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The answer you're looking for is "Yeah, as much as people like to cry moral decay, honor is still a thing." You're right, there was no advantage to reporting t

The answer you're looking for is "Yeah, as much as people like to cry moral decay, honor is still a thing." You're right, there was no advantage to reporting the vuln. Most people would have jumped on that vuln like <edgy metaphor>. But "fuck you, got mine" mentality won't get us to Mars. And as stupid as it sounds, having a story to tell is at least partly as satisfying as doing the actual heist. Zero risk, and you get to brag how smart you were. People are also much more likely to trust you in the future (as opposed to you being an unknown quantity). Heists like that also punish the ecosystem. If Overstock lost $1m, it would forever show that moving to crypto is fundamentally a terrible idea. It would destabilize the basis of wealth you sought to acquire. But... Yeah, passing up a $1m payday would not be easy.

nathan_f77 9y ago
This would be pretty mild hack compared to all the other cryptocurrency hacks that have happened so far. There's the $30M Parity hack, $94M stolen from Bitfinex, $473M from Mt Gox, $5.1M from Bitstamp, $50M from DAO, $7M from CoinDash, $8M from Veritaseum, and $500k from Enigma. I'm probably missing a few big ones, and countless small ones. But a $1M Overstock hack would barely make the news, and would probably be covered by insurance. It's fun to think about all the people behind these hacks. JB Snyder could have been one of them, and we'd never know. A lot of them are probably just regular software engineers and security experts who stumbled onto these vulnerabilities. I think it's true that the "fuck you, got mine" mentality won't get us to Mars, but that's the motivation behind cryptocurrencies. We can't trust billions of strangers, but we can trust math and physics. Except, we already have systems that allow us to trust billions of strangers (governments and laws). Governments and banks could have reversed all of these transactions. The FBI might have tracked down the hackers, and a judge might have sent them to prison. I'm starting to think that we don't really need cryptocurrencies, and the current system is actually pretty good.

nathan_f77 9y ago

This would be pretty mild hack compared to all the other cryptocurrency hacks that have happened so far. There's the $30M Parity hack, $94M stolen from Bitfinex, $473M from Mt Gox, $5.1M from Bitstamp, $50M from DAO, $7M from CoinDash, $8M from Veritaseum, and $500k from Enigma. I'm probably missing a few big ones, and countless small ones. But a $1M Overstock hack would barely make the news, and would probably be covered by insurance. It's fun to think about all the people behind these hacks. JB Snyder could have been one of them, and we'd never know. A lot of them are probably just regular software engineers and security experts who stumbled onto these vulnerabilities. I think it's true that the "fuck you, got mine" mentality won't get us to Mars, but that's the motivation behind cryptocurrencies. We can't trust billions of strangers, but we can trust math and physics. Except, we already have systems that allow us to trust billions of strangers (governments and laws). Governments and banks could have reversed all of these transactions. The FBI might have tracked down the hackers, and a judge might have sent them to prison. I'm starting to think that we don't really need cryptocurrencies, and the current system is actually pretty good.