17 ms·
Bitfinex just spent $23.7M in fees to make a single Ethereum transaction
- hakanito 5y agoThis is not a mistake, it’s a pretty common method for money laundering
- jtbayly 5y agoELI5, please? Who does the fee go to? I would have thought the miner. But if so, how can you predict (or control) which miner will get your block?
- Geee 5y agoThe transaction is sent directly to the miner without going through mempool, or the miner itself makes the transaction.
- sliken 5y agoIs the mempool logged? Is it possible to tell if it was a mistake or if they skipped the mempool?
- hedgedoops2 5y agoEvery node operator can log their node's mempool, but the protocol does not ensure that mempools are consistent across nodes. That said, logging this might violate GDPR :)
- Tenoke 5y agoIs this even still possible? Since EIP-1559 miners like ethermine stopped including their own tx for 'free' presumably because you cant pick and choose anymore.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y agoIt certainly is. Here's a list of them: https://etherscan.io/txs/label/private-transaction https://etherscan.io/txs/label/private-transaction
- xur17 5y agoYou can still pick and choose, EIP-1559 forces miners to burn part of the fee, which means it's no longer "free" to the miner to include these transactions. In the case of this transaction, Bitfinex also included a very large tip that went to the miner.
- kevwals 5y agoAre they the one who's going to choose the miner?
- newacct583 5y agoI'd submit an answer involving jargon like "mempool" doesn't qualify for "ELI5". ELI4?
- Geee 5y agoMempool or "memory pool". It contains pending transactions that have been publicly broadcasted and are waiting to be mined into the blockchain.
- xur17 5y agoEtherscan indicates that the transaction was in the mempool [0]. My understanding is that this wouldn't show up if it was mined without releasing the transaction to the mempool. [0] https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2c9931793876db33b1a9aad123ad4921dfb9cd5e59dbb78ce78f277759587115 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2c9931793876db33b1a9aad123ad4921df...
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- throwaway1777 5y agoHow would this work? The fees go to the miners or are burned, so how do the laundered funds make their way back?
- tux3 5y agoPerhaps instead of sending your transaction publicly in the Mempool, you give it to your miner friend to include in their next block.
- sliken 5y agoIs the mempool logged? Is it possible to tell if it was a mistake or if they skipped the mempool?
- gruez 5y ago>Is the mempool logged? Yes. For instance on etherscan there's a "Confirmed within x secs" indicator, which is "Estimated duration between time First Seen and included in block".
- pcthrowaway 5y agoEven if it is logged, there are ways this behaviour could be masked. Say a colluding miner mines blocks including this unbroadcast transaction until they finally hit the block target with this transaction included. Bitfinex then broadcasts the transaction to mempool. After some plausible delay (but a short enough one that no one else gets a chance to mine it), the colluding miner publishes a valid block including the transaction. No one can confirm that the miner didn't receive the transaction from mempool like everyone else, and then 'get lucky' shortly after. I'm not saying this is what happened, I think user error is more likely. But it can neither be ruled out nor easily proven.
- Thorrez 5y agoThere would be suspicion that the block doesn't have any recent transactions in it though.
- gruez 5y agoWhile I don't doubt it's a method used for money laundering, this particular instance probably isn't it. For one, if you're money laundering, you don't want the transaction to show up on the front page of HN.
- throwaway1777 5y agoYeah why not do this over time with smaller fees. With the ridiculous gas these days you might be able to sneak quite a few tx in under the guise of “nft bots” but not 7500 eth in one tx
- tsimionescu 5y agoWhat's another explanation for this huge fee? Your reasoning makes sense, but that still leaves me extremely curious.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y agoIts not money laundering, lol. a) Bitfinex is an exchange, they don't need to launder. They are the laundry! b) You usually want to get the money back when your launder. This is handing 20 million dollars to a random on the street who takes your transactions.
- tsimionescu 5y agoI get that point, but I was asking for what is then the real reason. The only two I've seen proposed are money laundering (perhaps by collusion with the miner) or mistake (accidentally confusing the transaction amount with the tip - still meaning the intention was to pay $100k in transaction fees).
