So, is this some flaw in the system or just a ridiculous user error?
That depends on what you mean by "this", but the fact that bitcoins can't be recovered without the private key is the intentional design of just about any viable crypto-currency.
Every other transaction I have even done has gone across flawlessly.
Unfortunately we humans never have a problem until we have a problem.
I just noticed the new post Tas and didn't feel like I was being ridiculed but thank you for the support.
I never intended to ridicule. I'm not sure why Tas sees it that way, but I was just pointing out the reality of the situation. I apologize to anyone who found that my words were somehow offensive. I'll try to find less offensive ways to get my point across in the future.
I realize now I should have paid more attention to the the little red "not synced" but It didn't seem to important at the time.
This reminds me a a humorous, true, but mostly unrelated story. I was riding in a friend's car once and I noticed a yellow light on his dashboard that was lit up with the words "Check Engine". I politely pointed it out to him, and he explained that the light had been lit for nearly a year. When I asked why it didn't concern him, he simply explained, "I figured if it was important they would have made the light red."
In the end aren't there only going to be a set number of coins total. If this kind of thing happens it would reduce that total.
This is a very common topic of discussion.
Here is a link to read more about it if you like:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Won.27t_loss_of_wallets_and_the_finite_amount_of_Bitcoins_create_excessive_deflation.2C_destroying_Bitcoin.3FIf someone could come up with a way to find and collect these "ether bound" coins they would be rich!
This is designed to be impossible until/unless mathematicians find a weakness in all three mathematical algorithms used by bitcoin: ECDSA with the secp256k1 curve, SHA-256, and RIPEMD-160
I'm sure this isn't the first case of this happening.
Definitely not.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253.msg1483219#msg1483219. . . you would think they would have some sort of back up on their system that would save any generated address. I wouldn't have thought the browser would have been the thing to generate the address I would have thought it would be their server that would then send the address to your wallet. That would eliminate this problem entirely . . .
There used to be some popular web hosted wallets that worked that way. The problem is that leaves a large amount of bitcoin accessible by anyone who has access to the servers operated by the wallet hosting website. This is a HUGE security hole. Any hacker who can hack into the servers serving the website can instantly take everyone's bitcoin. Furthermore any malicious employee of the wallet hosting company can decide to run off with everyone's bitcoin. This led to some significant thefts and loss of faith in web hosted wallets that work this way.
The guys at blockchain.info came up with an ingenious solution. The wrote a javascript web page that can generate the addresses right in your browser, then encrypt the private keys in the browser and send only the encrypted private keys up to their server to be stored in the database. Then anytime you want to spend bitcoins, their servers can send the encrypted private key back to your browser and your browser can decrypt it locally using your password. The web page they designed doesn't send the password up to them at all. This way nobody at blockchain.info can ever access any of your bitcoin. They can't steal them, and a hacker can't either. Unfortunately the drawback is that if your browser fails to synchronize the newly generated and encrypted private key with their database, then they can't supply it back to you for you to access the bitcoin later.
