Draft : Proposal to help fundraiser participants who lost their seed phrase

While we sympathize with those with lost seed phrases, we found the economic finality concerns outlined above to be compelling.

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At first thought I was very much in favor of this proposal. It is terrible that there are people who have lost their fundraiser ATOMs.

On reflection, I have to come down against this, on fairly simple principles.

  1. Economic finality of the blockchain.
  2. Validators should not be in the business of making subjective judgements. We are not adjudicators. We are not in the business of KYCing random ATOM holders.
  3. The precedent setting of validators working together to approve rectification of perceived wrongs. There will eventually be a significant theft of ATOMs, either from an individual or an exchange. What will be asked of validators?

Cosmos is not EOS.

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Iā€™m not sure I understand the economic finality argument.

economic finality is just a set of social norms.

I think the norm of the ā€œgenesis stateā€ was only fully baked until after some block upgrade would be perfectly acceptable by the economy.

I donā€™t think responding to a theft is a reasonable thing to respect. It would simply be too difficult to coordinate the validators to do that without introducing a central authority.

Hi Matt ,
Thank you and Figment for taking the time deliberate on the draft proposal.
Some notes based on you comments.

  1. When the next upgrade occurs with the chain-id change , the new genesis block will contain new addresses based on proof that was provided by the fundraiser participants . There will be no change in the blockchain between the blocks . So one could say that economic finality of the next chain will be maintained.

  2. We could say that there will be no subjective decisions. There would be only 2 cases.Keys lost of addresses before the genesis block are different from keys lost of addresses that were funded after Gen0 block . In other words the former cannot be a precedent to the latter .

  3. Validators may not need to perform a KYC in this case . The ICF or another third party may be requested to do it and the cost of the operation can be covered from the donation from the recovered funds.
    This will act as a big deterrent to what Gamarin suggests may happen.

Cosmos is definitely not EOS . The EOS situation unfortunately had a much more complicated form of recovery from what I understand and that is why Block Producers were hesitant to go through with it . However , the upgrade mechanism that CosmosHub has makes it very simple to code this recovery in.

I would like to implore Figment to please reconsider their thoughts on this proposal and will be greatly obliged if that could possible.

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Withdrawal History (Poloniex)
Txid: 1f584ea7b8da75d78dd90168c8d1a4046be88e20f75c867d567944bd17d46973
Amount : 1.5BTC

Withdrawal History
Txid: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/67069e24befe1f5b1cf6c86ab64bd867f409e78dd36c42adc5cf6ebfec5c7a7e
Amount: 1.0 BTC
Thanks for your proposals & considerations.
It was a terrible mistake not to write down seed words anyway.
However, please consider it more with generosity.

my donated info

Eth address - 0x53AD4398F76a453A2d4daC4470F0b81Cd1D72715
TXID - 0x42d0f860e1cd484f51647f34479843008b69d8f1158c94ad44ae30df33fdc080

Amount: 16 eth

Ed Moncada here with Blockfolio.

First off, I would like to sincerely thank @vee_em for the time and effort that he has put into this discussion / proposal.

Our story is a bit different from the others on this thread, as we did not lose our seed phrase. We simply never received one.

Back in April of 2017 on the morning of the offering, my investment partner Calvin opened up his Brave browser while on the phone with me (edit for clarification: he was participating in the offering through his Mac laptop while one the phone with me). He was going to handle the transaction for us (of which I had a minority share). We knew there was a high likelihood that the Cosmos sale would sell out quickly so he was up early and waiting for it to begin, watching the countdown clock make itā€™s way down until the offering started. When the countdown was complete and the sale finally started, he informed me that a Bitcoin address appeared on his screen and asked if he should go ahead and send the Bitcoin there. Calvin was never presented with a flow to obtain a seed phrase, or one to confirm it. It just went straight to showing him a BTC address (and yes we have the transaction IDs that show we sent it to the right place - see below). Having participated in a number of ICOs prior where you would just send Bitcoin to a wallet address, I assumed the Cosmos sale was similarly designed so I let him know that we should just go ahead and send our Bitcoin in. He then sent in a total of 22 BTC from two different addresses.

https://btc2.trezor.io/address/16LQ1kwAq7QWGUx6Lc3Zt41AZVaRazTKqo (12 BTC sent)

https://btc2.trezor.io/address/14CXPxT4DBJVJaVroKyyuJ1Nuc3xXb29f4 (10 BTC sent)

Given how fast ICOs for high quality projects would sell out, we felt a sense of urgency to send our Bitcoin to make sure we didnā€™t miss out, and again having had participated in a number of other ICOs this flow did not seem out of the ordinary for us. Unfortunately, we did not find out until 2 years later that we were supposed to have received a seed phrase. Fortunately, we still have control of the two Bitcoin addresses that we sent in and participated from.

In our case, there was no user error. We obviously donā€™t know how this could have happened, but we can only postulate there may have been a bug that was missed when using Brave browser (which at that time was not nearly as used as it is today).

I feel incredibly fortunate to have been directed to this forum / proposal and feel incredibly thankful for @vee_em 's efforts. We also sincerely appreciate the consideration from all of those who are spending their time discussing. Debate and Governance are meant for situations like this.

Lastly, even though in our case it wasnā€™t a lost seed phrase, should this proposal be approved we would happily donate 20% of our recovered funds to the community pool, which looks to be a considerable amount. Also, I think the proposal would need to change slightly to include us as a new category of participant.

-Ed Moncada

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I am for this if they can sign from the accounts the money was sent from. Is anyone going to ever bother submitting this as a real proposal on chain so people can actually vote on it?

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I see I can contribute 82 atom for this @vee_em

As a COSMOS fundraiser participant privately, but also holder of ā€˜LOSTā€™ ATOMS via the ICONOMI holdings I would love to see this happen, a 10-20% fee would seem fair in my view.

Would be willing to donate 50 ATOM to support this, (am sure many more within ICONOMI community will also)