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y agoIf i was to bet, my money is on a catastrophic fuck up. Its probably 'other peoples money' too. Some VC maybe lost a big bag of ether.
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- eco 5y agoI'm curious how this works. As I understand it, Bitfinex would have do this by not broadcasting the transaction to the network and instead keeps it on a single miner and it gets included when the miner snags a block but how does that help launder money? Is it some sort of deniability thing to say your hilariously unreasonable miner tip was mined by a random miner who may or may not be you? Surely regulators/prosecutors aren't this gullible.
- wpietri 5y agoRegulation/prosecution is lagging way behind in this space. Even in traditional finance, Ponzi schemes and money laundering go on for years. It's also important to consider the psychology of things like Ponzi schemes. A bright 12 year old can understand why a Ponzi scheme falls apart in the long run. But for most of the people running them, they aren't thinking about the long run. They're responding to short-term incentives. An investor wants money back? Well there's money, so let's give some to them. Low on money? Go out and sell more people on putting money in. People have concerns? Reassure them that everything's fine, better than fine, amazing in fact. So the question of "do they think they can get away with it in the long run" is not really the right one to ask. 100% of their attention is on the short term. They carefully avoid thinking about the long run at all, because it's way too uncomfortable. As long as the problems are deniable enough in the short term, they're just going to keep going.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoThe cool part is all of these transactions are public and can be archived by regulators for long term forensics and enforcement activities while still within the statute of limitations. Might take years, but government can take its time investigating and prosecuting. Regulation can lag because there is no rush; the evidence is preserved by the very nature of the technology. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28673552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28673552 (HN: Tracking stolen crypto is a booming business) | https://archive.is/s1WvQ https://archive.is/s1WvQ
- wpietri 5y ago
- eightysixfour 5y agoI thought all transaction fees are burned after EIP-1559 was implemented?
- tylersmith 5y agoNo, there are 2 parts to the fee. The base and the tip. The base is burned and the tip goes to the miner. This transaction burned 0.008493159450499633 eth (~$25) and paid the miner the rest.
- tromp 5y agoIt's also potentially risky. What if a big mining pool, upon noticing the huge fee mined by another miner/pool, decides not to mine on top of that block, but in competition with that block in hope of snagging the fee for itself?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y agoThere's been a lot of talk about reorg due to MEV (which this could be considered MEV), but to the best of my knowledge it hasn't happened yet. This seems like a big opportunity because this is ~3000x bigger than the standard block reward
- seaourfreed 5y agoWe need Ethereum to always prevent this. Or the big mining pool will just do this for every block and allow ONLY THEIR blocks to be processed. Then they get 100% of mining of the ETH mining fees. This reinforces by most miners being willing to join, to get a share in monopoly rents over miners-never-earning. The big mining pool(s) could let in enough to stay big enough. But not too many to spread the monopolistic gains by too broad a base.
- AgentME 5y agoThe mining pool would have to have >50% of the hashrate to pull that off indefinitely.
- dylkil 5y agoIts a great way for miners to launder money. Bitfinex pays the fee and it turns up on the miners balance sheet, where does bitfinex gain?
- FireBeyond 5y agoThe recipient in this case absolutely appears to be "associated" with Bitfinex, who don't understand the concept of "arms length", so entirely 'nepotistic' transactions like this would be par for the course (remember the loan between Bitfinex and Tether, who were at the time being stated as independent and unrelated, yet somehow the same two people signed and countersigned the loan for both sides?).
- dylkil 5y agoI read your whole comment expecting you to get to the evidence where bitfinex and the miner are associated...
- FireBeyond 5y ago> DeversiFi — a non-custodial exchange that spun out of Bitfinex in 2019 From the article. And as said, given previous dishonesty from Bitfinex about all sorts of unrelated parties (they claimed to be independent of Tether, until that was proven a lie, and they are heavily intertwined with their bank, Deltec, who says that they have "insight into every transaction and Tether"), I'm going to consider Occam's Razor, here.
