After the accidental suicide of the Parity portfolio that occurred in early November, several developers have raised possible scenarios for the recovery of frozen funds. On this occasion, the Parity developer team has ensured its commitment to a modification of the protocol.
According to the team, many users thought that frozen funds would not be recoverable without a change in the status of the blockchain via hardfork, code updates or modification of consensus rules. However, it is not a problem inherent in the protocol, but rather the usability of the client. "Ethereum, today, remains solid and continues to evolve," the team said in a publication on its website.
Recall that at the beginning of November a user removed the Parity portfolio library, making it impossible to withdraw the funds. The so-called suicide of Parity happened by a human action and not by the characteristics of the protocol of operation of the blockchain. 500,000 ETH, equivalent to about 238 million dollars at the current price, are frozen after the accidental suicide of Parity Wallet.
The alleged error was committed by the user @ Devops199, who alleged a flaw in the protocol of the portfolio that allows a user to assume the intelligent contract that functions as a record of Parity addresses and remove it.
THE SOLUTIONS
There are three possible scenarios to solve the problems of ethers and tokens ERC-20 frozen in the blockchain of Ethereum: one that uses the EIP156 proposed by the creator of the network, Vitalik Buterin; a recovery of ethers and tokens ERC-20 of specific addresses and, finally, a change in the protocol to reactivate suicide contracts.
The first solution allows holders of private keys affected by certain problems to withdraw their ETH. However, it would not apply to the Parity event, since the typical cases covered by this proposal are contracts created without code, some losses due to DDos attacks or losses generated by the JavaScript library error. It is a solution of strict rules since all these cases have a clear owner that can be checked with a relatively cheap and simple calculation in the chain.
"Therefore, this generalized proposal does not provide any explicit favor to any account, user or application. This approach does not cover blocked funds in Parity's multiple-signature purses because the contract itself still contains code, and would not allow recovery of non-ether tokens, "the Parity team stressed.
The second possibility would be an ETH recovery and specific tokens of a certain address. This is the most direct solution and could solve all the cases raised above, but still with the difficulty of recovering the portfolio library.
Finally, the solution suggested by Parity is a change in the protocol that would allow the reactivation of suicide contracts and the detailed deployment of contracts for all users in the future. This solution would allow the solution of the event of the portfolio, as well as other problems in which the contract addresses contain funds but the code has not been implemented. In addition, it would serve to solve future incidents of a similar nature.
This is another partial coverage with a "strict rule approach", although it represents a sufficient change in the behavior of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that could be considered a functional improvement for the platform, since it does not make the ordering of transactions the factor determinant in a contract direction. We prefer this solution because it adds functionality for users, although the details are currently being discussed. Currently has four different designs under review.
For the Parity team this event invites a new discussion on governance and consensus within Ethereum. Thus, despite the fact that the hardfork after the hacking of The DAO brought about the creation of Ethereum Classic, a good consensus has been reached on the technical improvements, as in the case of the reduction of the mining reward. This next discussion will be an important test of how this type of disputes can become a scale of consensus