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This is a heck of a story.
Cryptocurrency is bound to a blockchain ledger that makes everything unchangeable, immutable. This concept is key to what happened. Everything that happens is bound to these blockchain ledgers. Once a transaction is posted to the immutable ledger, it's done. It cannot be changed. Well, sometimes it can, but it's extremely hard. And in this case, probably impossible.
Hashes are also a critical concept. It's sort of a checksum, a computed value that says that a particular value is valid and has not been tampered with. So you have a file, or token, that contains the transaction, plus a file that contains a hash of the transaction to validate it.
There's a third thing: wallets. Wallets are sort of like password managers, an electronic file that contains your cryptocurrency. I don't know if all cryptocurrencies have community wallets, this particular one does.
The Juno cryptocurrency had a problem. And at this point I'm just going to quote the article.
A community vote had decreed that around 3 million Juno tokens, worth around $36 million, be seized from an investor deemed to have acquired the tokens via malicious means. (This in itself was a big crypto news story.) The funds were to be sent to a wallet controlled by Juno token holders, who could vote on how it would be spent.
But a developer inadvertently copy and pasted the wrong wallet address, as reported by CoinDesk, leading to $36 million in crypto being sent to an inaccessible address.
What happened was the developer was sent the wallet address plus the hash of the address. Sadly, he entered the hash of the address, which is invalid. And it was written to the blockchain. And all them Juno coins are now forever inaccessible.
So the 'investor deemed to have acquired the tokens via malicious means' no longer has them, and neither does anyone else.
Cryptocurrency. Vanished into the bit bucket.
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/a-typo-sent-36-million-of-crypto-into-the-ether/
Cryptocurrency is bound to a blockchain ledger that makes everything unchangeable, immutable. This concept is key to what happened. Everything that happens is bound to these blockchain ledgers. Once a transaction is posted to the immutable ledger, it's done. It cannot be changed. Well, sometimes it can, but it's extremely hard. And in this case, probably impossible.
Hashes are also a critical concept. It's sort of a checksum, a computed value that says that a particular value is valid and has not been tampered with. So you have a file, or token, that contains the transaction, plus a file that contains a hash of the transaction to validate it.
There's a third thing: wallets. Wallets are sort of like password managers, an electronic file that contains your cryptocurrency. I don't know if all cryptocurrencies have community wallets, this particular one does.
The Juno cryptocurrency had a problem. And at this point I'm just going to quote the article.
A community vote had decreed that around 3 million Juno tokens, worth around $36 million, be seized from an investor deemed to have acquired the tokens via malicious means. (This in itself was a big crypto news story.) The funds were to be sent to a wallet controlled by Juno token holders, who could vote on how it would be spent.
But a developer inadvertently copy and pasted the wrong wallet address, as reported by CoinDesk, leading to $36 million in crypto being sent to an inaccessible address.
What happened was the developer was sent the wallet address plus the hash of the address. Sadly, he entered the hash of the address, which is invalid. And it was written to the blockchain. And all them Juno coins are now forever inaccessible.
So the 'investor deemed to have acquired the tokens via malicious means' no longer has them, and neither does anyone else.
Cryptocurrency. Vanished into the bit bucket.
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/a-typo-sent-36-million-of-crypto-into-the-ether/