- dylkil 5y agothey refunded the fee to bitfinex
- fuddle 5y agoIs it possible they are just incompetent?
- Ekaros 5y agoWith bitcoin you could spend lot of mining time get these fees with longer chain. Is that possible with ethereum too?
- danielvf 5y agoYes there would have been a window for that, if you could spin up insane hash power in minutes. However ethereum blocks happen on average every 13.5 seconds and this TX is now 1,558 blocks in the past, it's not likely now.
- danuker 5y agoIf you can react quickly, a 51% PoW attack is... still prohibitively expensive: https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y agoThose figures assume that the miners other than yourself are honest. The big risk with MEV is that in theory it could trigger all miners to prioritize reorging (51% attack) instead of building on the longest chain.
- xur17 5y agoThis is a really interesting point, and an issue that Bitcoin will likely run into as the block reward nears zero, and transaction fees provide the majority of the miner revenue. Miners could be incentivized to reorg blocks in order to get transaction fees.
- jagger27 5y agoSo who got the tx fee?
- capableweb 5y agoThe block: https://etherscan.io/block/13307440 https://etherscan.io/block/13307440 Miner: https://etherscan.io/address/0xb7e390864a90b7b923c9f9310c6f98aafe43f707 https://etherscan.io/address/0xb7e390864a90b7b923c9f9310c6f9... Has 3% of miner power in the network it seems, fairly big. Seems to only been running since 2021-07-12.
- fuddle 5y agoIt looks like it's labeled as Flashbots block.
- elliekelly 5y ago> DeversiFi — a non-custodial exchange that spun out of Bitfinex in 2019 — said the transaction originated via its platform, which offers access to DeFi protocols "without paying gas fees." These transaction fees, it turns out, are paid out through one of Bitfinex's main wallets, which ended up footing the bill. Am I understanding correctly that Bitfinex is subsidizing DeversiFi transactions? How does this work? And why does Bitfinex do this?
- graeme 5y agoIf the money laundering theories in this thread are correct, then could be related to that. But also Biftinex/Tether benefit if people lock up their USDT into earning schemes rather than trying to redeem them for fiat. It reduces withdrawal pressure and allows Tether to keep the game going. (This is assuming the common theories that Tether is unbacked/poorly backed are true. In a ponzi, managing withdrawals is paramount, and all the crypto high yield earning on stablecoins provides a way to discourage withdrawals) I haven’t thought through the trading aspect though or why that would be subsidized. I guess it does soak up USDT as well. Edit: a couple other facts came forward. Deversifi was originally called Ethfinex, a Bitfinex spinoff The miner that got the fee is owned by Christopher Harborne, Bitfinex shareholder: https://protos.com/bitfinex-tether-digfinex-shareholder-harborne-brexit-bankroller/ https://protos.com/bitfinex-tether-digfinex-shareholder-harb...
- spywaregorilla 5y agoThey don't allow redemption of tether for dollars. There is no withdrawal pressure, right?
- hartator 5y ago$23.7 million to transfer $100,000. It's becoming a hard sell.
- Ekaros 5y ago23700% in fees. Suddenly the 3-5% that is insane doesn't feel like that much...
- skazka16 5y agoand this is public ledger... imagine what's happening in the banking industry, where you can't see other people's money flowing around
- skazka16 5y agoLol to all the downvoters. You truly believe that everything cryptocurrency related is a scam and money laundering, whilst hidden-from-public-eyes banking ledger is saint? Take you pink sunglasses off, please.
- dang 5y agoPlease don't break the site guidelines like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- etamponi 5y agoCan someone please explain to me how this is possible and what is the miner supposed to do if they don't have all those Ethers?
- rictic 5y agoThe miner received those ETH, nominally in exchange for their services validating transactions. Previous situations like this have been the result of the transaction author (or their software) making a mistake.
