15 ms·

Days Since a Cryptocurrency Exchange Has Lost More Than $100M

222 points by melzarei 9y ago

tim333 9y ago
It looks like it could do with some more data rather than just Days Since A Cryptocurrency Exchange Has Lost More Than $100 Million: </div> <div style="text-align:center;font-size:100px"> <span id='counter'>0</span>
- shakna 9y ago
  Did you block the script? The counter updates to 12 after the script runs, for myself. It is using a Twitter API at the back, so far as I can tell.
  - zuzun 9y ago
    It gets blocked if you have tracking protection enabled on Firefox. The resource at “https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” was blocked because tracking protection is enabled.
  - simias 9y ago
    It stood stuck at 0 for a while for me as well, before eventually updating. It's pretty crazy to see the amount of resources needed to load what is effectively a static page. I guess I shouldn't be too hard on a joke website but it's a bit symptomatic of the current state of the web these days.
    - harryh 9y ago
      ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There is a TODO in there to calculate the timestamp based on the tweet id rather than digging through the tweet iframe after it loads. If someone wants to submit a pull request for that it should speed things up tremendously. Bitwise manipulations in JS are annoying though so I haven't bothered.
- andreasley 9y ago
  Ghostery blocked the Twitter Button for me, which prevented the scripts from executing and updating the counter (which be default is 0).
  - tim333 9y ago
    Ah - yes. Ghostery was blocking it for me too. Maybe they should change the "0" to "updating - javascript needed" or some such?
    - tomascot 9y ago
      Or add a noscript element.
      - harryh 9y ago
        Good call. Done.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
h4l0 9y ago
All this bubble speculations, inadequacy of current platforms, taking risks to not miss the trend... I had been all in favor of blockchain and cryptocurrencies for a decentralized approach to local applications, closed markets. To be fair, I never believed blockchain could reach global scalability and there are still concerns on that part. We all saw the future value and possibilities before everybody started branding their deficient products with blockchain. I hope the bad taste surrounding this technology will wither in a short amount of time.
sna1l 9y ago
I think we will see a rise of decentralized exchanges like 0x and Airswap. Curious to see if they will be able to scale though.
- philfrasty 9y ago
  I thought so too until I actually used one. The experience is worse than I ever imagined possible (sure there is room for improvement). Additionally the two you mentioned only support ERC20 tokens.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    40 of the top 100 crypto assets (coins and tokens) by market cap are ERC20 tokens. Exchanges involving fiat are necessarily centralized since fiat requires a centralized custodian. There are some dollar-pegged ERC20 tokens like Tether (backed by dollars) and DAI (a stable coin) that could allow what is effectively fiat-value <-> token decentralized exchange, but to acquire actual fiat, that can be used in the rest of the financial system, requires interaction with a centralized exchange that has a banking relationship.
- oelmekki 9y ago
  Stellar already has a decentralized exchange built in, I've used it a bit and it's really a change to be able to use it directly from wallet, instead of sending coins to an exchange and basically giving them to it, hoping it will allow withdrawal. But please note it's not a complete fix either. You still have third parties you must trust (presuming others decentralized exchanges are built like stellar's one). Instead of having one third party for all markets, you have one third party per asset. When you buy xrp for xlm, for example, you don't actually own xrp, you own credits for the xrp anchor, with the promise you can withdraw them. So it's exactly like current exchanges, except if one anchor gets hacked, it does not affects all assets, just the one it manages. That's still better than current situation, and decentralized markets have many other advantages.
- mikro2nd 9y ago
  I certainly hope we DO see DEXs take off in the near future, but right now, every single one suffers from a severe lack of liquidity, which distorts prices and can make trades difficult verging on impossible if there's nobody with a suitable counter-trade offer. Liquidity is the number one reason traders love the Forex markets, and the reason so many Forex traders will trade only in the major currency pairs. Hell, I've even known a couple of traders who will only trade GBPUSD or EURUSD for that precise reason: If the market is sufficiently liquid, there is pretty-much ALWAYS someone who wants to trade at your price. On the flipside, where liquidity is too thin there's no market, no matter how many bells and whistles the "exchange" has, and no matter how attractive the notion of pure p2p exchange might be.
slimshady94 9y ago
It's been a rough month for sure, but I don't think such a high frequency of hacks can continue.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kosei 9y ago
  Well, at a certain point, if this rate continues, people will pull their money out, fulfilling your prophecy.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Testing with client-side JavaScript if the withdrawal amount is less than the account balance? Classic! That had to be a known hole to the designer, presumably whoever wrote that code just bought tickets to a non-extradition country.
- cspags 9y ago
  While you may be right, I think this could just be a classic example of Hanlon's razor.
  - bhouston 9y ago
    Incredibly incompetent. This is a well known issue with any dynamic pricing ecommerce site.
    - sametmax 9y ago
      Only if this is the only check. You can implement ut for ergonomics
  - logicallee 9y ago
    For example, as reported in this thread (I didn't test), without javascript the page reads "0 days". Then that 0 is updated automatically. Obviously it SHOULD read "loading..." and then that loading... text should be replaced. Why do I point this out? Because this oversight coincidentally serves the purposes of the page (its humor), it's a particularly strong impact when that reads 0 days. It's not supposed to actually read that way, but, there you have it. A good example of the principle in practice.
