On November 24, 2015, James Levy received 40,000 Ethereum Ethereum Ether.

This grant, worth approximately $ 35,000 at the time (and nearly $ 35 million today), rewarded Levy's efforts to create a smart contract tool, and one of them was encouraging work on another nascent cryptocurrency. sea ​​of ​​alternatives.

But three weeks later, the stock market was gone, emptied of its wallet in what could be the biggest hack of a single portfolio of the history of the ethereal platform.

The result of a weak password, Levy has been silent on the issue ever since. But now, in order to fund a new venture called TapTrust, Levy is calling on the hacker to return the funds, and failing that, he turns to the community to implement what would involve a system upgrade to the system. system scale, do it.

Such an upgrade would support EIP 867, a proposal to standardize the process of recovering funds on the platform, which was a point of contention for the ethereum developers.

Sometimes heated up, the discussion around the proposal tends to block all attempts to pursue the IEP. The former chief editor of the EIP, Yoichi Hirai, even resigned from his post, citing legal concerns that may arise from the development of the proposal. And with the developer community in a tumult, the proposal has been frozen in place as the process of accepting code changes is considered with more attention.

As a co-author of EIP 867, Levy has found himself in the eye of the storm as developers expose his concerns about the proposal – while lamenting the ethericeum's governance structure with regard to system-wide disasters. with such proposals ratified.

Levy's movement is indeed controversial, but he thinks that publicizing his story could influence the current debate.

"Especially in light of something like a hack, it's a very important issue for the community, and that's the one that I think the ethereum network and platform and the community we have to understand, "said Levy. CoinDesk in an exclusive interview.

While adoption continues to increase and the ethereum is becoming more suitable for use in businesses, Levy continues:

"In the end, I think it's an economic system that lives outside the rest of society and the legal system, are we completely separated from that?" ? "

The flight

To go back, the hack happened because of a weak password, which could lead some to blame Levy himself. Yet Levy defends his security efforts, saying that he suspected that his private key would still be needed to access the wallet.

But the wallet generation tool used by Levy, developed by the ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, had a critical flaw in that others could access the wallet just with the passphrase .

"I assumed that the passphrase was going to be used in addition to other criteria," says Levy.

Later, when the wallet was emptied, Levy discovered that his private keys were still secure, and at first he did not believe that he had been a victim of a hack.

"At first, I thought it was due to an improvement or something," he said.

Shortly before the wallet was emptied, new software, such as Brainflare (to force passwords), was tested. Levy tested the software on his own wallet, tore up the password and learned the bitter truth of his grant. – He was gone.

Still, he traced the funds to another wallet, and looking at the wallet since then, did not notice any movement.

They stayed at the same address without "a single outgoing transaction in the entire history of the blockchain," Levy said.

And while Levy first accepted the funds as definitely lost, it was the strange silence of the pirate's address (typically, one would think that a pirate would try to Cash or use funds) that would make him think of a fundraiser.

Initially, Levy will just try a friendly communication.

"One of the things I can not wait to do is try to get in touch with anyone who has access to this new wallet, and try it. to find something we can agree on to remedy the situation, "says Levy.

But if that does not work, Levy will submit another fundraising proposal that builds on his old efforts with EIP 867.

Annulment of Purpose

According to Levy, the new proposal requires "a very, very limited, well-defined and well-structured medium to defeat the purpose," such as the format offered by EIP 876.

With that, Levy could recoup his funds and use a substantial part to build something that would benefit the blockchain community, including his new TapTrust business, a Wikipedia-style forum to display objective information about tokens thrown on the ethereum.

"We are trying to improve the quality of the information available and to improve the ability of average people to participate in this new cryptographic economy without compromising their security," Levy said.

This is perhaps a particularly notable statement since most of the controversies surrounding the fundraising proposal have been fueled because of poor communication, said Buterin at a recent meeting. developer meeting.

Levy knows that his calls might not do any good, but still believes that they will begin a wider conversation about a painful point that the community must unravel.

While the latest discussion about fundraising comes from a code vulnerability that allowed a novice coder to freeze, at the time, $ 160 million of ether in the Etity clientity Parity Technologies, Levy said that hacks should be categorically different. ]

"I think if we want to encourage organizations, companies and financial institutions to adopt etheric, that goes, I think for many of them, to be a requirement, that in case of situation catastrophic, is at least something that they can try to do, "he said.

And this is a question that touches on a deeper and more philosophical cleavage in the ethereum community – the concept of blockchain finality.

The concept was first excited in the community after the DAO hack, when the Ethereum community voted to force the code to return the funds to its original holders. Valuing immutability under the adage "the code is the law", a dissident group that branched out of the main ethereal chain, thus creating the classical ethereum

Such tensions are still active in the community today, as evidenced by recent debates over the recovery of funds, according to which Levy would not be surprised if there was another division all over the country. line.

Levy tells CoinDesk:

"I would not be surprised if the network divides a certain point, not necessarily the problem of recovering ETH, but more generally, the question of whether we are going to have a network that is technically pure, or Will we have a network that we make some accommodations so that we can integrate into society. "

Stack of Money via Shutterstock

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