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Well done and congrats to the hackers. One step closer of ridding the world of web3 nonesense.
by rapsey 4y ago
Well done and congrats to the hackers. One step closer of ridding the world of web3 nonesense.
- Fargoan 4y ago
- doopy1 4y agoWelcome to HN, where crypto is the devil and must be eradicated at all costs. Anyone who thinks otherwise here is either perceived to be an idiot or a grifter.
- rjbwork 4y agoIt should, perhaps, tell you something that a community with one of the most highly concentrated populations of technically literate people on the internet are so vehemently against a technology. Crypto is just a paperclip maximizer for silicon and electrons that does what traditional companies have been doing for at least 60 years. Only 100000x less efficiently.
- sneak 4y agoThis community is nowhere near consensus on this matter. A small minority of loud naysayers is.
- rjbwork 4y agoI don't think it is a minority. In my personal and work life, it does seem to be something like 80/20 or 90/10. You might be right though, it's impossible to tell without doing some kind of vaguely rigorous poll.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> This community is nowhere near consensus on this matter. A small minority of loud naysayers is There's an information bubble. It's not the crypto skeptics. There's a reason when governments around the world have moved to ban crypto there's been little to no popular resistance beyond angry 4channers.
- sneak 4y agoSubstantually more governments have invested time, money, and regulatory effort into the crypto ecosystem than have banned it. The facts don't support the narrative to which you seem to be attached. a16z is a large investor in the space and proponent, as well as several other prominent tech investment firms. Are they angry 4channers? It's ok to be personally against it, but please don't misrepresent the facts.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> more governments have invested time, money, and regulatory effort into the crypto ecosystem than have banned it Lots of chatting. Looking at actual dollars and laws, we're weighing the elephants of China, India and increasingly the EU against...Singapore, El Salvador and Malta? Outside young men, disproportionately minorities, crypto has a limited beachhead [1]. It was an easy money phenomena with historic comparison. We're now seeing the regulatory mood shifting decisively against it with limited competent pushback. > a16z is a large investor in the space and proponent They're notable for where they're prominent and where they're not. Aggressive fundraising followed by SoftBank/Tiger style deployment. Tweets and blog posts galore. Yet middling returns, even on an internal basis, and absolutely zero presence worth mentioning in D.C. I'm no greybeard. But I've worked in finance long enough to see the game they're playing. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/11/16-of-americans-say-they-have-ever-invested-in-traded-or-used-cryptocurrency/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/11/16-of-ameri...
- FabHK 4y ago> Only 100000x less efficiently. You're being too kind to crypto there, I think, by a few orders of magnitude.
- yarg 4y agoOnly 2^200 times less efficiently (even that's generous).
- FabHK 4y agoI'd say between 1e7 and 1e11. 1e5 is too generous, 1e60 is way too harsh.
- yarg 4y agoWhen a fundamental part of token generation is brute-forcing secure hashes?
- FabHK 4y agoYes, but you still need, say, one computer to run what Bitcoin does (without the PoW hashing - just checking and recording 5 transactions per second). BTC uses around 15 GW currently, a computer say 15 to 150 W, so we are talking a factor of 1e9 (Giga) to 1e10.
- Ekaros 4y agoActually yes. I think crypto promoters are either idiots or grifters...
- Jerrrry 4y agoNon Sequitur. You can do both logically. You are a horrible convincer.
- endisneigh 4y agoThis is terrible obviously, but if code is law and someone writes bad code and exploits that is it “illegal”? The entire basis of even having judges, courts, etc is an acknowledgment that the “code” is imperfect and certain circumstances require human intervention. Going without that is, well… YMMV.
- Fargoan 4y agoCode is law is just a meme
- misnome 4y agoIsn't it a consequence? If the entire foundation of your system is irreversibility and finality, then doesn't it effective becomes true? (unless you are big enough to force a network-wide rollback...).
- cinntaile 4y agoIf you ignore the fact that the actual law might have something to say about this, then sure.
- ghaff 4y agoBut that's exactly what the decentralized crowd is arguing. You encode transactions and no centralized authority (e.g. a country's judicial system backed by people with guns) can override it. A natural consequence is that no one can override a mistake either. Legal contracts in the physical world can be poorly drafted as well. But courts don't usually allow ludicrous results arising from honest mistakes.