    - Semaphor 9y ago
      You need to allow everything from twitter and related domains even frames for it to show anything but 0. I was wondering what I missed this time.
  - stevenh 9y ago
h1d 9y ago
Can't argue if many of them are inside jobs for early retirement. "Hacked" is such a convenient word to cover the story of any losses. That crappy vulnerability could just have been placed to make people convinced how it was "hacked".
- mathgeek 9y ago
  One of the core life lessons of crypto is that when you combine anonymity (or at least the illusion of it) with someone else owning the private keys to your wallet, there's nothing stopping that "someone else" from taking your coins without any way to prove who took them. When you want to be personally responsible for your money, you have to accept that you're personally responsible for its security as well. Banks and financial regulators literally exist to push that responsibility onto someone else in the traditional systems, with the well-known tradeoffs.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Uptrenda 9y ago
    That's exactly it. We take it for granted that in simpler human-run ledgers accountability is easier to do. Accounting has all these checks and balances designed to place blame on a single individual. Corporations obscure some of that blame but it still works in theory. A complex distributed system means that it can be almost impossible to determine what went wrong and that has some hugely dystopian outcomes.
- paulpauper 9y ago
  Coding a bitcoin exchange is not a trivial task. I think it was a mistake . Even overstock had a major vulnerability that was caused by confusing Bitcoin Cash with Bitcoin
  - acdha 9y ago
    It’s not trivial but this is a basic skill which even the most basic industry research would make you aware. It’s like thinking you’re qualified to try surgery because you were pretty good at Operation as a kid.
grondilu 9y ago
Currency exchanges existed long before cryptocurrencies. As far as I know they are heavily regulated, more or less reliable and trustworthy. Hasn't the Forex added cryptocurrencies to its listing by now? Is the cryptomarket still the far west these days and if so, why?
- mikro2nd 9y ago
  Many of the Forex exchanges HAVE added crypto-assets to their offerings. It tends to be limited to BTC and maybe a FEW more, though -- some people might view that as a problem.
  - jerguismi 9y ago
    Can you list any specific examples? I'm aware of products that track the BTC price and futures, but not really any existing players which would allow you to buy actual btc so that you can hold it in your own wallet.
    - mikro2nd 9y ago
      This is a good point -- many are simply letting you trade CFDs against crypto-currency volatility, which is fine if all you're interested in is speculating in crypto prices. IIRC Swissquote does do actual BTC, ETH and a few others, though, and istr seeing one or two others, but I'm not a collector and hoarder of Forex exchanges. Pretty sure I've seen a bank or two dipping their toes into the water, too. After all, if there's money to be made out of it, they'll hardly be likely to stay away.
- jerguismi 9y ago
  Trust and reliability build up with time. Regulation is coming to crypto. The existing regulated companies won't be eager to touch it unless regulation has developed and/or they see lots of potential profits. While cryptocurrency might look like it's a big deal, it's still pretty much peanuts for many existing players.
- pjc50 9y ago
haakon 9y ago
Viewing this site without JavaScript enabled shows it's been 0 days. Turns out it's supposed to be 12.
- ponyous 9y ago
  Doesn't work for me at all even with everything enabled on latest Firefox. (Adblock disabled), twttr is undefined.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dao- 9y ago
    It works if I disable tracking protection in Firefox...
    - williamscales 9y ago
      Why do they need to track me to show me how many days it has been?
      - dingo_bat 9y ago
        I think it loads Twitter posts and the tracking protection blocks that. I don't think the site itself is trying to track.
        harryh 9y ago
        This is correct. It's my site and I'm not trying to track you. I don't care. If anyone has a better idea of how to make things work so that people with tracking protection don't run into problems feel free to submit a pull request.
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      Probably because it tries to load embedded Twitter posts.
yeukhon 9y ago
I was wondering why HN on my iPhone suddenly stretched. Damn, this domain name is testing the limit.
- adventured 9y ago
  I don't think I've ever seen a domain that long make the front page.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Why would that cause "stretching"? Here's how mine looks: https://s9.postimg.org/lcxpndbpr/Screenshot_20180224-203730.png https://s9.postimg.org/lcxpndbpr/Screenshot_20180224-203730....
paulpauper 9y ago
I don't think the Nano hack counts because when they were stolen it was worth a lot less and the exchange tried to hide the loss for awhile. The exchange was hacked in Nov. I think, when Nano was worth pennies. Rai Blocks was unique in that is went up so much, so that's why the figure is so big.
paulpauper 9y ago
BitGrail lost $170 million worth of Nano XRB tokens because... the checks for whether you had a sufficient balance to withdraw were only implemented as client-side JavaScript That was just one bug and was not the cause of all the losses. Other users reported issues with withdrawals and deposits , especially pertaining to litecoin and etherem over-credits. I think there was a bug that caused people to get too much.
patrickaljord 9y ago
