Thanks to a string of screw-ups and bugs, an unsuspecting developer recently took possession of an estimated $US390 million worth of the Ethereum cryptocurrency by accident. In an attempt to give back the money, however, the guy ended up locking up the funds permanently. Essentially, the money has just evaporated.

It turns out that hackers started the trouble getting into the cryptocurrency wallet service stealing about $42 million. To then patch the vulnerability to their block-chain technology, they introduced a bug that affected multi-signature wallets. These are wallets which require several people to enter keys before funds get transferred. This was intended to be top security for Ether which is the second largest cryptocurrency. Somehow, a guy called “devops199” triggered the bug and took control of all multi-sig wallets unintendedly. Then devops199 attempted to reverse the process to give back the money which then triggered the bug. The result was the destruction all of the funds. The bug caused a chain reaction of events that locked all multi-signature wallets that cannot now be unlocked.

Welcome to the world of Cryptocurrency.

BTW: Blockchain can be hacked, in case you did not know.