Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 249 posts

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#91

Post by JamesLeonis »

arkitaip wrote: post #80
che_shirecat wrote: post #56

How to make money in ethereum, from high to low risk: 1. Dump the leftovers of your bi-weekly software engineering paycheck into buying ETH, BTC, or whichever altcoin is popular this week. It went up 5000% in the past, it's got to keep growing right? 2. Participate in an ICO and stock up on whatever platform token they're hawking. It's more profitable if you get in early due to some presale mechanism (hopefully here…

turning your comment into a 10-week pdf course as we speak, just gonna pick a theme over ath theme forest brb

Why do the work _before_ getting paid? Take out an ICO and let them "preorder" your course!

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#92

Post by beepboopbeep »

che_shirecat wrote: post #56

How to make money in ethereum, from high to low risk: 1. Dump the leftovers of your bi-weekly software engineering paycheck into buying ETH, BTC, or whichever altcoin is popular this week. It went up 5000% in the past, it's got to keep growing right? 2. Participate in an ICO and stock up on whatever platform token they're hawking. It's more profitable if you get in early due to some presale mechanism (hopefully here…

But this is a good thing.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#93

Post by chatmasta »

tlrobinson wrote: post #69

I'm not sure I buy the premise that every service needs its own coin. Surely in most cases it would be better to just use the most widely used, most stable coin? If the concept of cryptocurrency is going to survive I think there needs to be one or two clear winners to eventually bring some stability to their value. Of course, not issuing your own coin doesn't leave as much opportunity to get rich quick off a bit of h…

In the case of ethereum backed coins, every service does not really have its own coin, but rather a derivative of ethereum. As long as the coin is tradeable for general ETH tokens, it must fundamentally be pegged to the price of ethereum, even if it's traded separately on exchanges.

There are obvious downsides to that, but it's a tradeoff for ease of development. You can create your own "coin" -- really just a (set of) smart contract(s) -- with simple tooling provided by the ethereum ecosystem. This is the real genius of ethereum; there is no "one use case" for it, but rather many, limited only by imagination. As more contracts are added to the ethereum ecosystem, ICOs funnel money into ETH, and ETH as a whole benefits from the ever increasing number of derivative services.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#94

Post by CPLX »

nickbauman wrote: post #42

Cryptocurrency is probably doomed because the makers of cryptocurrencies have a fundamental conceptual disconnect with money: what it is, why it works and what it represents. Money only works when you have a powerful state actor enforcing the legality of the transaction. When you try to escape that, you get at best a parallel system that still goes back to the state for help in keeping functioning or a system prone t…

Perhaps. Another way of looking at it is that they have an intuitive and successful connection with the mechanics of gambling.

Cryptocurrencies and ICO's as they stand today conceptually have a lot more in common with the old urban numbers rackets[0] than they do with the concept of currency.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#95

Post by joeyspn »

EGreg wrote: post #78

Question: in light of the SEC decision regarding the DAO, is there any way to do an ICO that doesn't run the risk of later the whole company being shut down for not registering securities? Like maybe opening the company in Crypto Valley, Zug? Is there a way to do a public offering of tokens? Or does it necessitate all the same reporting that a publicly listed company has? Could still be worth it! Because the investor…

Answer (if you want USA investors): https://coinlist.co/

Answer (if you don't need USA investors): http://cryptovalley.swiss/

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#96

Post by jaclaz »

bkolobara wrote: post #25
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even knowledgeable people can fall victim to attacks like this.

You make it sound like I claimed that people not working at google are less intelligent. My point was that if you are already making good money you are not looking for lottery tickets to buy.

But still there are seemingly a few people that threat dollars as peanuts.

The data on the page on Etherscan:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x29d7d1dd5b6f9c864d9db560d72a2...

does provide some insight at a quick analysis.

The total sent is (at the 494,170.68/1492=331.214 rate) almost exactly 500,000 US$ (499,821.59) of which, in four operation of 373 Eth each 1492 Eth were withdrawn 494,170.68.

