Tether hack, Omni hard-fork and MaidSafeCoin

If I was maidsafe I would be tempted to move tokens onto Ethereum as ERC20. I noticed Storj did this recently.

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So guys you’re saying that storing Maidsafe tokens on Omniwallet is not safe?

I think it’s safe because we have private keys

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I have no problem with decentralised community action against an attacker or thief when the decentralised community decides who the ‘bad guy’ is. For example, the ETH hard fork to recover DAO funds needed wide community consensus, and therefore could not have been forced by an attacker (e.g. government that’s not aligned to the community in its thinking).

I think we need to know more before we can make a judgement.

If this action needed many different people from all around the world to coordinate their actions to get this result, then it may be no problem at all, and demonstrate resilience in the face of a threat.

But if it’s a small number of people who can just decide to freeze any Omni assets between themselves, it could be very worrying indeed.

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This sort of thing is what Professional Indemnity insurance is for. If the code has bugs in it that cause some sort of disaster, the insurance pays out.

Ofc, out in the crypto wild west, who knows how responsible the companies backing these projects are and what sort of cover they have attained. It would seem quite reasonable for a class action suit to be taken against purveyors of code that loses their investors lots of money though and this is why insurance is needed.

Whether any insurance company would cover these sort of projects with a barge pole is another thing. Whether any legal team will test who can be sued and for what is another. One thing is for sure - as the numbers get bigger, this sort of thing will get tested sooner or later.

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Blockchains are not completely immutable. Not doing a hardfork today does NOT in any way guarantee that it won’t be done in the future. If a centralized company can decide to do a hardfork, it means they can be forced to do a hardfork. If no centralized actor can do a hardfork, the community can, whether or not a hardfork will be performed will then be up to the community, just the decision might be more decentralized that it would be in a centralized platform.

Avoiding hardforks of a blockchain to try to create an illusion that such hardforks can not occur in the future doesn’t do any good. A blockchain is not an autonomous data network after all.

I guess what this shows though is that OMNI is quite centralized and it seems they can do hardforks with or without the community.

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I would appreciate it if someone from Maidsafe could shine their light on this issue.

Thanks,
Andre

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Maidsafe to Bitcoin Conversion Problem

Please, NO!
I’m frantically avoiding anything ERC20.
Ethereum wallets are notoriously complex to normal users.

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I also argue against ERC20 on the Ethereum blockchain for one simple reason:

Ethereum did exactly what Omni is now proposing to do, and no, they did not achieve community consensus before hard-forking their way out of the DAO mess.

What Ethereum did was hold a rushed and little publicized poll to decide on the default vote of the reference implementation, ensuring the poll was favorable towards the hard-fork. So every node voted in favor of the hard-fork by default, unless explicitly configured to do otherwise. Ethereum calls it a 90%+ consensus for the hard-fork, I call it a rigged vote. Others called it the same, which is why Ethereum Classic exists.

This is also why, as someone who bought ETH on the first day of their presale, I completely divested myself from the project. It is also the reason why I don’t touch Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens, no matter how much I like the projects. I’m in this for the principle first, profit second.

If anyone ever considers Ethereum based tokens, please consider Ethereum Classic.

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Well, thanks for the information; I didn’t know it. But why did the hard fork happen? Could you please explain? Sorry i’m new with this technical terms.
Though this event I think There are so many great projects Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens.
How do you think this could influence their efficency or their aims?

Both the Omni fork and the Ethereum fork were due to thefts of coins. In the case of Omni, it was Tether tokens taken from their ‘treasury’ (3 of 4 multi-sig) wallet. In the case of Ethereum, it was Ether held in the DAO contract. Both forks blocked the hacker’s access to the stolen coins.

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We actually don’t have any additional info than has been posted by Tether confirming they are pushing out a new version of omnicore. I note that omniwallet has been put out of action for a few days ’ Wallet Outage
One of our backend components has had to be reinitialized. Wallet services will be unavailable until this is complete.
We apologize for any service disruptions as this is unfortunately taking longer than originally anticipated.
Updated ETA: Around Nov 27’. If we get any additional info, Andre, we’ll be sure to update the community.

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IMO the Omni hardfork is pretty inconsequential to MAID (at least from a technical perspective). All they did was block the address holding the stolen USDT from making transactions.
If people don’t like that change they can keep running their old Omni Core client of course.

edit: actually, maybe it could be a bit of a mess…

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Thx Nick ver much appreciated!

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I sent some 1000s of my MAIDsafe coins to changelly for exchange from OMNIwallet and now they are stuck. I think it’s due to this problem.

When did you send it, since omniwallet has fixed things since this topic started. If not too long ago, then likely waiting on confirmations on the btc blockchain.

See also this thread:

That is a poloniex issue as I gather the coins arrived at poloniex, just not credited to their account.

As @neo mentioned Omni seems to have resolved these issues and I have used it a couple of times successfully in the last few days. Did you have some BTC in the same wallet as your MAID sending address?

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