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Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

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Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#151

Post by bob33212 »

nadam wrote: post #148
jstx1 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also possible that some people understand all of this and still don't think that crypto is a good idea, or that it has worked out well in practice, or that it does anything meaningful.

Ok. In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Why isn't it meaningful to further research this technology in your opinion? (While mathematicians are researching all kinds of esoteric topics?) In my opinion proof-of-stake research is one of the most-important research topics to…

If you find it a good store of value for yourself that is fine, but you need to understand that value is defined by social norms not by technical features. Picasso paintings are currently a very good store of value. Gold has been a decent store of value for thousands of years. People bought beanie babies in 1998 because they thought the price would go up and stay up for a long time. Obviously they were wrong, but the same thing could happen to GOLD, BTC, or even Picasso paintings. It totally depends on what society values in the future.

Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#152

Post by gjulianm »

Taek wrote: post #123
wesleywt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain to me why HN is so anti-crypto?

It used to be very strange to me, but honestly think the answer is that a large number of HN community members are - somewhat ironically - very closed minded. Once you start to think in that framework you see it everywhere, and it goes all the way back to the original DropBox thread where some guy said "this is stupid you could just combine FTP with SVN". Of course that doesn't apply to everyone, and perhaps not even…

> creative/unusual forms of technical innovation

Crypto has been around for quite a few years already. How is everyone still close minded? Maybe the issue is that crypto has several problems that are consistently ignored by the community and crypto products keep on underdelivering on their promises.

In the end, it all boils down to one fact: the differentiating feature of blockchain is decentralization. That's mainly it. However, the crypto community keeps on promising changes and improvements in areas that don't have anything to do with decentralization without any actual arguments, ignoring what is the reality of those issues.

Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#153

Post by gjulianm »

nadam wrote: post #148
jstx1 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also possible that some people understand all of this and still don't think that crypto is a good idea, or that it has worked out well in practice, or that it does anything meaningful.

Ok. In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Why isn't it meaningful to further research this technology in your opinion? (While mathematicians are researching all kinds of esoteric topics?) In my opinion proof-of-stake research is one of the most-important research topics to…

> an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology

As the other commenter said, "censor resistant" is impossible to achieve. It's society the one that gives value to things, and society can decide to censor you and stop you from storing/getting value from that network. Not to mention that most blockchains are traceable, so it's not that difficult to know how money is flowing.

> potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far

Why? This always happens in crypto: somehow it's going to fix a lot of issues even if the features that differentiate it from existing solutions don't have anything to do with those issues.

Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#154

Post by nadam »

bob33212 wrote: post #151
nadam wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Why isn't it meaningful to further research this technology in your opinion? (While mathematicians are researching all kinds of esoteric topics?) In my opinion proof-of-stake research is one of the most-important research topics to…

If you find it a good store of value for yourself that is fine, but you need to understand that value is defined by social norms not by technical features. Picasso paintings are currently a very good store of value. Gold has been a decent store of value for thousands of years. People bought beanie babies in 1998 because they thought the price would go up and stay up for a long time. Obviously they were wrong, but the…

I understand this. While you are right, there are some properties of these assets that can help us predict what could become a store of value: is it durable? is it easy to transfer? is it easy to censor? is it inflationary? also you can examine the network effect related to the asset. By developing new technical features, you can increase the chance of an asset to become a store of value. That's why researching proof-of-stake algorithms is meaningful. Not as important as to find cure for cancer? Maybe. But still meaningful. Lots of people on HN claim that it is totally bullshit, which is a strong opinion imho...

Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#155

Post by pjmorris »

mlazos wrote: post #35
hamburgerwah wrote: post #16

I haven't seen any evidence there was in fact a hack at all. A digital contract was used in a way that complied with the contract that the bonehead writers of that contract did not intend. That's it. If bad contract writers get to cry "hack" and beg for their money back there is no point to digital contracts at all. If someone had physically or electronically broken into systems and illicitly copied private keys that…

It’s so funny to me when everyone touts crypto + smart contracts as revolutionary™ then when you follow a system implemented with them to its logical conclusions you have analogs to everything that already exists. Lawyers to audit the contracts for bugs (and yes there can be bugs in a formally verified spec as well), courts to arbitrate disagreements, and an authority to enforce rules when someone finds a security ho…

> Maybe we should understand the existing system before advocating complete disruption.

This is a great point. One name for it is 'Chesterton's Fence' [0]

[0] https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/

Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#156

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

A fun way to spend $600 million that you cannot launder anyway would be to put it in a smart contract and release it in portions to anyone who could solve a proof of work problem. Incidentally, the PoW problem would result in empty blocks being mined on Bitcoin, effectively executing a denial of service attack. The incentives should be adjusted so it becomes at least twice as profitable for a miner to mine empty blocks for the smart contract than to mine real blocks on the Bitcoin main network.

Edit: It should probably be designed as a contract which pays out only once a predetermined number of fake blocks have been mined, and the payout to the solvers will be proportional to the number of blocks they have in the final solution chain (wallet addresses of solvers should be encoded in the empty blocks they mine to prevent front-running, which will destroy the incentives). It should be possible to submit any solution to the contract so that everyone competes. This includes solutions that are mined by actual bitcoin miners, effectively pitting the miners mining real blocks against the miners mining empty blocks. Someone who is more skilled than me should design such a contract and put it on Ethereum, ready to receive Ether that someone "finds".

Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#157

Post by cassonmars »

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #39
pmorici wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because there are similar mechanisms doesn’t mean they haven’t been improved on in some way. Lawyers and courts are notoriously inefficient if this implementation achieves efficiencies, even if the mechanisms are analogous, seems like progress.

> It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in t…

The irony whenever someone references this article is they always seem to forget that he was arguing against the decision to rewrite Netscape, specifically, to create version 6, also known as Mozilla.

Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#158

Post by nadam »

gjulianm wrote: post #153
nadam wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Why isn't it meaningful to further research this technology in your opinion? (While mathematicians are researching all kinds of esoteric topics?) In my opinion proof-of-stake research is one of the most-important research topics to…

> an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology As the other commenter said, "censor resistant" is impossible to achieve. It's society the one that gives value to things, and society can decide to censor you and stop you from storing/getting value from that network. Not to mention that most blockchains are traceable, so it's not that difficult to know how money is flowin…

>Why?

Are you a gold investor? I am. There are lots of problems with gold: 2-3% inflation, hard to store, hard to transfer, hard to divide, hard to examine whether it is really gold. BTC has some advantages (and some disadvantages). Proof of stake ETH have even more advantages (but also some more disadvantages). It is meaningful to research this, experiment with this, and not treat it as complete bullshit.

Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#159

Post by baobabKoodaa »

hamburgerwah wrote: post #16

I haven't seen any evidence there was in fact a hack at all. A digital contract was used in a way that complied with the contract that the bonehead writers of that contract did not intend. That's it. If bad contract writers get to cry "hack" and beg for their money back there is no point to digital contracts at all. If someone had physically or electronically broken into systems and illicitly copied private keys that…

This is a disingenuous argument not written in good faith. You know very well that the contract writers did not intend for this to happen, and yet you are pretending otherwise just to make a provocative argument.

Re: Poly Network hacker returns $258M after stealing $600M

#160

Post by [deleted] »

birdyrooster wrote: post #85
hnick wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In games we usually separate between exploits and hacks. Exploits are vague but typically things allowed by the game, but not intended (or have for more impact than expected). I believe if you lied in the game that would constitute a written/verbal contract and what you did is fraud. Some games enforce written agreements, others say it's the wild west so too bad, this is role playing by a character, not the person. I…

https://www.pcworld.com/article/152673/virtual_theft.html

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