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

roninblockchain.substack.com

151–160 of 761 posts

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

#151
post #125
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…

They think that government is tyranny, therefore lack of government is freedom. Yes, they are dumb as hell.

They forget, freedom to be screwed is also freedom

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

#152
post #56
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…

Yes. People worked hard for electronic dollars to be transferred to their electronic wallets. They tried to use some of that digital money (in another electronic format) in a digital game, but the game got hacked and now those dollars are someone’s else dollars. The hacker may have some difficulty transforming digital money into paper bills, because KYC, but he can launder it like old school people used to and have s…

> but he can launder it like old school people used to and have some.

Crypto provides exciting new ways to do that, too. First send it through a mixer service. Then, invest in some new NFT project. Six months later, oh nice, someone bought your NFT for 10x what you paid for it. What a great investment.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Voluntarily transferring money is very different from having it stolen. The bank should protect your money while holding it from theft. They can't protect you from your own decisions on how to use your money.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

That's all well and good when the thieves are in the US or a country that will extradite them. What happens when the thieves are operating out of a country without an extradition treaty? In the regular financial world you can at least reverse the transaction. With crypto, is there anything you can do?

In principle if you had enough desire among world governments you could plausibly try and legally force a blockchain fork.

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

#156
post #15

Over half a billion in assets and.. > We discovered the attack this morning after a report from a user Fuck me.

No monitoring whatsoever over $600M of funds stored in your system is crazy negligent.

Or malicious...similar to the DAO hack from 2017 suspected of being an inside job (with evidence pointing to the insider who lawyered up to refute it with code-is-law argument), somebody was accountable for security and they deemed it not worth it to secure it.

Axie Infinity was already struggling, and this happens a day or two away from scheduled distribution of rewards & update release.

Cui bono? Who could've known they were carrying funds in a hot wallet other than the people directly involved with the project? Unless there was a way to discover this from the outside?

Somebody at Axie Infinity could have been asking whether they want to get paid 0.025% of that hot wallet yearly or have it all up front, today. After all it isn't cash sitting at a bank they have to rob.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's only an open question to people who haven't actually looked into it. Yeah, criminals get caught trying to move around stolen cryptocurrencies all the time.

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

#158
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we have an answer to that, it's called the law, and its worked since 1750BC. [edit] This guy, Hammurabi - king of the First Babylonian Dynasty - faced a similar quandary, so there's some prior art. Disputes under the law are resolved in court.

The only way to apply the court’s judgement (in the case of ETH) is to hark fork, because there is no governance contract in place. A blockchain can in theory support such things, which would allow a majority vote to approve the court’s judgement, but not ETH as it currently stands. Alternatively if you could get enough miners to just collectively agree to replay the blocks without that transaction you could let the…

> The only way to apply the court’s judgement (in the case of ETH) is to hark fork, because there is no governance contract in place.

Courts can and do issue orders against any kind of asset in order to enforce justice and unlike smart contracts, their orders are backed by men and women with dogs and guns.

Put another way: a court will not say "gee, gosh, if only ETH had a mechanism I could give orders for! I guess I'm beaten". They will instead say "you owe $X and I will seize all assets you have today, or will ever possess in future, in order to pay that debt". And when it turns out that people thought they were clever by evading the court order by keeping everything in a coin, they will then learn that ethereum can't buy top bunk at the federal penitentiary if you don't have access to a computer.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

She was converting her Bitcoin into Monero first before laundering it. The weak point is converting the resulting crypto coins into fiat money.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You aren't insured for $650M in a bank account

You have a legal system available, and banks that have to rigorously comply with that system.
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