- kingo55 5y agoThey probably mixed up their spent output with the fee output. It happens from time to time and some miners are happy to send the funds back. But it'll be interesting to see what happens in this case when it's $23m.
- csomar 5y agoThat’s the case for Bitcoin but ETH doesn’t have inputs/outputs.
- 0x000000001 5y agoSomeone submitted a transaction with incorrect parameters allowing this to happen and the miner got a $23m tip as a result
- threevox 5y agoSeems more like fraud/money laundering, from what I can tell
- pandemicsyn 5y agoIgnoring the already public statements that have already been made by the Bitfinex and co, and the fact that a large transactions like this is guaranteed to trigger folks in the community to poke at the transaction, I'm curious what leads you to believe that its a money laundering attempt?
- ivalm 5y ago$23m transaction fee for $100k transaction?
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoI assume money laundering
- nprz 5y agoHow would you know which miner would pick up this transaction and process it?
- CydeWeys 5y agoYou privately send it to the colluding miner; you don't publicly broadcast it.
- t0mas88 5y agoThat would be visible to those that save the full protocol state / interactions but probably invisible to almost anyone else. And you could even broadcast it after you know the miner already solved a valid block with it but before they publish it.
- hiq 5y agoYou don't have to propagate the transaction to other miners.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoI don't know, but it's an unlikely mistake to make, and they have a lot of know how in the business. I expect them to know something we don't about the protocol, and setup things in a way that they get the money with plausible deniability.
- jraedisch 5y agoMaybe do not publish the tx and be the only one including it in potential blocks until successful.
- zionic 5y agoThis is likely money laundering via inclusion of an offline transaction.
- elliekelly 5y agoI keep seeing people blaming money laundering but I’ve yet to come across anyone even attempting to explain how the money laundering would theoretically work? Is there a way to manipulate or influence which miners get with transactions?
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- chucknthem 5y agoYeah seems like a luck of the draw for the miner to happen to find the right hash to mine the block when this transaction happened. Very risky way to launder 23M.
- SXX 5y agoHow much GPU capacity can you rent on GCloud / AWS / Azure / Oracle Cloud / IBM at once? You only gonna need it for a few minutes since blocks for ETH mined every 15 seconds. Someone should be able to do the math of how much $ it's gonna cost.
- michaelt 5y agoMiners get to choose what transactions make it into their block. Instead of broadcasting the transaction to the mempool, the sender could send it directly to the miner who could hold onto it and included it only once they'd mined a block successfully. Not sure I think it's likely, though - could have just been a user miskeying something.
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- notJim 5y agoThere's a bit of context on this Bloomberg article https://archive.is/dnT51 https://archive.is/dnT51. Claims it was a mistake.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoWait a minute, aren't transactions fees supposed to be "burned" after the last hardfork? What am I missing? Edit: Trying to determine if this is a bug or just a misunderstanding on my part.
- skybrian 5y agoThere is a fee that's burned, but I think sending a fee to the miner as well is still there.
- fanzhang 5y agoCrazy. Was this just the result of a typo? Perhaps not, considering: - The transaction sender set both the max total fee and the max priority fee to above 10 million. Most UIs require at least two manual setting changes to do this. - The sender is Bitfinex -- they're pros and not just a mon and pop. Maybe it could just be a transfer from the sender to whoever the miner is...
- klntsky 5y agoNot everyone uses UIs. It might be a typo in some custom code. Can happen with anyone.
- retrac 5y agoYep. In one of the previous cases of jaw-dropping txn fees, while we never learned who lost so much, we can be pretty sure it was a program as the exact same thing happened again 24 hours later.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoMy guess is Integer VS Float. Take a typical $23 transaction fee, which comes out to ~0.00775756 ETH Of course, everyone knows you don't want to do math as floating point, you want to use an integer representation. 1 ETH can be divided into 1e18 "Wei" or 1e9 "GigaWei". So that 23 USD could be expressed an an integer "7757560", with the expectation that the decimal point would get moved 9 points <- thataway to become 0.00775756 ETH If somewhere in your code you do some kind of money formatting that turns 7757560 GWEI into 7757.56 ETH, you've got your $23,000,000 USD mining fee.
