This month Bitcoin almost split in two, pulling back from the brink at the last minute. Of course, there is no solution in sight for the dire scaling problems of Bitcoin, but who cares as long as the exchange rate keeps rising against the weakening US dollar?
Etherereum should be so lucky. After the DAO disaster in 2016, followed by several hard forks that rewrote history, you would think that sensible people would have headed for the hills. Of course that’s not happening.
This fall has seen yet another disaster. One of the most used wallets experienced a bug which led to the freeze of a large amount of Ethereum. I don’t really understand the bug itself, but somehow the coins were consigned to accounts that can no longer be managed. You can see your money, but no one can get it.
Just as baffling as the bug, there seems to be little urgency to fix it. It’s been a week now, and there seems to be little idea of what can be done, and shockingly little indication that anything will be done soon.
Stan Higgens writes in Coindesk that “Parity Floats Fix for $160 Million Ether Fund Freeze”, but the actual text indicates that there is no fix in sight except maybe a hard fork due in 2018 [2]. In other words, you are out of luck if you are wanting to use some of those millions of Ether any time soon.
The good ship Ethereum is like the Titanic, except when it sinks they roll back time and sail again—to sink all over again.
It is important to point out that these disasters in Ethereum are mostly not due to the core protocols and cryptography that define the distributed ledger itself. The DAO went down with all hands because of a bug in executable contract code, and the Parity Wallet ran aground due to the wallet code (related to executable contract code, I think), not the ledger itself.
The point is, security is an end-to-end thing <<link>>. People who talk about how invulnerable the core ledger is supposed to be are missing the point: Ethereum or any cryptocurrency is only as secure as the weakest link between two users. And there are a lot of links: wallets, APIs, servers, networks, mobile devices, and OS code, to name a few. And there are people in the chain, too, heaven help us.
At some point, you have to ask whether Ethereum is creating more problems than it is solving.
- Stan Higgins, Parity Floats Fix for $160 Million Ether Fund Freeze. Coindesk.November 13 2017, https://www.coindesk.com/parity-floats-fix-160-million-ether-fund-freeze/
- Parity Technologies, Parity Technologies Multi-Sig Wallet Issue Update, in Parity Technologies Blog. 2017. https://paritytech.io/blog/parity-technologies-multi-sig-wallet-issue-update.html
Cryptocurrency Thursday
Robert McGrath's Blog 