I am not a developer or a programmer.
What Happened?
Parity wallet software has had some problems which resulted in a loss of $100 million in user funds. This error could even be more than $100m according to sources. This problem was posted on Github by “devops199”. Any Parity wallet deployed after July 20 that uses the multisignature implementation is effected. This is however not the first time Parity has had problems, earlier they lost as much as $30m.
Could it be fixed?
It is really hard to tell if this can be fixed, some people have suggested a hard fork but others are saying that might not even work. Today though some developers have said a hard fork would work, but there are a lot of issues still at hand. Creating the fork would need a community support etc
What is going to happen to ethereum?
It is fairly unclear as to how the community will react to the news. This wasn't a Ethereum hack, but rather a problem with a ethereum wallet. The money was also not stolen it looks like, but “nuked”. Meaning, the funds will not be spent or used, and will be inactive for the time being. Which leaves a lot of people wondering if the price will increase due to the decrease in supply. However, historically after a “hack” ethereum price has dropped substantially.
How should we move forward?
One thing is fairly certain, we are having a lot of problems with security. Not just with ethereum or ethereum wallets, but in general with cryptocurrency. We need to start running security audits with this programs and companies that are holding such large financial resources such as the $100m+ that was recently nuked. This is not restricting as regulation would be, however it is a standard that we need to hold these clients and wallets too. However we can not play the blame game, and need to move on as a community. Build better ways to openly audit these projects so that millions of people will not be in the dark with a attack like this. Most of the people in the cryptocurrency space today are not programmers and developers, so we need to figure out a more effective way to connect the developers so they can collectively work on finding issues in an open environment. I know that some things are in existence today already. We are still extremely early in cryptocurrency, and so bugs and failures are expected to happen. We just need to be smarter as a community and work together to get through times like this.
Also when you are speculating this it should be noted that the amount of money lost should be related in terms of relevance to the entire market cap of ethereum.
Thoughts on this?