I don't understand people who constantly make fun of new technologies that we're only recently about to figure out how to make right. Like people obsessed with making fun of IoT (I don't own any IoT besides a smartphone) or cryptocurrencies (I own a bit). Isn't it normal for new techs to be failing at the beginning? Do we really need to ridicule these nascent techs just because they're not perfect for now? It's like people making fun of first airplanes 150 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp7MHZY2ADI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp7MHZY2ADI). First attempts to fly were full of huge failure, many leading to deaths. Many people ridiculed the very idea we would one day do mass travel by plane. I thought of anyone, we should know better than making fun of new tech having some failures, this is how tech works. Because one day, one of these techs may take off like these planes eventually did and you will be the one looking like a fool then.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- paulpauper 9y ago
  The technology is not being ridiculed. the exchanges are the ones messing up by making really careless coding errors.
  - patrickaljord 9y ago
    I don't know, @patio11 who's quoted on the link keeps attacking bitcoin all the time. Equally annoying are people who keep praising bitcoin all the time by the way. Bitcoin may or may not succeed but people who keep predicting it will fail are just as tiring as people who keep saying it will save humanity and get rid of all the ills. > The technology is not being ridiculed I could find you plenty of people ridiculing cryptocurrencies on twitter everyday. This site is just another example.
    - tigershark 9y ago
      In your opinion I’m probably one of the people attacking bitcoin. And yes, I would like them to completely disappear. People are just wasting an enormous quantity of energy in an unregulated lottery in which they are almost always guaranteed to lose. Can you please tell me a good reason why I should not oppose crypto currencies and all the similar “scams”? Plese don’t answer with Proof of stake or other shenanigans if we want to be evaluating this phenomenon in an honest way. Unless I missed something proof of stake is translated to “who has more money can print the biggest percentage of new money”, but I didn’t really follow all the variations of this philosophy.
st3fan 9y ago
"client side balance check" - these people should not be allowed to write software.
maxaf 9y ago
It peeves me a lot to see virtual currencies described as being "worth" something in a USD or some other real currency equivalent. By the same token, why isn't open source code described as being worth a certain amount of money? I think we can all agree that useful code that powers much of today's enterprise - entirely gratis, too! - is actually worth a lot more than some imaginary string of bits that gets traded back and forth for arbitrary sums of money.
- trisimix 9y ago
  Not to short sighted people that only care about money
  - maxaf 9y ago
    I'd flag your comment for resorting to ad hominem in a civilized discussion forum, but HN won't let me flag a response to my own comment. Instead, I suggest you spend your youthful fervor on reading a few articles from a range of media outlets on the negative effects that virtual currencies have on the environment. I won't expound on this further, as the linked articles do admirably in this department. https://newrepublic.com/article/146099/environmental-case-bitcoin https://newrepublic.com/article/146099/environmental-case-bi... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-mining-consumes-electricity-ireland https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-m... http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/07/technology/bitcoin-energy-environment/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/07/technology/bitcoin-energy-en... https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/bitcoin-pollution-environment-electricity-robots/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/bitcoin-pollution-e... https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/2/16724786/bitcoin-mining-energy-electricity https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/2/1672478...
    - avg_dev 9y ago
      pretty sure he was agreeing with you
- mcherm 9y ago
  > It peeves me a lot to see virtual currencies described as being "worth" something in a USD or some other real currency equivalent. By the same token, why isn't open source code described as being worth a certain amount of money? If we called it "code currency" and touted the ability to use open source to buy and sell things then I think people WOULD compare it to preexisting currencies. Instead, open source code is touted as a replacement for proprietary code, and we often hear people making comparisons such as "Gimp vs Photoshop" or "Linux vs MacOS". The dollar-value for cryptocurrencies is because they are CURRENCIES.
jwilk 9y ago
The site doesn't work for me, but apparently these are the tweets it refers to: https://twitter.com/bascule/status/962740918053888000 https://twitter.com/bascule/status/962740918053888000 https://twitter.com/ofnumbers/status/962149781400305664 https://twitter.com/ofnumbers/status/962149781400305664 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/957514764011298816 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/957514764011298816 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/938519280240357376 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/938519280240357376 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/760627527450624002 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/760627527450624002 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/731733049847599104 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/731733049847599104
jnbiche 9y ago
If you're going to fetch important quantitative data using a client-side Ajax query, then you really shouldn't default that value to "0". That results in a delay of several seconds or more when the page displays "0" even if the actual value is say, "12". It would be much better to default to either the empty string, or "-", or "fetching..." or something like that. In my case, there was a "0" on the page as the main value for at least 5-10 seconds (probably due to HN load) before the correct value was displayed ("12").
- darepublic 9y ago
  loading message or animation is probably best while the number is fetched.
- harryh 9y ago
  Good point. Fixed.
- ric2b 9y ago
  Even better, why isn't the number rendered server-side?

