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

roninblockchain.substack.com

131–140 of 761 posts

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

#131
post #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.

Anyone who knows anything about human systems knows that that's the end point: We'll be right back to banking as it is today, except with less efficiency and a ton of wasted time and technology that could have been spent making the current systems better.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And if it was drained from a bank account, you have recourses to get it back.

Not true in the EU, we got scammed into making a bank transfer from Germany to Belgium for a bicycle that never arrived. We contacted the police and bank with all the details, and had to pay our bank about 40 euros to ask the scammer if they would refund the money, they said no and that was it. EU banking laws protected them. On the plus side the website appears to be gone now.

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

#133

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...

Or you just keep it in monero indefinitely :)

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

#134
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?

It’s not money, it’s ether.

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

#135
post #54

I love how crypto brodudes are all like "fuck the government, we want anonymity and no regulations", and the second their dumb system stops working and they lose all their gambling money, they come running back to the government. Fucking pathetic.

Privatize the profits and socialize the losses. Classic.

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

#136
So, if someone could explain this to me, I don't understand all the particulars.

From the article -

The attacker used hacked private keys in order to forge fake withdrawals.

The validator key scheme is set up to be decentralized so that it limits an attack vector, similar to this one, but the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.

Can someone explain what happened here? How were they storing the keys in such a way that they were accessible from the internet? Namely, is this a problem with how crypto is designed itself, did they mishandle their architecture (so presumably if they organized their containers in another way then a hacker wouldn't have access), or did they just put the keys in a file that said KEYS.pem with open access?

Does this have implications for blockchain as a whole or was this company just dumb? Ideally, you shouldn't hold 650 million in one wallet, but if the promise of crypto is supposed to be secure then it shouldn't matter.

PS:

If anyone would loan me 650 million dollars I promise not to lose it and would take only a small percentage of the total to pay rent and continue to exist.

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

#137
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving $650mm in USD to a random company is still infinitely safer than doing so with crypto. If a regulated bank claims they got hacked and lost that amount, there are a slew of federal and state laws and agencies in place to investigate it. With crypto, it could very well be in the wallet of the CEO or IT guy and no one would know.

Cryptocurrency theft is illegal and the US government does investigate and prosecute it. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/feb/14/us-bitcoin-case-...

Yes, but it's an open question how successfully and how frequently they catch the bad guys.

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

#140
post #47

In a system run by people, the transaction could be reversed, traced, and the culprits eventually brought to justice. In a system run by algorithms, designed to avoid oversight by people (governments), there is no such powers. There's no reversal. There's no checking the name on the account the transfer was to. It's just gone. I do not understand why people who have legal intentions would want to be part of the crypt…

Because there are people in the world who can wake up and have lost all money they had deposited in a bank. There are people who have to pay 20% transfer fees to move money overseas. There are people who don't have the ability to open a bank account. There are people who can lose all their banked money if their government doesn't like them.

The first world doesn't have these problems.

Crypto is a bigger play than 'get rich quick'

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