Will EIP-999 Vote Unlock Parity Millions?
One of the things that makes blockchain so powerful is its immutable state, and this is normally considered to mean the data is permanent or unchangeable. Immutable is also defined as unyielding and inflexible, which is a slightly different interpretation perhaps preferred by some Parity wallet users. The Parity wallet has the option of providing “extra” protection by using multiple signatories, but unfortunately, bugs in the associated smart contract locked up 600,000 ETH in November 2017.
At the time, the crypto that became unspendable was worth around $150 million, and by April 2018 this value had increased to close to $400 million. The Ethereum community is being asked to decide what immutable means to them by voting to accept or reject Ethereum Improvement Project (EIP) 999. With less than 15 hours remaining, the vote was too close to call, with 47% in favor of unlocking the funds and 53% being against.
The argument for unlocking the funds is simply that those affected were not to blame for using the Parity wallet and it would be the decent thing to do. Those against EIP-999 argue that if the fix is implemented for the Parity wallet users, then the ecosystem will be inundated with requests from thousands of other token holders that have lost funds in the past or will lose them in the future. Another argument put forward by those against EIP-999 is that rolling back the blockchain means some of the project teams will not be as thorough as they should be when checking their smart contracts. Selfishly some have argued that rejecting the proposal increases the value of their tokens as the 600,000 tokens will be locked forever.
It wouldn’t be the first time that the blockchain had been altered to resolve an issue. Blocks were rolled back to an earlier state in the very early days of bitcoin to remove 184 billion coins that were created by someone that spotted a bug in the code. In 2016, a hard fork of Ethereum returned $40 million to coin holders affected by the DAO attack. It’s worth noting that these two incidents occurred when the coins were relatively new to the market and not applying the fix could have destroyed the blockchain, especially bitcoin with only a maximum 21 million coins being available.
Originally published at cryptodisrupt.com
I do hope that millions in eth will release. Because everybody's expecting for a expensive eth. Thus is really good news to everyone if that happens. I will be the one of the happiest person in the world if this happened. Because my dreams will all come true. It's not bad to have a dream. Like l was see the possibilities are in bitcoin. This is God's grace that l never expect to meet bitcoin that will give me a chance to be rich. So I really thankful if the price of eth will grow.
