#Cryptocurrencies #million #euros #lost #due #bad #copypaste
news hardware Cryptocurrencies: 34 million euros lost due to a bad copy-paste
While Bitcoin is experiencing its biggest crisis in almost a year, briefly dipping below the €30,000 mark yesterday, Juno, another popular cryptocurrency, has been in the news in recent days by mistakenly losing the equivalent of €34 million. of euros.
Bad rumor for crypto Juno
It sounds like a good (or bad depending on where you are) Belgian story from our childhood, but it’s actually a fun story 2.0. The Juno blockchain, which aims to compete with big cryptocurrencies like Ethereum in particular, would certainly have done just fine without this bad 8-digit publicity stunt.
If scams, lost passwords or forgotten passwords are common in the wonderful world of cryptocurrencies, the one that brings Juno to the forefront is unprecedented, especially in light of the amount lost.
At the time the fatal error occurred, no less than 36 million dollars (that is, 34 million euros) had somehow vanished into thin air, or rather, into the clouds to join the sector.
A typographical error in 34 million euros…
At the origin of this story, you should know that the Juno blockchain is based on another blockchain called Cosmos. The principle of these blockchains is to operate on a system called “Proof of Stake” (proof of participation). that requires human validation, where Ethereum and Bitcoin, for example, work on a “Proof of Work” (proof of work) principle.. Thus, with Juno, all decisions, validations, changes must be voted on and approved by the members, in a precept called “Chain Governance”.
The Juno rose to more than €40 in March before falling sharply to less than €9
Also note that according to their rules it is forbidden to own more than 50,000 Juno crypto tokens. However, it was discovered that a user named Takumi Asano, had over… 3 million, just like that, quietly. Ultimately, given this suspicion of massive fraud, the Juno administrators decided to temporarily confiscate the assets of this user to raise the question of the legitimacy of these tokens with their members.
For this, the sum had to be transferred to a company wallet, and for this, a deposit address was provided to the programmer in charge of handling. Except, little problem, the sum never made it to the intended wallet, but instead ended up at an address that doesn’t belong to… anyone. The cause of this error? A simple typo, or rather a bad copy and paste…
But not all can be lost
Such an error is not supposed to be possible, because in order to validate a transaction according to the “Proof of Stake” principle, it had to be validated by 125 human “validators”. Problem, none of the 125 validators saw the slightest error (the address was “valid” even if it belongs to no one) and therefore the transaction was approved. A system that cannot happen with a traditional bank (if you make a transfer to a non-existent account, it is simply cancelled) or even with a “Proof of Work” type validation system because minors would have seen that the address was “null”. ”.
In short, very bad publicity for Juno crypto, even if its developers claim that the transaction is reversible by releasing a new validation in a few days.
