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Someone 'Accidentally' Locked Away $300M Worth of Other People's Ethereum Funds (vice.com)

Posted by msmash on from the not-the-onion dept.

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.

8 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Reasons not to use cryptocurrency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1) It is extremely volatile
    2) Few businesses accept cryptocurrencies
    3) They are easy to steal
    4) They are not backed by real world goods, so the value can easily go to zero
    5) There is no anonymity because all transactions are public

    Anyone who cares about their privacy and security should avoid cryptocurrencies like the plague.

    1. Re:Reasons not to use cryptocurrency by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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...
    2. Re:Reasons not to use cryptocurrency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Reasons not to use cryptocurrency by WankerWeasel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Bitcoin uses 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of power for each transaction. That could power the average American home for almost a week. It's incredibly wasteful. I believe recently they'd said bitcoin mining is currently using more power monthly than the entire country of Nigeria uses in a year.

    4. Re:Reasons not to use cryptocurrency by sl3xd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And yet, Artist's Shit, sold for €275,000.

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    5. Re:Reasons not to use cryptocurrency by WankerWeasel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On a larger scale, De Vries' index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes." https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

    6. Re:Reasons not to use cryptocurrency by ChumpusRex2003 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The mean quantity of work required to "mine" a "block" of bitcoin transactions is given by the equation W = D * 2^32, where D is the "difficulty level" (currently 1.2e12), and W is the number of hash operations. In other words, one block requires on average 5e21 hash operations.

      The most efficient hash device available on the open market (and also used internally by the manufacturer for their own mining purposes) is the antminer S9 based on 16nm lithography ASICs. These have a specific energy consumption (this parameter is typically quoted as the main figure of merit for bitcoin mining systems, so is widely available for almost all mining hardware) of 60 pJ/hash.

      From these figures, we can calculate an energy requirement of on average 300 GJ per block - or about 83 MWh.

      A full block can contain approx 2000 transactions, giving a total energy consumption of approx 40 kWh per transaction at maximum transaction throughput (specific consumption is increased if transactions per block are reduced due to a low transaction rate).

      Note that the above energy consumption figures are based on the ASICs only, and do not include power supply/distribution/conversion losses, as well as miscellaneous control devices/servers/networking. Add in these losses, and you could be looking at 45-50 kWh per transaction.

  2. Utter, stark, raving madness by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.