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Comment by AsyncAwait | Hacker News Reader

> Next time, I'm going to use this case as a counterexample, because when the solution to the problem of "hackers robbing banks" is "vigilantes robbing the remaining banks", something is very wrong with your system

I can see what you're saying, but I don't think that this is a problem with cryptocurrencies specifically, it's a problem with buggy software, yes, but it's something that is the case with every dangerous exploit being actively taken advantage of in the wild, Heartbleed would be an example that doesn't involve cryptocurrencies, but I give you that the Ether-based ecosystem seems to be a particularly buggy collection of software, probably because of too much ambition, (a Turing-complete VM), being written by people with too little experience and applied for very sensitive (monetary) transactions, which seems like a recipe for disaster.

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This is a problem that everybody seems to skip over with cryptocurrencies.

Cryptocurrencies are being sold as eliminating trust and allow us to rely on the cold certainty of mathematics. Only trust hasn't been eliminated from the system, it's just been shifted from a central bank to the authors of the software client you're using. To the majority of the miners in the network.

The awful politics, lies, greed, corruption, are still here in all their glory.

Much worse in fact, since the entities in power have no oversight, were not elected, and have no obligation to anything but increasing their own personal wealth.

Not quite true. You elect with your money. Immediate. Instantly. And you withdraw your support with the one thing that hurts most: your money and move to a competing system. That's extremely liberating and powerful. Also: anybody can fork and create an alternative model whenever they prefer to do so.

Only in this particular case you do not have any money left because you made (probably unknowingly) a contract to give it away. (Or it was stolen, depending on your point of view, but anyway, there is no money left to vote with)

>It’s important to understand that this exploit was not a vulnerability in Ethereum or in Parity itself. Rather, it was a vulnerability in the default smart contract code that the Parity client gives the user for deploying multi-signature wallets.

Yeah, I don't see the difference here. So it was an aspect of Ethereum that had the vulnerability, how many more millions have to be stolen before the system is successfully QA'd?

I'd never heard of Ethereum before, so now this is the only thing I've heard about it.

I read that and said to myself "So....it WAS a vulnerability in Parity"

The article stating that it wasn't a vulnerability with Parity AND THEN IMMEDIATELY AFTER stating it was a vulnerability with code distributed BY PARITY is throwing up all sorts of red flags with me.

Like the Wizard of OZ with "There is nothing behind the curtain"

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