- cinntaile 4y agoThe law doesn't care if I argue it doesn't apply to me.
- dylan604 4y ago
- kstrauser 4y agoWas this actually theft? The smart contract basically said “ask and you shall receive”. I’m trying to think of a banking analogy. Maybe their website has a page that says “enter your checking account number to get $1,000”, but the web service had the authorization code commented out. If someone discovers that and tells their friends, have they stolen from the bank? Note that I’m thinking of “theft” and “stealing” from a legal point of view. The moral angle may be very different.
- misnome 4y agoYes, I imagine that would be counted as stealing, if it wasn't intended. However, if the bank had spent large amounts of time absolutely promising irreversible transactions, and publicly opened itself to attackers, then - no, that's just an intended operation of the system.
- johnbellone 4y agoThis is akin to going to an ATM and finding a bug that lets you withdraw money out using the information from a receipt that someone threw out in the trash bin. It is definitely illegal.
- mathattack 4y agoIf you find a way to get the ATM to spit out $100K to you by mistake, legally you have to pay it back. Same if it’s the bank’s error.
- badpun 4y agoI'm not sure if it's theft but they most certainly have to give the money back. It's just an honest mistake, an equivalent to accidentally dropping a wallet full of cash on the street.
- mach5 4y agoto be fair it's really funny
- doix 4y agoIs it theft? If you go by the whole "code is law" (is that still a popular catch phrase? I don't keep up with crypto much anymore), then this is not theft. The contract let this happen, so it's legal. Edit: heh, I see a lot of HN had the exact same thought process and we all commented at the same time. I'll leave this up anyway.
- Test0129 4y agoThere is a reason technology that requires high levels of stability is mired in layers of approval, review, regulation, etc. It doesn't change much if at all once it works, because the probability of introducing a failure mode is so high with software. There's a point where this level of of negligence should rise to criminal liability, no different than if someone wrote code for a new boeing that was so bad it moves beyond incompetence. We are at this point, and crypto companies need to be held criminally liable for these hacks. If not at least, should be required to carry insurance and pass stringent security audits no different than other high value systems. This is pathetic, and it's not the first time, second time, or third time it happens. I do hope crypto dies. It's been co-opted by grifters and thieves, and even when it's not, grifters and thieves end up stealing the money anyway through hacks like this. Things like this could be somewhat remedied by teaching people to refuse to deal with coins that do not post several independently verifiable third party security audits but alas people don't care anyway.
- Night_Thastus 4y agoI have no sympathy for the end of a speculative trade engine that's been almost exclusively used to scam people. Watch the "Line Goes Up" video, it explains it very well. It's not perfect, but provides plenty of background on crypto in general. (Despite the title)
- simonh 4y agoIt's horrible technology, born from deeply misguided ideals that will hurt and is hurting a lot of people. I'm not going to celebrate it's repeated, persistent failures but I'm not going to deplore them either.
- upupandup 4y agoBut what about ppl who are trying to get rich off the downfall of others savings? This is web3, crypto
- oneoff786 4y agoIt’s like the story of the three little pigs except they just keep trying the straw houses and blaming the wolves
- crest 4y agoOh cry me a river. This is criminals applying the codified "law" against each-other for their temporary enrichment and the entertainment of the spectators.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It only makes things worse. Especially please don't cross into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: since you've actually been doing that a whole bunch recently, I've banned the account. Can you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Kiro 4y agoWeb3 is all about these heists. That's what makes it fun and interesting. We're living the cyberpunk dream.
- wollsmoth 4y agoI do really enjoy reading about these heists and it does seem like a lot of fun.
- dagw 4y agoNo! We need more "web3 nonsense" like this. This is the closest the internet has felt to the cyberpunk dreams of the 90s. Outlaw Hackers exploiting bugs in automated smart contract to hijack cryptocurrency is the future Gibson promised us.
- wishfish 4y agoTrue, but it's funny how all these hijinks seemed so cool in the books. Jacking in while in a grimy Tokyo nightclub as your friend, the assassin with razorblades, watches your back. But in reality, it's just all so pathetic. Sometimes I feel like a cyberpunk fan in 1988 found a monkey's paw. Made a wish that it would all come true. And it did, but in a much more banal & sad way than the fan would have thought possible.