222 points by melzarei 9y ago

It looks like it could do with some more data rather than just Days Since A Cryptocurrency Exchange Has Lost More Than $100 Million: </div> <div style="text-align:center;font-size:100px"> <span id='counter'>0</span>

shakna 9y ago
Did you block the script? The counter updates to 12 after the script runs, for myself. It is using a Twitter API at the back, so far as I can tell.
- zuzun 9y ago
  It gets blocked if you have tracking protection enabled on Firefox. The resource at “https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” was blocked because tracking protection is enabled.
- simias 9y ago
  It stood stuck at 0 for a while for me as well, before eventually updating. It's pretty crazy to see the amount of resources needed to load what is effectively a static page. I guess I shouldn't be too hard on a joke website but it's a bit symptomatic of the current state of the web these days.
  - harryh 9y ago
    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There is a TODO in there to calculate the timestamp based on the tweet id rather than digging through the tweet iframe after it loads. If someone wants to submit a pull request for that it should speed things up tremendously. Bitwise manipulations in JS are annoying though so I haven't bothered.
andreasley 9y ago
Ghostery blocked the Twitter Button for me, which prevented the scripts from executing and updating the counter (which be default is 0).
- tim333 9y ago
  Ah - yes. Ghostery was blocking it for me too. Maybe they should change the "0" to "updating - javascript needed" or some such?
  - tomascot 9y ago
    Or add a noscript element.
    - harryh 9y ago
      Good call. Done.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

h4l0 9y ago

All this bubble speculations, inadequacy of current platforms, taking risks to not miss the trend... I had been all in favor of blockchain and cryptocurrencies for a decentralized approach to local applications, closed markets. To be fair, I never believed blockchain could reach global scalability and there are still concerns on that part. We all saw the future value and possibilities before everybody started branding their deficient products with blockchain. I hope the bad taste surrounding this technology will wither in a short amount of time.

sna1l 9y ago

I think we will see a rise of decentralized exchanges like 0x and Airswap. Curious to see if they will be able to scale though.