Of the 212 total operation 4 are withdrawals, 3 are 0, that makes 205 "IN" operations.

The distribution of the amounts of the single operations/deposits is interesting, I quickly put together a few "classes":

a. >30,000 2 Total 66,243 US$

b. 20-30,000 3 Total 70,840 US$

c. 10-20,000 6 Total 82,803 US$

d. 5-10,000 14 Total 102,576 US$

e. 2.5-5,000 23 Total 80,125 US$

f. 1-2,500 33 Total 54,225 US$

g. 0-1,000 124 Total 43,010 US$

If the "targeted audience" was around 9,000, roughly 200 or 2.2% fell for the phishing.

A handful of people (classes a., b., c., 11 in total, i.e. coincidentally roughly the 0.1%) contributed for almost half the amount 66,243+70,840+82,803=219,886 219,886/500,000=43,98%.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#97

Post by nickbauman »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #66
nickbauman wrote: post #42

Cryptocurrency is probably doomed because the makers of cryptocurrencies have a fundamental conceptual disconnect with money: what it is, why it works and what it represents. Money only works when you have a powerful state actor enforcing the legality of the transaction. When you try to escape that, you get at best a parallel system that still goes back to the state for help in keeping functioning or a system prone t…

> Money only works when you have a powerful state actor enforcing the legality of the transaction. Fiat currencies work this way. Gold and cryptocurrencies do not, but they still work all the same, though gold is not very convenient in the modern world. > failure, fraud and speculation. These ICO hacks are separate from the fact that cryptocurrencies do work and are working right now. Preventing fraud is not a featur…

I never said anything should be prevented. But you just illustrated my point exactly. Gold (and cryptocurrencies) cannot support a market economy because of the problem of hoarding a limited resource and the lack of representation of debt. Even the ancients knew this: they would require taxes be paid in the _coin of the realm,_ not just gold. Requiring this made it possible for monarchs to facilitate a market economy. They paid their soldiers in the coin. The peasants traded with the soldiers in order to pay their taxes. Markets emerged from this.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#98

Post by throw2016 »

Its appears crypto currencies have escaped the technical domain and have landed plum into nigerian scam territory.

The crypto currency ecosystem has become toxic and irrational propped up by ignorance, desperation and blind greed

I wonder what arguments will be made to third world countries at the next climate change summit when a large number of our population seem to be squandering electricity without pause in the hope of riches.

The only way any crypto takes off in the world we live in is if some powerful vested interest sees some use for it, at which point all the speculators having spent the better part of the past decade pushing fantasy narratives about freedom etc will sell out every single tall claim made for a dime. Those who do not understand history and in this case economies are condemned to repeat it, and badly.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#99

Post by eganist »

che_shirecat wrote: post #56

How to make money in ethereum, from high to low risk: 1. Dump the leftovers of your bi-weekly software engineering paycheck into buying ETH, BTC, or whichever altcoin is popular this week. It went up 5000% in the past, it's got to keep growing right? 2. Participate in an ICO and stock up on whatever platform token they're hawking. It's more profitable if you get in early due to some presale mechanism (hopefully here…

Regarding #3, user uetokenceo did that with uetoken.com and put far less effort into it than what you described, to at least some decent effect.

Re: Hackers nab $500k as Enigma is compromised weeks before its ICO

#100

Post by jankins »

Retra wrote: post #89
jankins wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are making an assumption that seems common sense but might not actually hold: that cryptocurrency will fail if it is prone to fraud, speculation, theft, etc. I think it's interesting that cryptocurrency has achieved its current level of success despite those things being widely known and publicized. Users accept the risk to gain the benefits of the platform.

It appears one of the benefits of the platform is the ability to easily commit fraud, speculations, theft, etc.

Yep :P that's definitely a benefit for a class of users, but it's not the benefit that all users are interested in, and all the other benefits are linked to those vulnerabilities. (in the current implementations anyway).
Post reply on HN