Someone ‘Accidentally’ Locked Away $300M Worth of Other People's Ethereum Funds And a hard fork is on the table.
From Vice
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.Read more: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbqmg/parity-multi-signature-wallet-vulnerability-300-million-hard-forkNow, 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.
According to a blog post released by Parity on Tuesday, the code that fixed the July bug contained another vulnerability. That vulnerability allowed a user known as "devops199" on GitHub, a site for developers to collaborate on open source code, to allegedly accidentally trigger a function that turned the contract governing Parity multisignature wallets into a regular wallet address and made him or her the owner. Devops199 then killed this wallet contract, or, as Parity put it, "suicided" it. This made all multisignature wallets tied to that contract instantly useless, their funds locked away with no way to access them.
If the story is true, it seems like Devops199 was jiggling door handles and when one door opened, they tried to close it and the whole house exploded.
Ethereum, this is why we can't have nice things! Will we see another ETH based fork coin? Forks are so hot right now.
Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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lol "accidentally". One of the biggest accidents to happen in the crypto world.
Yeap Parity wallet did it again! Second problem with them this year, for any of you intereste in understanding how this error occurred the github issue is here: https://github.com/paritytech/parity/issues/6995
I don't know if you have seen any of his posts about it.. They are pretty funny!
to emphasize "accordionally"
Whoah! I'm new to crypto-currency, but that sounds nuts!
It is really alarming for cryptocurrencies.
That's very bad. Should I sell my ETH now? Any diea why the markets haven't reacted yet?
How would a HF effect EOS?
haha, looks like only the people who lost their money care?
Holy Sh*. This space is so wonderfully crazy.
This is the trade-off for the epic functionality of Ether. There are so many attack surfaces. The other end is bitcoin; hard to use, but safer.
It could give a toe hold to EOS, but Ether is becoming a household name. EOS as a 2nd mover has a huge uphill battle because of branding and all the companies that already use ETH.
Keep your eyes open. Exciting times. Thanks a lot for this post. I had no idea.
PS seems like bad code by Parity... not such a bad look on Ethereum.
Bitcoin isn't harder to use than etherium.
Oh, I was under the impression that the Ethereum blockchain was designed to be simpler to build on, while bitcoin blockchain was not as dynamic. That's just from a very surface knowledge. I'll look into it more.
I agree that the end user experience is essentially the same.
I was thinking about the end user experience. On the other level you were talking about ethereum could be considered easier but this article demonstrates its also easier to fuckup and lose coins.
How much does this news hurt Ethereum as an investment opportunity? I guess a lot!
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