philfrasty 9y ago
I thought so too until I actually used one. The experience is worse than I ever imagined possible (sure there is room for improvement). Additionally the two you mentioned only support ERC20 tokens.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  40 of the top 100 crypto assets (coins and tokens) by market cap are ERC20 tokens. Exchanges involving fiat are necessarily centralized since fiat requires a centralized custodian. There are some dollar-pegged ERC20 tokens like Tether (backed by dollars) and DAI (a stable coin) that could allow what is effectively fiat-value <-> token decentralized exchange, but to acquire actual fiat, that can be used in the rest of the financial system, requires interaction with a centralized exchange that has a banking relationship.
oelmekki 9y ago
Stellar already has a decentralized exchange built in, I've used it a bit and it's really a change to be able to use it directly from wallet, instead of sending coins to an exchange and basically giving them to it, hoping it will allow withdrawal. But please note it's not a complete fix either. You still have third parties you must trust (presuming others decentralized exchanges are built like stellar's one). Instead of having one third party for all markets, you have one third party per asset. When you buy xrp for xlm, for example, you don't actually own xrp, you own credits for the xrp anchor, with the promise you can withdraw them. So it's exactly like current exchanges, except if one anchor gets hacked, it does not affects all assets, just the one it manages. That's still better than current situation, and decentralized markets have many other advantages.
mikro2nd 9y ago
I certainly hope we DO see DEXs take off in the near future, but right now, every single one suffers from a severe lack of liquidity, which distorts prices and can make trades difficult verging on impossible if there's nobody with a suitable counter-trade offer. Liquidity is the number one reason traders love the Forex markets, and the reason so many Forex traders will trade only in the major currency pairs. Hell, I've even known a couple of traders who will only trade GBPUSD or EURUSD for that precise reason: If the market is sufficiently liquid, there is pretty-much ALWAYS someone who wants to trade at your price. On the flipside, where liquidity is too thin there's no market, no matter how many bells and whistles the "exchange" has, and no matter how attractive the notion of pure p2p exchange might be.

slimshady94 9y ago

It's been a rough month for sure, but I don't think such a high frequency of hacks can continue.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kosei 9y ago
Well, at a certain point, if this rate continues, people will pull their money out, fulfilling your prophecy.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago

Testing with client-side JavaScript if the withdrawal amount is less than the account balance? Classic! That had to be a known hole to the designer, presumably whoever wrote that code just bought tickets to a non-extradition country.

cspags 9y ago
While you may be right, I think this could just be a classic example of Hanlon's razor.
- bhouston 9y ago
  Incredibly incompetent. This is a well known issue with any dynamic pricing ecommerce site.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Only if this is the only check. You can implement ut for ergonomics
- logicallee 9y ago
  For example, as reported in this thread (I didn't test), without javascript the page reads "0 days". Then that 0 is updated automatically. Obviously it SHOULD read "loading..." and then that loading... text should be replaced. Why do I point this out? Because this oversight coincidentally serves the purposes of the page (its humor), it's a particularly strong impact when that reads 0 days. It's not supposed to actually read that way, but, there you have it. A good example of the principle in practice.
  - Semaphor 9y ago
    You need to allow everything from twitter and related domains even frames for it to show anything but 0. I was wondering what I missed this time.
- stevenh 9y ago

h1d 9y ago

Can't argue if many of them are inside jobs for early retirement. "Hacked" is such a convenient word to cover the story of any losses. That crappy vulnerability could just have been placed to make people convinced how it was "hacked".

mathgeek 9y ago
One of the core life lessons of crypto is that when you combine anonymity (or at least the illusion of it) with someone else owning the private keys to your wallet, there's nothing stopping that "someone else" from taking your coins without any way to prove who took them. When you want to be personally responsible for your money, you have to accept that you're personally responsible for its security as well. Banks and financial regulators literally exist to push that responsibility onto someone else in the traditional systems, with the well-known tradeoffs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Uptrenda 9y ago
  That's exactly it. We take it for granted that in simpler human-run ledgers accountability is easier to do. Accounting has all these checks and balances designed to place blame on a single individual. Corporations obscure some of that blame but it still works in theory. A complex distributed system means that it can be almost impossible to determine what went wrong and that has some hugely dystopian outcomes.
paulpauper 9y ago
Coding a bitcoin exchange is not a trivial task. I think it was a mistake . Even overstock had a major vulnerability that was caused by confusing Bitcoin Cash with Bitcoin
- acdha 9y ago
  It’s not trivial but this is a basic skill which even the most basic industry research would make you aware. It’s like thinking you’re qualified to try surgery because you were pretty good at Operation as a kid.

