The London company Parity Technologies yesterday made several suggestions on how to make the stuck ethers worth $ 230 million back. The Ethereum community should now decide with their feedback on the future of the crypto-currency ether.
The British crypto-wallet provider Parity addressed itself yesterday in a blog post to those affected by the bug in the multi-signature wallets. Ethers in the current value of more than $ 230 million are affected. These can not be used for more than four weeks. In fact, a bug fix should close a security hole that allowed cybercriminals to steal $ 32 million of Ether from the Multi-Sig Wallet in July. The bugfix, however, led to new problems, which apparently nobody at Parity foresaw.
Yesterday, four different protocol changes were introduced, with different consequences for the owners of the affected wallets. The rescue operation was only possible with the help of a hard fork, as they emphasized. One should not indulge in any illusions that there is no other way. However, Parity can not or will not decide by itself which protocol changes are made in detail. We are now waiting for feedback from the community.
Final bugfix or source for new bugs?
The proposed solutions have already been criticized by Ethereum developer Nick Johnston. The planned modification of an invariant (specified value) in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM for short) could possibly lead to new and unexpected errors. That’s exactly what you really want to prevent. In the blog post, Parity, on the other hand, promises auspiciously of functional improvements that will free the frozen ether credits while avoiding similar problems in the future.
