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Someone 'Accidentally' Locked Away $300M Worth of Other People's Ethereum Funds (vice.com)
On Tuesday, a single user "permanently" locked down dozens of digital wallets containing nearly $300 million dollars worth of ether, the unit of exchange on the Ethereum platform, allegedly by accident. From a report: Now, some in the Ethereum community are considering the possibility of a risky network split, known as a "hard fork," to fix it. The affected wallets -- known as "multisignature" wallets because they require multiple people to sign off before funds are moved, making them popular with companies -- were all created with Parity, a popular program for digital wallets. Parity multisignature wallets experienced a bug in July that allowed a hacker to steal $32 million in funds before the Ethereum community scrambled to band together to hack back and secure the rest of the vulnerable ether.
Which sounds a lot like multi-level marketing.
It costs approx. $1000 to create a single bitcoin. How much money does it cost for the US Govt to print $100?
Fiat currency is backed by productivity
This is what cryptocurrency advocates forget when they state that fiat currency is as ephemeral as bitcoin. There's a caveat: you do need a responsible central bank to keep the money supply in line with the GDP, and a more or less stable economy. But that's why people favour dollars and euros over Nigerian nairas or Peruvian sols.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Just because something has a "cost" to make, doesn't mean the thing ends up with the same value.
I can spend an hour of my time sticking rocks to the side of a cow pie, but that doesn't mean the end result is worth $8.
And yet, Artist's Shit, sold for €275,000.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
So far the early adopters seem to be trying to make a fast buck on the ever increasing value of the system - which grows because new people enter it. Is this real growth or a ponzi scheme?
Wow - imagine if the banks could have an Undo button. Reset. Start over.
National Debt could be erased, all those bad loans. Bankruptcy? What Bankruptcy?!
I can't imagine losing $32 million in some money "system" --- could you imagine placing your paycheck into this "bank" to pay for all your stuff, and then the landlord says "last month's check never came through" only to find everything gone! $32, $320, $3200... or $32 million. Who cares how much evaporated - it's gone. Speculative investments at their best.
It's an experiment that people are willing to invest $100's millions into? Feels more ponzi to me.
So now we had a wipeout from a bug fix for the last wipeout. This will, of course, be the last one... until the next one. Recovery from the prior debacle involved white-hat hackers taking it upon themselves to steal currency from vulnerable wallets (and eventually returning it) before black-hat hackers could. And this time around, apparently the only fix is basically to start an entirely new ecosystem and hope like hell everyone migrates.
Contrast this miserable chaos to the sweet lilting tones from the founders:
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference .
Caveat emptor indeed.