The good news is, his transaction must have been confirmed by the network really fast! The bad news is, bitcoin is still a long ways from becoming an acceptable currency for the mainstream, given that horrific errors like this can occur.
This posts sums it up nicely:
Can't wait to see grandma start using bitcoins. Oops, there goes 500 grand.
Yes, let's blame the entire Bitcoin infrastructure on one person's stupid mistake with raw transactions.
People have been losing their lives, daily, to automobile accidents since the automobile was invented. Not money, their
lives!
Yet, we don't go around saying "automobiles are not an acceptable means of transportation for the mainstream, given that horrific errors like this can occur," do we?
"Can't wait to see grandma start driving a car. Oops, there goes grandma's life along with the family of 5 she crashed into."
Humans are going to make huge, sometimes life threatening, errors regardless of the tool you give them. It's up to the individual to educate and protect themselves. Even so, accidents will occur.
I've never heard of anyone making such a fee mistake unless they were messing with raw transactions to being with.
It's simple to call it an idiot mistake from atop your ivory tower, but if a bitcoin "enthusiast" (we are still in the early adopter phase, afterall) can manage a colossal fuck up on the scale of blowing $20,000 USD worth of bitcoin, then there is a problem with the bitcoin ecosystem. There is no equivalent to this in real life. You would never accidentally leave a $20k tip at a restaurant, or accidentally overpay $20k for your Starbucks frappacino.
Your car analogy is flawed. This is why: we have been using cash and credit cards for years, each have provided great utility to consumers. Like I said above, there is essentially no room for massive fuck ups, and even if your money is stolen somehow, you typically have recourse.
It would be like if supercharged motorbikes from the present were suddenly introduced to denizens of the world of a distant future Earth, where all cars traveled at 200 mph and were automated so that accidents were a thing of the distant past.
Now you give them these bikes which can be crashed, and the people, without adequate knowledge or proper concern for their personal safety and that of others are cut loose. Of course they'll have accidents, and for what point, ultimately?
If you guys want bitcoin to succeed, it will need to be idiot proofed. Nobody is going to convert their cash to a protocol that allows them and their friends to potentially lose their life savings to some momentary lapse of judgement!
You have no idea if this person is a "bitcoin enthusiast". You have just made a baseless assumption because you believe us to be in the "early adopter" phase. The two things wouldn't necessarily be linked even if they were both true.
Many people have accidentally lost money if they try to transmit it themselves. If I opted to withdraw my funds as cash, and walk them to China, I would probably lose them. Whereas if I had just used the nice software my bank provided I might not (have such a high chance of) losing them.
As many people have pointed out, unfortunately, this person was not using any good wallet software. This would be similar to me trusting a new nigerian payment processor as my bank - not a great idea.
Brainwallet is lambasted constantly by anybody reasonably knowledgable because human beings CANNOT CHOOSE RANDOM PASSPHRASES. The number of people who have lost their funds due to brainwallets being hacked is huge. But people will not search google and will not perform due dilligence with their own money, which, yes, is something you (currently) have to do to use bitcoin safely.
Now I know that this person's brainwallet was not hacked, but he obviously did not research properly bitcoin protocol and security as if he had he would not be using one. Would YOU really send $20,000 to a string of numbers you had just printed from a random webpage you found on the internet without knowing much about it.
The bitcoin PROTOCOL does not need to be idiot-proofed. There should be no idiots reading/using that. That (unfortunately) was the issue here. Services (for example wallets) have and will continue to be built on top of the protocol to facilitate end-users' safety.
That said, I do feel terrible for this guy/gal's loss. That is a serious amount of money, and after seeing ASICMiner step up and return some previous errors of this size it is a massive shame that P2Pool mined that block. Hopefully some people on freenode will return some funds if he signs a message or something.
/rant
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