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The great thing about crypto exchanges (and other sites that hold crypto for you) is that they're self-paying bug bounties.
by ronsor 5y ago
The great thing about crypto exchanges (and other sites that hold crypto for you) is that they're self-paying bug bounties.
- klntsky 5y agoCrypto does not really provide anything new here. You can say that about traditional banking systems as well.
- duxup 5y agoI wonder if a completely Wild West really makes for better security… doesn’t seem like it so far. Probably a good lesson in there about incentives and consequences maybe not always going where you might think.
- rsynnott 5y agoI mean, did anyone ever suggest it would? I don't think even the biggest bitcoin enthusiast would claim that these dodgy exchanges were especially secure.
- monkeybutton 5y agoThe invisible hand of the free market is in your back pocket lifting your wallet.
- 0xb0565e486 5y agoAnything that holds value is a self-paying bug bounty.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Anything that holds value is a self-paying bug bounty Most valuables have means for recourse. Crypto’s pitch is that it circumvents these mechanisms.
- repomies69 5y agoI think hacking about any service will provide valuable data, which can be sold at darknet marketplaces. I read somewhere that there is a marketplace just for hacked server credentials as well.
- gruez 5y ago>Most valuables have means for recourse Most valuables? I think most financial assets have means for recourse, but if your gold bars/jewellery gets stolen, it's as good as gone.
- rsynnott 5y agoIf you have literal gold bars, they are almost certainly in an insured facility; actual risk to you, the owner of the gold bars, is limited. I mean, if you have them on your _house_ then this applies, but people typically don't.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> if your gold bars/jewellery gets stolen, it's as good as gone Which is why society stopped storing meaningful quantities of value in gold generations ago.
- midasuni 5y agoOne of the reasons. The ability to exchange cheaply and quickly is another reason, di visibility another one
- tshaddox 5y agoSurely there is more value stored in gold now than generations ago, right?
- canjobear 5y agoOn the list of reasons for why we switched away from the gold standard and gold coinage, this is probably not even in the top 10.
- 5y ago
- cinntaile 5y agoThis only makes sense for smart contract run exchanges where the code, in theory, is always right. Otherwise this is no different from any other financial hack.
- ronsor 5y agoOh, but it is, because with crypto you can simply drain the wallets anonymously. If you hack a regular bank and try to transfer the money to your accounts, you'll get caught and jailed ridiculously fast.
- ryanlol 5y agoMaybe you should try to learn about how these schemes work before making such statements? According to the FBI, BEC fraudsters took $1.8 billion in 2020 by stealing wire transfers from businesses into their own accounts https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2020_IC3Report.pdf https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2020_IC3Report.pd...
- brarsanmol 5y agoI'm a relative newcomer to the crypto-space so please forgive me for any errors. I see the point you are attempting to make but the number is rather useless, in the past week hackers took 20% of what was stolen by BEC in a year. And skimming through the report you sent it seems like there is a program to recover said funds that have been lost and it has an 82% success-rate.
- ryanlol 5y agoThe $1.8B only represents US losses known and properly classified by the FBI, the real number for global losses will be much higher.
- brarsanmol 5y agoAgreed, but that is simply cause-and-effect by virtue of the majority of the world using the current global financial system rather than crypto and many more hackers are targeting said folk. Either way two wrong's don't make a right, there will be losses in both systems but I would argue that storing your money with a unregulated crypto-firm would be more dangerous than with a modern-day bank. I think the main gripe that many people have including myself with crypto is that it doesn't even have the proper consumer protections so that a decent/strong chance of recovery is possible. This trend of massive amounts of crypto currency being stolen is not even a relatively recent one, see Gerald Cotten's (Quadriga) death in 2019 which resulted in $150 million in assets going missing with no chance of recovery. This reply has been a little-bit scatter-brainish, so my apologies for that.
- Ansil849 5y ago> The great thing about crypto exchanges (and other sites that hold crypto for you) is that they're self-paying bug bounties. That's a pretty crass and glib statement. So are home burglaries, I guess? Or, really, any kind of crime regarding the stealing of funds or valuables? You're basically saying 'if you find a 'bug' that lets you get money, then it's a self-paying bug bounty.' So, snatching someone's purse while they're in the toilet--boom, instant self-paying bug bounty.
- eatYourFood 5y agoDo you even know what a joke is?
- Ansil849 5y agoDo you know what insensitivity is? Would you make the same joke about any of the other examples I mentioned?
- eatYourFood 5y agoNo I wouldn’t because they aren’t topical to a website devoted to talking about dev and tech. It’s a joke, sensitivity isn’t always a priority, you don’t have to like it.
- dmingod666 5y agoIf explicitly people want to be independent of the regulated financial sector and sign-up to take these risks you cannot claim "oh, I've been wronged, pity me" -- sure they deserve justice, but this happening to them is part of the risk reward of working with crypto..
- folli 5y agoI'd wager that you shouldn't put any money you can't afford to lose into crypto, so your other examples are not really comparable.
- 5y ago
- hawk_ 5y agoUnless it's an inside job going high up.
- foobiekr 5y agoInsider threat is a part of security considerations.
- humaniania 5y agoExcept these people can create their own bugs and rob their own clients and call it a hack and nobody can do anything about it because they're off shore and unregulated. You'd have to be pretty dense to put any money on the unregulated exchanges.
- whiskyant 5y agoYeah, what's the motivation for so many people going to these unregulated exchanges when there's so many regulated ones (or at least larger ones, I've never even heard of BitMart)? Is it to trade coins/tokens that aren't normally listed?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arcticbull 5y agoAt least in the US, exchanges aren't really regulated. Not as broker-dealers, anyways, in the same way a Fidelity or Schwab is regulated. They're regulated as money services businesses and money transmitters, a much weaker form of regulation designed explicitly to work around the "onerous" regulations in the rest of the system.
- xwolfi 5y agoYes, to speculate on a ponzi they know will fall but they think they can time. In normal finance, it s just too crowded to make the same amount of margin short term.
- tim333 5y agoI had a little bit in BitMart. It was to speculate on some iffy coin that was only listed there. With hindsight maybe not wise.