grondilu 9y ago

Currency exchanges existed long before cryptocurrencies. As far as I know they are heavily regulated, more or less reliable and trustworthy. Hasn't the Forex added cryptocurrencies to its listing by now? Is the cryptomarket still the far west these days and if so, why?

mikro2nd 9y ago
Many of the Forex exchanges HAVE added crypto-assets to their offerings. It tends to be limited to BTC and maybe a FEW more, though -- some people might view that as a problem.
- jerguismi 9y ago
  Can you list any specific examples? I'm aware of products that track the BTC price and futures, but not really any existing players which would allow you to buy actual btc so that you can hold it in your own wallet.
  - mikro2nd 9y ago
    This is a good point -- many are simply letting you trade CFDs against crypto-currency volatility, which is fine if all you're interested in is speculating in crypto prices. IIRC Swissquote does do actual BTC, ETH and a few others, though, and istr seeing one or two others, but I'm not a collector and hoarder of Forex exchanges. Pretty sure I've seen a bank or two dipping their toes into the water, too. After all, if there's money to be made out of it, they'll hardly be likely to stay away.
jerguismi 9y ago
Trust and reliability build up with time. Regulation is coming to crypto. The existing regulated companies won't be eager to touch it unless regulation has developed and/or they see lots of potential profits. While cryptocurrency might look like it's a big deal, it's still pretty much peanuts for many existing players.
pjc50 9y ago

haakon 9y ago

Viewing this site without JavaScript enabled shows it's been 0 days. Turns out it's supposed to be 12.

ponyous 9y ago
Doesn't work for me at all even with everything enabled on latest Firefox. (Adblock disabled), twttr is undefined.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dao- 9y ago
  It works if I disable tracking protection in Firefox...
  - williamscales 9y ago
    Why do they need to track me to show me how many days it has been?
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      I think it loads Twitter posts and the tracking protection blocks that. I don't think the site itself is trying to track.
      - harryh 9y ago
        This is correct. It's my site and I'm not trying to track you. I don't care. If anyone has a better idea of how to make things work so that people with tracking protection don't run into problems feel free to submit a pull request.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    Probably because it tries to load embedded Twitter posts.

yeukhon 9y ago

I was wondering why HN on my iPhone suddenly stretched. Damn, this domain name is testing the limit.

adventured 9y ago
I don't think I've ever seen a domain that long make the front page.
dingo_bat 9y ago
Why would that cause "stretching"? Here's how mine looks: https://s9.postimg.org/lcxpndbpr/Screenshot_20180224-203730.png https://s9.postimg.org/lcxpndbpr/Screenshot_20180224-203730....

paulpauper 9y ago

I don't think the Nano hack counts because when they were stolen it was worth a lot less and the exchange tried to hide the loss for awhile. The exchange was hacked in Nov. I think, when Nano was worth pennies. Rai Blocks was unique in that is went up so much, so that's why the figure is so big.

paulpauper 9y ago

BitGrail lost $170 million worth of Nano XRB tokens because... the checks for whether you had a sufficient balance to withdraw were only implemented as client-side JavaScript That was just one bug and was not the cause of all the losses. Other users reported issues with withdrawals and deposits , especially pertaining to litecoin and etherem over-credits. I think there was a bug that caused people to get too much.

