300 Million Dollars Locked In Ethereum Network By A Bug Generated By Solving Another Bug
While here on Steemit people are going rogue about somebody hijacking their CPU power with browser mining (which is obviously not true) real people have real problems.
After solving a bug for multisig wallets on Ethereum, the developers realized the patch allegedly introduced another bug, which made one developer actually kill all the multisig wallets, in a "suicidal" operation.
Guess what? There was money in those wallets. Loads of money. Up to 300 million dollars.
I first found out about this by an email sent by Viewly this morning, which apparently lost 1399 ETH in this so-called exploit, or almost 420.000 USD. Then I read the news and got proof that the bug was actually real. It's hard to believe it's real, mind you, but hell, it looks like you can "accidentally" delete 300 millions dollars just like that.
Another convincing proof that human ignorance / stupidity is far worse than human greed.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
Huge elephant in the room here. Tons of people lost a lot of money and it "wasn't their fault" - hard fork round two??
Charlie Lee tweeted about this as well asking if code was still law. Found it pretty humoring this morning. Maybe an ETC2 will be coming soon?
Long term storage of your money is for me the main problem today with crypto that will limit a wider adoption. (and a bigger use from me ?)
You cannot beat on your retirement pension. You cannot take the risk to loose a big amount of money if you have normal incomes. It is fine if you have millions in fiat and millions in crypto, but this is not the most common situation.
Thanks for posting this, it's part of the crypto history now. :)
I have been concerned for some time that Etherium is over subscribed, almost every new ICO and token is built on it and this presents huge risk in that there is so much money centralized onto one platform. More so, if critical societal functions like energy networks (guess what, energy is requred for blockchains) all use one platform, then a failure of one underlying system can become extremely damaging.
Id advocate for people doing things the hard way, building custom block-chains which are proofed against these sorts of bugs, or at least having them only effect one of many discrete systems.
Ethereum surely isn't mature enough for the kind of attention it receives. Many core ETH developers, including Vitalik Buterin warned about this.
Yeah, I kind of think people forget everything in block-chain, including Bitcoin, is one huge experiment
Ha, I don't quite understand why so many people were suddenly calling you out for the steem.supply mining thing. I have been silently reading these posts, resteemed by pretty popular and influential authors on Steemit. JSE itself shows an ad at the bottom and you had made a post about before.
Yeah, looks like people just love picking on other people, without checking the facts. Human nature, I guess.
Well, that's going to be a real test on the durability of there system and whether all that has been deleted is recoverable.
Im yet to get a full understanding on blockchain as a Distributed system. Has the deletion removed the data across all servers ?
I't didn't deleted the data, once a block is generated it could not be edited nor deleted, what the user did was to kill the wallets and they lost the tokens because the users didn't had his private keys
Ok, thanks for explaining.
@dragosroua Will a Hard Fork need to take place with Ethereum in order to free up the wallets ?? Also if it takes a Hard Fork to Fix this will there be 3 different Ethereum tokens then ??
A hard fork may be required but it won't create 3 different Ethereum tokens.
In fact, Ethereum already has several planned hard forks in the next few weeks.
http://support.exodus.io/article/141-what-will-happen-to-my-ethereum-in-my-wallet-when-ethereum-hard-forks
I thought blockchains are immutable....so how can anyone delete data from Ethereum?
I don't have much knowledge about blockchains though :)
Dang, that a some huge ass mistake!