- quotemstr 5y agoMy position for ages now has been that it was a mistake to make floating point types first-class primitives in most programming languages. Integers and rationals should be the go-to types for most code most of the time. If you really need a IEEE float, you should reach into a library to get it.
- nathanvanfleet 5y agoWhy is everyone saying this isn't a shady trade when the person who got the $23m is a weird person with a pseudonym in thailand and fueled Brexit? Is it because that guy seems on the level?
- ethanbond 5y agoWell this happened in a context where fraud and shadiness are essentially the norm, and strict adherence to letter of contract (not intent) is somehow seen as a virtue.
- elif 5y agowait who was the miner? that's quite the claim to make
- mikeryan 5y agoIt seems in the latest update that the funds were returned via another transaction.
- mirekrusin 5y agoSomebody was in a rush to get tx included, I hope they didn’t wait too long, respect.
- throwdecro 5y agoI guess the $23M fee was something that the market could bear.
- saalweachter 5y agoWhat is that, one NFT?
- eurasiantiger 5y agoIs it perhaps the only way to make sure the transaction ends up in the correct miner’s block?
- herendin2 5y agoIt's the opposite of that. Miners will try to grab higher fee transactions first, as soon as they see them broadcasted
- tschwimmer 5y agoDetails are scarce at this point but this is just another data point suggesting that DeFi doesn't solve a real problem. Yes, the existing financial infrastructure is slow and costly but in a pretty good local maximum. Touted features of DeFi that are arguably worse than what they're replacing: 1. "Your contract is executed exactly as it is written! No loopholes, no shenanigans!" Clearly this is a double edged sword. Since code is a lot more complex than written human language, expressing intent can be very difficult. In a regular contract, if your counterparty figures out a clever way to cheat you out of your money, you can sue them in court and the judge will very likely tell them to give the money back and slap them with damages too. Apparently in Ethereum Smart Contracts, you can accidentally/inadvertently allow for a gas fee that 230x the transaction value and there's literally nothing anyone can do for you. 2. "No need for expensive lawyers/bankers!" True! But you now need to pay expensive computer scientists to write/review your contracts, who are probably at least twice as expensive as the bankers. Oops. 3. "Not centralized! Don't be chained by unjust government regulation!" True, but also probably not optimal for 99.5% of people. Anyone who has been banned from Venmo for making a North Korea joke knows how annoying AML/KYC is, but by and large the regs (in the US at least) are written in a way that protect the average joe and society as a whole.
- j_walter 5y agoNot just 23x...but 230x transaction value ($23M to send $100K). Not to mention it was 7,700,000x the going rate for the other transaction in that same block.
- dilap 5y agoThis might be a very naive question, but would it not be the case that many contracts would be essentially similar in nature? So while weird loopholes would exist at first, over time there could be a large library of tried-and-true contracts which could be applied to the situation at hand?
- j_walter 5y agoYou are correct and there is already a bunch of off the shelf contracts that are basically plug and play...however it takes little knowledge to actually publish said contract and a small typo can either make the contact never accessible or easily exploitable.
- p4bl0 5y agoSo, how do you cancel a transaction with such an obvious mistake when it is recorded on a blockchain? (This is a rhetorical question.) EDIT: Why the downvotes? It's not okay to discuss the fact that in the possibility of human error (assuming this is one, and not a very wild —yet successful— bet on a laundering attempt), the incapacity to cancel transaction may be a problem?
- brockwhittaker 5y agoYou're getting downvoted because it's a longtime well-known problem of the blockchain. The answer to your question is that nobody can reverse the transaction or undo it. That's kind of the point, for better or or for $23m worse.
- _3u10 5y agoYou're pointing out an obvious major flaw with blockchain that is a consequence of what many in the crypto community believe to be an advantage, namely that your assets cannot be seized without your private key. Your post is basically this, but less humorous so people are upset. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ So to answer your question, how you revert this transaction is to buy $5 wrench and go have a conversation with the miner.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y agoIt’s pretty easy to revert it: you fork the protocol. The ETH guys already did this once, hence Ethereum Classic.
