5 Crypto Programming Errors You Must Know

By Sumedha Bose

Our lives are surrounded by technology; that is a fact that we have already established. On an average, we spend more time interacting with people virtually, then we do in person. However, we often forget that all the technology we see around us is man-made at some level. Blockchain too is one such technology that requires human effort to develop it and keep it functional. An army of coders and programmers are behind the various crypto platforms that we see on the internet.

Which brings me to my next point, that whenever human effort and labour is involved in any project, there is always room for mistakes. Crypto and blockchain programmers too are not immune to this. Often a small mistake on their part can have a huge impact on the platform or the technology. It can either be a bug in their code, or a loophole in the security making it vulnerable to hacks. Here are five of the most common crypto programming errors that you should be aware of:

REX ICO Fiasco

Back in August 2017, the popular platform that incorporates blockchain technology in real estate, REX, made news when their developers lost around $1.3 million in ether, during their Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

The platform, which offers a unique multiple listing P2P service, suffered a major loss due to a programming error last year. While programming the ICO’s smart contracts, they made an error of entering a wrong Javascript hex string. This resulted in loss of funds which were sent to an inactive address on the blockchain by mistake. However, thanks to their venture capital funding, they were able to give the investors the tokens that they had paid for.

The developer who goes by the name devops199 made headlines when he accidentally froze $300 million worth of Ethereum, while trying to right a wrong.

While programming, the developer had accidentally gained access to multi-signature wallets of thousands of users. Instead of exploiting the situation, he/she took the highroad and tried to undo the code that granted him access in the first place. In that process, all of the funds froze indefinitely, resulting in a massive loss of Ethereum worth $300 million. Those funds are till date frozen with no hopes of recovery.

Bitcoin Update Error

It is common knowledge that Bitcoin’s coding needs to be upgraded from time to time in order to maintain the smooth running of the blockchain. However, if there’s a mistake in the update, the results can be a nightmare.

Back in March 2013, Bitcoin was scheduled to be upgraded from Version 0.7 to Version 0.8. This upgrade was aimed at increasing the block size of Bitcoin. The disaster began as soon as the update was completed.

The developers soon realised that the current version of bitcoin was not compatible with the new upgrade, which resulted in a bitcoin split, much like the hard fork that gave rise to Bitcoin Cash. Eventually the community decided to go back to Version 0.7 to avoid any further confusion.

Binance Trading Suspended

Being one of the most renowned exchanges in the industry, you would think that Binance is immune to any mistakes, but that is not true. Back in February of this year, a coding error resulted in Binance having to suspend its trading for almost two days. due to a coding error.

However, the crypto world was not buying the story. Due to several hacks that Binance had been subjected to, most people believed that this shutdown was due to a hack and that the coding error is a cover up story, that the exchnage is going with to save loss of face. When these speculations went out of hand, the CEO of Binance, Zhao Chenpeng posted a clarification on Twitter with a screengrab of the coding error. The error was fixed soon and it did not result in any loss of funds.

Bitcoin Coding Bug

A curious incident attracted the attention of a bitcoin developer named Jeff Garzik, back in 2010. While reviewing the bitcoin coding, he observed that the value of one of the blocks was 92 billion bitcoin, which was strange considering there were only 21,000,000 bitcoin ever created.

A coding bug as significant as this, prompted the developers to reset the entire thing by rescinding the blockchain to the block previous to the one that contained the 92 billion bitcoin. This rendered all the transactions that took place before the hack as null and void. The reason behind this hack was a bug that had allowed the hacker to exploit a number overflow error.