patrickaljord 9y ago

I don't understand people who constantly make fun of new technologies that we're only recently about to figure out how to make right. Like people obsessed with making fun of IoT (I don't own any IoT besides a smartphone) or cryptocurrencies (I own a bit). Isn't it normal for new techs to be failing at the beginning? Do we really need to ridicule these nascent techs just because they're not perfect for now? It's like people making fun of first airplanes 150 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp7MHZY2ADI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp7MHZY2ADI). First attempts to fly were full of huge failure, many leading to deaths. Many people ridiculed the very idea we would one day do mass travel by plane. I thought of anyone, we should know better than making fun of new tech having some failures, this is how tech works. Because one day, one of these techs may take off like these planes eventually did and you will be the one looking like a fool then.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
paulpauper 9y ago
The technology is not being ridiculed. the exchanges are the ones messing up by making really careless coding errors.
- patrickaljord 9y ago
  I don't know, @patio11 who's quoted on the link keeps attacking bitcoin all the time. Equally annoying are people who keep praising bitcoin all the time by the way. Bitcoin may or may not succeed but people who keep predicting it will fail are just as tiring as people who keep saying it will save humanity and get rid of all the ills. > The technology is not being ridiculed I could find you plenty of people ridiculing cryptocurrencies on twitter everyday. This site is just another example.
  - tigershark 9y ago
    In your opinion I’m probably one of the people attacking bitcoin. And yes, I would like them to completely disappear. People are just wasting an enormous quantity of energy in an unregulated lottery in which they are almost always guaranteed to lose. Can you please tell me a good reason why I should not oppose crypto currencies and all the similar “scams”? Plese don’t answer with Proof of stake or other shenanigans if we want to be evaluating this phenomenon in an honest way. Unless I missed something proof of stake is translated to “who has more money can print the biggest percentage of new money”, but I didn’t really follow all the variations of this philosophy.

st3fan 9y ago

"client side balance check" - these people should not be allowed to write software.

maxaf 9y ago

It peeves me a lot to see virtual currencies described as being "worth" something in a USD or some other real currency equivalent. By the same token, why isn't open source code described as being worth a certain amount of money? I think we can all agree that useful code that powers much of today's enterprise - entirely gratis, too! - is actually worth a lot more than some imaginary string of bits that gets traded back and forth for arbitrary sums of money.

trisimix 9y ago
Not to short sighted people that only care about money
- maxaf 9y ago
  I'd flag your comment for resorting to ad hominem in a civilized discussion forum, but HN won't let me flag a response to my own comment. Instead, I suggest you spend your youthful fervor on reading a few articles from a range of media outlets on the negative effects that virtual currencies have on the environment. I won't expound on this further, as the linked articles do admirably in this department. https://newrepublic.com/article/146099/environmental-case-bitcoin https://newrepublic.com/article/146099/environmental-case-bi... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-mining-consumes-electricity-ireland https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-m... http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/07/technology/bitcoin-energy-environment/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/07/technology/bitcoin-energy-en... https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/bitcoin-pollution-environment-electricity-robots/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/bitcoin-pollution-e... https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/2/16724786/bitcoin-mining-energy-electricity https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/2/1672478...
  - avg_dev 9y ago
    pretty sure he was agreeing with you
mcherm 9y ago
> It peeves me a lot to see virtual currencies described as being "worth" something in a USD or some other real currency equivalent. By the same token, why isn't open source code described as being worth a certain amount of money? If we called it "code currency" and touted the ability to use open source to buy and sell things then I think people WOULD compare it to preexisting currencies. Instead, open source code is touted as a replacement for proprietary code, and we often hear people making comparisons such as "Gimp vs Photoshop" or "Linux vs MacOS". The dollar-value for cryptocurrencies is because they are CURRENCIES.

jwilk 9y ago

The site doesn't work for me, but apparently these are the tweets it refers to: https://twitter.com/bascule/status/962740918053888000 https://twitter.com/bascule/status/962740918053888000 https://twitter.com/ofnumbers/status/962149781400305664 https://twitter.com/ofnumbers/status/962149781400305664 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/957514764011298816 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/957514764011298816 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/938519280240357376 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/938519280240357376 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/760627527450624002 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/760627527450624002 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/731733049847599104 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/731733049847599104

jnbiche 9y ago

If you're going to fetch important quantitative data using a client-side Ajax query, then you really shouldn't default that value to "0". That results in a delay of several seconds or more when the page displays "0" even if the actual value is say, "12". It would be much better to default to either the empty string, or "-", or "fetching..." or something like that. In my case, there was a "0" on the page as the main value for at least 5-10 seconds (probably due to HN load) before the correct value was displayed ("12").

darepublic 9y ago
loading message or animation is probably best while the number is fetched.
harryh 9y ago
Good point. Fixed.
ric2b 9y ago
Even better, why isn't the number rendered server-side?