[adjkant]

They are in location X and it has been written into code that there is no way to ever remove them from X. The only difference between throwing this "money" into a black hole and this is that you can see what's in this black hole once it's in there, even if you cannot remove it.

The only way to ever fix this is to rewrite the history of the blockchain which means forking the entire ETH currency by getting all mining/record nodes to agree to it.

Long story short: Virtually unrecoverable without large coordination from the entire ETH community.

[RomanAlexander]

It's a possibility if your name is Vitalik Buterin

[sanderjd]

Hard to say but my guess is that no, even he can no longer pull this off. I think he used his one freebie.

[can16358p]

Yup. One more freebie hardfork that reverses (okay not "reverses" techbically but forks away from a previous state) some mistake/hack and Ethereum would lose trust especially competition between chains (EVM or otherwise) is so high.

[floatingatoll]

They would gain trust for returning all of the WETH accumulated in all of the contracts where it’s been idled due to PEBCAK, in concert with a code fork that refuses to accept such transactions. That would be a sign of maturity and intelligence to bankers, and influence their consideration of whether Ethereum might be a viable platform for their financial business someday.

[adjkant]

This idea would be antithetical to decentralization of cryptocurrency, but I think that since this issue is a platform level problem (e.g. future contracts can also introduce this) what is needed is a set of mediators/arbitrators (we can call them "judges" that hear these cases and have a technical mechanism to correct them without a fork.

In order to select these judges, the community can elect them directly or elect a board or leaders to select them indirectly.

Of course these corrections would require gas, so they may need to add a small additional gas charge to transactions to fund this group and perhaps also their salaries. We can call this extra gas a "tax".

In summary: Stand up an entire government around ETH in order to ensure the benefit of judges and humans can override code. Once you do this though, you have a central ruling authority with an in-code constitution, but parts that take place in a human judgement realm.

I set this up partially in jest of blockchain currencies in general, but I do actually say this seriously. I think that purists of decentralized code only control will hold back any possible benefits that cryptocurrency could bring. The situation above still has benefits from a monetary fiat system run by a nation state, though I think severely less than what the cryptocurrency ideal is. Some include:

- There is no nation state attached to this centralized ruling body and itself can be decentralized and beholden to no nation

- All transactions and reasons of the body can still be public and on open API's for people to integrate and monitor with modern tech

- The loose "untraceable" or general "freedom" arguments that come with a blockchain would still hold so long as the community with these tenants maintains control of the board / judges / leaders.

[floatingatoll]

You jest, but “stand up a government” is a primary barrier to entry to being considered a “fiat currency”, which makes sense given the drawbacks of trying to qualify as a currency without one.

A banking-grade currency would have reversed the WETH transactions and prohibited new ones. Ethereum has refused so far to do so, even though it’s in their power to hard fork. Whether or not you view them as a currency, that’s not the sort of behavior that engenders a perception of financial trust and safety in their work.

[sanderjd]

Some other blockchains do actually have "governance" somewhat along the lines of what you've described here.

[pvaldes]

So all that is needed is forcing a bunch of people to do something. Not much different than forcing a lot of people to do to war, so not impossible.

Lets imagine, hypothetically, that some mafia boss, big company, users would create a lobby, the "platform of people affected by Ethereum" that would lobby to force a fork for a fee. Lets say 50% percentage of your lost money if we are successful, that is still much better deal than having no money at all. And then would use some tool to convince/coerce/bully everybody to restore it or just would mess with the process to force it. Would be this possible or a probable outcome after enough amount of time has passed?