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$625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

roninblockchain.substack.com

61–70 of 761 posts

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#62
Echoes of Mt Gox: when something meant to be a much smaller operation (such as a place to trade Magic:The Gathering cards) suddenly finds itself playing a much bigger game.

It's like you agreed to temporarily store the Fort Knox gold reserves in your spare room, but still have the same ordinary lock on the front door.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#63
Supposing the hacker gets away with stealing such large quantities of stolen ETH without getting caught and their ETH is now sitting in a brand new wallet that everyone knows about. Is the next move to convert it into a privacy-preserving coin like Monero, then back to "clean" ETH?

source: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/2699/is-there-a...

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#65
post #31

I'm out of the loop and trying to understand - people lent over half a billion dollars of their 'real' fake money (ETH) to a game studio so they could transact on the studio's sidechain because gas fees are prohibitively expensive on ETH, and then the game studio got hacked and lost it all? How was this ever going to end any other way? Imagine how preposterous the idea of storing $650mm in USD in a random game studio…

The chance of $650 million being drained from a game studio’s bank account is significantly less than it being drained from their ETH wallets, at least as of now.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#66
post #20

So they now have this giant sum of money sitting in their wallet https://etherscan.io/address/0x098b716b8aaf21512996dc57eb061... what do they do next? How do criminals even use this money to do anything?

They could use it to pump the price on Uniswap of a low cap ERC20 crypto that they own a lot of. That's the safest way to launder that money imo.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://tornado.cash/ Probably can get $3-5m or so a year slowly. (which would take ~25 years or so).

Which is what that horrible cringe rapper lady was doing when she and her boyfriend were busted.

No - they had Bitcoin, completely different beast. (due to lack of smart contracts, Bitcoin is a lot simpler/transparent/harder to hide stuff there).

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#68
post #31

I'm out of the loop and trying to understand - people lent over half a billion dollars of their 'real' fake money (ETH) to a game studio so they could transact on the studio's sidechain because gas fees are prohibitively expensive on ETH, and then the game studio got hacked and lost it all? How was this ever going to end any other way? Imagine how preposterous the idea of storing $650mm in USD in a random game studio…

At least with a checking account you may be able to have the transfer reversed.

The idea of buying game credits and trading them in game makes sense, but you would want the game publisher to have root on the ledger so that if there was a hack they could reverse it.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#69
Question for the legal-minded folk here. Is this "theft" illegal in the criminal sense?

It's exploiting an unintended hole in software, but it's technically following the smart contract faithfully, albeit against the better intentions of its author(s).

Has a smart contract case like this been litigated before?

It brings to mind comparable things that have happened in the financial services world, where one party insists on following a poorly-composed contract to the letter, to the detriment of their counter-party. Their actions were deemed unethical, but not criminally illegal.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#70
Something tells me that if indeed cryptocurrency sticks around it’s going to sprout rules and regulations that are a mix of banking and securities regulations, and that will suck most of the “fun” out of it.

We pause the stock market on a 5% drop and stoop it on 10%. Moving that much crypto in a day is probably never on purpose.

Though in a distributed consensus system I don’t know how you’d enforce such a thing.

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