- rchaud 4y agoReplace the Tokyo nightclub with an air-conditioned military intelligence office in Pyongyang, where crypto is flooding in via ransomware payments and web3 exploits. That's the reality and it would still be quite sensational....as a Tom Clancy novel.
- woodruffw 4y agoDo you have evidence that North Korea makes up any significant amount of "Web3" exploits? From my vantage point, it seems to be mostly bored twentysomethings.
- danielvf 4y agoI don't think this one was North Korea. And yes, most aren't. North Korean cryptocurrency hacks are a bit distinctive. Rather than finding logical bugs in contracts, they tend to use traditional spearphishing / social eng to get targeted people to run malware which they try to pivot to stealing keys / access credentials. Then after a hack, most crypto hackers try to obfuscate and store their stole coins on chain somewhere. North Korea already has a large and practiced money laundering network, so after a hack the money immediately starts going to hundreds of different places in the real world, perhaps to mules or to faked accounts in Southeast Asia.
- kyruzic 4y agoThat's like saying each train robbery during the settlement of the west was getting us one step closer to ending the settlement. If anything these heists prove interest in web3 remains high.
- colechristensen 4y agoThis is about like saying the Hindenburg proved the popularity of zeppelins.
- 676234e117 4y agoInteresting analogy. Is this exploit a Hindenburg or a steam train wreck? It is probably both. The model of allowing governance updates from a contract owner on a bridge or rollup is not sustainable and will have to change to mitigate these kinds of risks. Whether that means crypto networks as a whole will inevitably be replaced by a central banking system is harder to agree with.
- colechristensen 4y agoCrypto for banking is... mildly interesting. Not very many people have this mindset, more should. It's being sold as revolutionary, literally, being able to overthrow $x in power or to the more susceptible as a way for everyone to get rich. So people who believe in it think it's some grand revolution of freedom, and people against it just see it as scammers exploiting the foolish. What it actually is going to be is boring. Regulated like the rest of finance, centralized like the rest of finance, but with a few new features which will end up not revolutionary but "oh I guess that's nice". It will also come with weaknesses that older centralized institutions don't have that will seem ridiculous at times. It should be about as exciting as a new programming language for bankers. Like sure if you're a banking programmer you might think it's cool, but not the kind of thing that'll get superbowl ads or the topic of your uncle joe's podcast. Snarky comparisons to the Hindenburg aside, I really think things like this disaster in the long line of disasters that won't end is just another blow to the excitement of crypto which won't disappear completely or dominate but become a mundane method for the exchange of value which to the end user is only slightly different than the old ways.
- jxi 4y agoBad news for you that web3 isn’t going away. That’s like wishing for REST to go away.
- Hashemm 4y ago
- rmbyrro 4y agoIf you don't like banks and someone robs a bank, do you celebrate the robber?
- rideontime 4y agoYes, I do.
- rightbyte 4y agoArmed robbery too? Or are we talking unarmed thief digging a tunnel to the vault?
- rmbyrro 4y agoInteresting. So, if someone doesn't like you, a robber goes into your home, threatening you and your family, and this person celebrates in your face, you'd be O.K. with it, right?
- rideontime 4y agoNo, I don't see how that follows. The person who doesn't like me might be ok with it, though.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't post flamebait to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it should be obvious, but this moderation point has zero to do with how any of us feel about web3 or whatever.
- choppaface 4y agoCouldn’t you send this sort of message privately? The post gained a number of replies and the sentiment that “web3 is trash” is about as commmon today as “McKinsey is trash.” I would advocate HN send warnings in private as, respectfully, public warnings look like flamebait IMO to me.
- lelandbatey 4y agoHacker News does not have a "private message" feature, so there is no way to communicate other than publicly.
- marincounty 4y ago
- dang 4y agoIt's vital that such messages be public. Their most important function is to signal to the community what sorts of comments are/aren't ok here, and indeed that the site is moderated at all.
- eastbayjake 4y ago> The post gained a number of replies and the sentiment that “web3 is trash” is about as commmon today as “McKinsey is trash.” Those are both low-value, ad hominem attacks that don't substantively engage with content, and they are both comments that erode the quality of discussion in our community.