So just a quick back story to get everyone on the same page.

Parity technologies created a multi signature Ethereum wallet based on some code that the Ethereum foundation wrote and the community checked.

Parity made some further developments to it in their own version which turned out to have some bugs and security flaws.

As the story goes some ‘amateaur’ programmer managed to accidentally run a kill function that caused the smart contract to delete some of its own code.

Some of the code that was deleted was the feature that allows Ether to be withdrawn from these multi signature wallets.

Several ICOs including Iconomi now collectively have 500,000 Ether in these multi signature wallets with no way to withdraw or move the funds.

At today’s price of approx $800 that’s $400m.

The update today is that unlike when Ethereum hard forked to restore the funds stolen from The DAO, this time the Ethereum community has rejected the idea of doing a hard fork to forcibly re-insert the deleted withdrawal code and store the functionality to the multi sig wallet.

One of the most appealing features about a blockchain is it’s immutability, once data is saved it’s permanent and you can trust it 100%.

When Ethereum hard forked and basically re-wrote history to fix The DAO issue, it caused so much controversy that it gave birth to Ethereum Classic, which maintains the original version of history unchanged.

The bottom line is that this 500,000 Ether is still locked inside this smart contract with no way to get it out.

I’m glad that the Ethereum community has decided not to hard fork this time, however with Ethereum averaging 1m transactions per day now, it’s almost impossible to change history again.

There’s too much activity on the network now.
What do you think? How would you suggest they fix this? Is Parity Technologies even obligated to fix this? Let me know in the comments.