The debate over Parity’s lost funds has reached a climax, with a strong anti-recovery stance being taken by many in the community.

Parity’s decentralised multi-signature wallets were compromised after a user exploited a bug in an Ethereum smart contract, deleting the wallet’s library function.

This locked over 500,000 Ethereum and rendered all the wallets unusable.

Parity stated that in order to recover the lost funds, users would need to “hard fork” the blockchain. This would require the consensus of miners, who verify transactions on Ethereum.

Divisive choice

To facilitate the recovery of the parity funds, Ethereum developers created an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP), which would function as a standardised recovery model.

The EIP is open to public comment, and the vast majority of those commenting are against the implementation of the EIP.

This choice is indicative of the difficulty of blockchain governance, as there is no centralised authority to appeal to in this situation.

While Parity users lost a large amount of funds and want to recover them, those against the implementation of these recovery tools argue they could increase the Ethereum blockchain’s attack surface and increase its reliance on EIP editors.

Many referred to the EIP as a “get out of jail free card”, which only requires the approval of EIP editors to manipulate funds on the blockchain.

They argued that the implementation of EIP 867 could potentially damage the decentralisation and security of the blockchain.

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