- ricardobeat 5y agoThe idea that the code maintainers get to decide which transactions are valid or not is insane. Almost as insane as saying an 'easy' fix is to arbitrarily fork the chain undermining it's whole purpose.
- ac29 5y agoThe new kingmakers are the stablecoins. Whichever chain they decide to honor has a huge amount of economic weight behind it. How much of this economic weight is real, at least in the case of Tether, is another story. I suspect we'll find out in the next few years as regulation ramps up.
- fwip 5y ago> The transaction was a smart contract interaction with the amount of tether sent to one wallet before being passed along to Deversifi’s wallet. It used the newly implemented EIP-1559 type of transaction, which was designed to make Ethereum fees easier to predict. From https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/118753/bitfinex-just-spent-23-7-million-in-fees-to-make-one-ethereum-transaction https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/118753/bitfinex-just-spe... More and more, it is revealed that that majority of actors in crypto are either incompetent, scammers, or both.
- mgraczyk 5y agoWhat's most incredible to me is that the sender has $1.4B in ETH: https://etherscan.io/address/0x742d35cc6634c0532925a3b844bc454e4438f44e https://etherscan.io/address/0x742d35cc6634c0532925a3b844bc4... Just a few more zeros, and this could have been a company-ending mistake. Bitfinex should probably reduce the size of their hot wallets.
- leppr 5y agoBitfinex/Tether is probably the single richest entity in crypto. A $1.4B loss would not be close to "company-ending" for them.
- neoromantique 5y ago$1.4B loss would lead to huge market dip though, as crypto is fairly sensitive to these events.
- bob229 5y agoBlockchain is trash and useless
- noxer 5y agoIts been years since competing blockchains projects added fee limits at least in the front ends if the protocol cant allow it so that this does not happen. It happened many times on ETH and it will happen again because the devs simply dont care. BTW the money laundering idea is complete nonsense. You dont do that by making large transactions so that mainstream media writes about it and investigations are triggered. This is just the usual HN crypto bias that seeks for confirmation that everything cryoto is illegitimate.
- PretzelPirate 5y agoVarious Ethereum wallets warn you about excessive fees, and even set reasonable defaults (especially post 1559). Even if they didn’t, Ethereum devs aren’t the same as Ethereum wallet devs and each group has their own opinions about how to handle fees and UX. It’s disingenuous to say that “Ethereum devs don’t care” about any specific issue and you should be more specific about who you’re criticizing. It’s unlikely that Bitfinex was using a consumer-faci by wallet and they could easily build those checks into their systems.
- noxer 5y agoI mean the devs of the network ofc they are the only one who could completely stop this. UI/wallet devs can only partially because people dont need to use an UI and can still use old software too. They very obviously dont care because the problem is know since years and the sum of accidental fees could probably pay google whole software dev personnel to write 1000 different possible fixes but nothing was ever done about it.
- jallen_dot_dev 5y agoHow do you solve it at the protocol level? Let's say I set a gas price of 0.00000004 eth. Is that too much or too little? If you try to enforce the price to be within some range of the average of past n transactions it could: 1. make transactions that were valid at the time of creation suddenly invalid if the average moves, which is frustrating to all parties 2. not able to respond to rapid changes in demand 3. overcomplicate validation/consensus
- kevinlst 5y agoDamn, I'm getting scared of crypto now. Will took some of my money lol
- cr15 5y agoTo those claiming that this is an example of crypto being a scam / useless / unsafe: I'd point out that if this is a case of incorrect data entry, similar cases happen in traditional finance with some regularity, and in the majority of those cases (e.g. someone sends a large amount to the incorrect bank account), there is no legal recourse to recover those funds and companies resort to asking nicely for the money back (usually it works).
