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

181–190 of 249 posts

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

#181

Post by ringaroundthetx »

saalweachter wrote: post #168
arkitaip wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised. People know nothing about Bitcoin but have a friend, uncle or acquaintance who has dropped a few thousands in BTC and raves about the price going from 580 usd to 4000 usd in just a year. People lose their minds and they won't even have shitty tulips to show for it.

See, that's the thing with the old tulip story. At the heart of the bubble there were a number of people who just wanted a damn tulip.

and those people got tulips, at normal low prices.

futures traders didn't want a tulip, nobody accepted delivery of a tulip.

no tulips in the spot market were being traded anywhere near the futures month prices.

with that in mind, doesn't this make it one of the worst poster childs of irrational exuberance to cite?

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

#182

Post by drngdds »

Do the victims ever get their money back after these cryptocurrency hacks/scams? I know crypto transactions are irreversible by nature, but do the coins ever get seized by law enforcement and returned to their owner? If not, that seems like a major problem. (I know they got around the DAO hack, but that's a unique case.)

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

#183

Post by nickbauman »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #143
nickbauman wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Gold (and cryptocurrencies) cannot support a market economy because of the problem of hoarding a limited resource and the lack of representation of debt. That's a bold claim to throw out there with nothing to back it up. Gold has been used as a currency for thousands of years. Crypto-currencies are out there working whether you like it or not. To say that they can't work is pretty silly when they are literally work…

The "Coin of the Realm" source: Page 49 of Debt, The First 5000 Years by David Graeber.

https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf

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

#184

Post by quickthrower2 »

nxsynonym wrote: post #31
richardknop wrote: post #17

Another ICO, another scam. I am not sure I feel bad for people who are gullible enough to send their hard earned money to these "companies". They have one PDF whitepaper and a generic Wordpress template website with some buzzwords, based in Cayman islands or some other tax haven for money laundering. And expecting to get rich from that.

People are afraid of missing the next Bitcoin boom and think throwing money at every ICO will turn them into overnight millionaires. It's unfortunate that the greed and FOMO are dragging the technology through the dirt. If you plan on investing in any ICO please do your due diligence and avoid the hype trains.

I'm almost a FOMO MOFO but keep talking myself out of buying coin because I'd rather learn more classic ways of making a lot of money even if it involves the dirty 4 letter word.

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

#185

Post by ringaroundthetx »

ritarong wrote: post #32

It's amazing that this has happened multiple times before and yet people have not learned to be more careful. Greed and FOMO.

The attack vectors are getting more sophisticated, but it is also a different standard applied to cryptocurrencies:

Fraud in legacy payment networks is hundreds of millions per year, with an occasional outlier of 80 billion, the only difference is that it isn't international news every single time. $500,000 thefts are happening every single day in fiat currencies, in person, banks, over electronic networks like ACH/checks, Wire, SWIFT, IBAN etc.

Square Inc's annual report cites a couple huge thefts they have had to deal with which have and could materially affect their business of creating merchant tools. They lost like $5 million in one swipe and its just buried in a boring annual report. $500k in one crypto OPSEC issue and you question the entire concept? Cmon thats mentally disingenuous

You'll just have to keep that in mind if you want to have any kind of objective view of this reality containing cryptocurrencies

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

#186

Post by ringaroundthetx »

drngdds wrote: post #182

Do the victims ever get their money back after these cryptocurrency hacks/scams? I know crypto transactions are irreversible by nature, but do the coins ever get seized by law enforcement and returned to their owner? If not, that seems like a major problem. (I know they got around the DAO hack, but that's a unique case.)

No, one thing that has been a partial remedy is that the token sale creators give the new token to the people that sent money to the wrong address anyway. It isn't really dilution to the founders so its easy to remedy.

Case in point, Enigma was trying to raise $50,000,000 which they haven't even initiated yet. This was only going to result in 50% of the tokens in the hands of the public. So buyers would have new tokens and trade that amongst themselves and other people, Enigma would have $50m a lot of that for the founders, and Enigma would also have the other Enigma tokens which would also be valued at $50m which they could use for rewards or selling into the market in the future, all depends on how the market grows.

The hackers get their $500k bug bounty and would have to have equally as bad OPSEC to get caught.

The deterrents aren't really there right now, it isn't necessarily a problem, I don't really think the state is necessary here and I wouldn't want them to use my pooled resources on this given the cost of their investigations.

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

#187

Post by trophycase »

justadeveloper2 wrote: post #120
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even knowledgeable people can fall victim to attacks like this.

Smart people are often the easiest to scam because they believe they can't be scammed.

Source?

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

#188

Post by nickbauman »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #143
nickbauman wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Gold (and cryptocurrencies) cannot support a market economy because of the problem of hoarding a limited resource and the lack of representation of debt. That's a bold claim to throw out there with nothing to back it up. Gold has been used as a currency for thousands of years. Crypto-currencies are out there working whether you like it or not. To say that they can't work is pretty silly when they are literally work…

The hoarding problem source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2017/07/26/the-f...

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

#189

Post by JoblessWonder »

Steeeve wrote: post #177
pavel_lishin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could I invest in your course academy via some sort of ICO?

Coursecoin is going to change the academic world altogether. The combination of a distributed ledger algorithm with online academia opens up a world of education to people who otherwise could not afford it. Student loans are out of control, but with course coin, the students earn their tuition by mining coins. All the overhead of an academic institution is distributed over a wide array of systems that are responsible…

Coursecoin regrets to inform its prospective student-investor-miners that there was a compromise to the secure ICO system before launch. There will be no courses or refunds. Thank you for your interest and investment in Coursecoin.

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

#190

Post by CryptoPunk »

HackerNews gets an unrepresentative picture of the token market. The only stories that get to the frontpage are the ones concerning hacks. But that's not the whole picture. There are a huge number of token sales happening, and the vast majority are not being hacked. This is certainly newsworthy but it needs to be put into the context of how many token sales occur.
Post reply on HN