Bitcoin Forum

About a month ago,  user “devops199”, triggered the flaw in the Parity Library code, apparently by accident. When they realised what they had done, they attempted to undo the damage by deleting the code which had transferred ownership of the funds. Rather than returning the money, however, that simply locked all the funds in those multisignature wallets permanently, with no way to access them.

Estimates of exactly how much of Ethereum's coins has been frozen vary widely. Low estimates put the figure at $150m but others suggest it could be as high as $300m. It is understood that a lot of the ICO project after 20th of July are impacted by this bug and have their funds frozen.

Parity has now sent out an update and propose options including hard fork to solve this issue and potentially similar contract issues in the future.

https://paritytech.io/blog/on-classes-of-stuck-ether-and-potential-solutions-2.html

Would you support such a hard fork?

I'm against forking just to fix this whole frozen funds issue. But if they do it as a side objetive on a bigger hard fork like Constantinople (i think thats what the next one on the roadmap is called), then i'd be inclined to accept it. I hope people stop giving parity the benefit of the doubt, its the 2nd time they screwed up already.

The forked coin won't save the frozen millions simply because those are millions worth of the original ETH. The forked coin defnetely won't have the same price so in the best case millions will become thousands. And projects won't give up trying to get the frozen money, It will be the extra profit with fork anyway. In this article there are more valuable solutions of this problem (like EIP156 by Vitalik Buterin).

I know about the case with the locked coins and paritytech fail but I would NOT support such a hard-fork because this will be very dangerous precedent. What then? A hard-fork after hard-fork because of people mistakes?? This is against the whole conception of decentralization.

Bitcoin had a hard fork in the past due to bug in core protocol (integer overflow allowed to create bitcoins out of thin air).
Is this a bug in core protocol, or just somebody badly programmed or secured a smart contract?

Where would you draw the line? $100K lost due to bad smart contract will not be hardforked, but $1M will?

Nope. Everybody should be responsible for their own mistakes and those could be costly sometimes. With FIAT one small programming mistake could also cost you or your company millions (like Knight capital lost $440M within few minutes due to "trading glitch"), so crypto is not different here. Deal with it. Real world does not have hardfork options to fix your mistakes :)

A hard fork won't prevent bad coding. Parity wallet is ultimately at fault for not identifying the underlying issues with it's code - e.g. poor testing/QA. A service like Quantstamp may be able to help audit code and contracts to prevent future issues, but you have to be willing to pay the price upfront, or potentially a far heavier one further down the road when a bug reveals itself. There was talk of a fix to restore the missing tokens in the Constantinople fork. Anyone know whether that's still on the table?

If a hard plug for solving this problem leads to the formation of a new coin, which we will use instead of ethereum, then I am definitely against such a tough fork. Moreover, many people say that this problem can not be solved by a rigid fork. I think that this problem should be tried in another way, without using a rigid fork. This will be a bad precedent for the crypto currency.

I want to believe that any form of hardfork is just another creation of a coin and not in anyway going to solve a problem. Just like the way we were made to believe that bitcoin forks will the myriad of issues facing it but unfortunately, we are only deceived because in spite of the several forks that have happened, the issues still remains.  In other words, the way out of this issue is just to find another way to bring out the funds because even hardfork is just chance and not a certainty that the issue will be solved.

I definitely will support hard fork to rescue locked in wallet and contract. i know of few solid project that are suffering as a result of parity issue. Security  should also be worked on as well. Bitcoin is the most secure cryptocurrency till date!

What makes you think the hard fork is likely? I'm not surprised that Parity is pushing for it -- I assumed they would as soon as the news came out. But there are definitely some stakeholders that aren't interested in supporting a hard fork. This isn't like the DAO hack. I recall seeing one of the Augur devs firmly opposed to a hard fork to bail out the Parity wallets. It's too bad, as this brings some uncertainty to the market, which looks to be on the verge of breaking out.


How many times do you expect the entire ecosystem to hard fork over things like this? This isn't a protocol upgrade. This is just an application that was badly written. As time goes on and the ecosystem grows/stakeholders become more entrenched, hard forking in these cases is going to be problematic. Not everyone supports the fork. In fact, in rational terms, ETH holders are better off with those coins locked up -- less supply.

this is getting ridiculous, there can't be a fork for every bad thing happening, this is just going to sink the credibility in the project  ::)