- jonny_eh 5y ago> there is no legal recourse to recover those funds and companies resort to asking nicely for the money back Yes there is, there are courts. There's a long history of error corrections being forced. That is if it's clearly an error. https://www.ncconsumer.org/news-articles-eg/using-money-mistakenly-deposited-into-your-account.html https://www.ncconsumer.org/news-articles-eg/using-money-mist...
- Smashure 5y agoCrypto is international. Courts are terrible with that scenario. Pretty hard for US courts to make a random person across the globe give up their wallets. Also, banks can be court ordered to hold funds. Crypto doesn’t have that.
- handmodel 5y agoOne important thing to note is that in traditional finance if the money gets sent to person B, because person B hacked my e-mail, there is an enforcement mechanism to get the money back. However, this is not as true for crypto. If I steal 5M from your account and put it into mine then you can't get the money back if I don't give up the key. And, while the state will personally arrest you, they are going to be a lot less likely/able to recoup any crypto.
- mikeryan 5y agoThere’s an interesting court case on this going on now. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/08/man-robbed-of-16-bitcoin-sues-young-thieves-parents/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/08/man-robbed-of-16-bitcoin...
- progbits 5y agoLooks like the miner returned significant portion back. Here is the block, showing a reward of 7678ETH: https://etherscan.io/block/13307440 https://etherscan.io/block/13307440 From that 7676ETH was the fee by Bitfinex (see OP). And here (around 10 hours later) is a transaction from the miner giving back 7385ETH to Bitfinex: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x85294effd53126b3bfa9e7f655267e00ac1ae2ef76f4569644670bf5403637d6 https://etherscan.io/tx/0x85294effd53126b3bfa9e7f655267e00ac... Wonder if they talked or just decided to do this as a show of good will. Either way, still kept around $800k so not a bad deal.
- bjt2n3904 5y agoHow much of this is... "Return it or we break your legs"? I'd be significantly concerned about coming into $27 mn, even if (according to the laws of Medes and Persians and smart contacts) it was mine to rights. There's "I hate you $1,000 much", and "I hate you $1,000,000" much. I should be able to manage the first. The second? Not so much.
- ourgovtisinept 5y agoCan confirm. I had a co-founder screw me out of >$1mm. It's not something I think I'll ever "get over". As in, if I see him walking down the street I may enter a state of temporary psychosis.
- ToFab123 5y agoSorry to hear. Just incase that ever happens you should delete your comment
- vmception 5y agoeh the temporary psychosis is a good enough defense just tell the jury that they the other founder took the QSBS tax exemption and didn't even "pay their fair share", the jury will ignore the prosecutor's instructions and acquit
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- dh4h45b4 5y agoWell...you won't see that happen in Bitcoin ever.
- ryanSrich 5y agoSo many people calling this money laundering. The miner sent most of it back already https://twitter.com/cryptocobain/status/1442611045021913089?s=21 https://twitter.com/cryptocobain/status/1442611045021913089?... HN irrationally loves to hate crypto.
- mcnichol 5y agoThis right here. It was one of the few ways in BTC where you could launder it and completely break the flow. Then there was monero and it seemed to scratch the itch a little easier
- yencabulator 5y ago> UPDATE (6:10 p.m. EST): The majority of the funds -- some $22.1 million worth of ETH -- have been returned to the Bitfinex-controlled wallet. The transaction was sent at 5:14 p.m. EST at a cost of $33.74.
- jpgvm 5y agoCrypto. Definitely ready for production. /s Like this smart-contract stuff is cool but it's still definitely in a nascent state. Maybe one day it will be well tested enough to actually use for for now I think the likelihood of these bugs just increases as complexity and layers are added on.
- judahmeek 5y agoNah. It'll be like every other production system in existence: once the bugs are triaged to an "acceptable" level, then the C-suite decides to focus on adding new features.
- turloughc 5y agoChristopher Harborne is Will Harborne's father and has been involved with Crypto Currencies from the early days. The relationship was covered by Private Eye magazine (ed 1517) on the #Fincenfiles