Are we going to regulate this insanity yet?
$625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
201–210 of 761 posts
Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
#202In 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.
What's so dumb about the idea of wanting to be responsible for your own outcomes? You make a stupid mistake, you suffer, nobody else does. If you don't want take responsibility for your own actions, feel free to stick to the mainstream financial system. Note however that as a result of that you'll be on the hook for bailing out other people's stupid mistakes when they fuck up, like how the taxpayer bailed out banks that made stupid loans during the GFC.
Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
#203In 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.
More likely they think government monopoly over money is a form of tyranny, or that unchecked government power is tyranny.
See:
Civil forfeiture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
Executive order 6102: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
Greek austerity measures (which include the reduction of social welfare and benefits due to incompetence of government spending): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_austerity_packages
And the most important consequence, hyperinflation, often caused by central banks and governments: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hyperinflation.asp
The illusion of security and stability is a very nice fantasy to live in. The price of everything you bought went up ~7.5% in the last year, the debt grows perpetually higher with no plan to ever pay it off, housing and stock market bubbles continue to grow, and this is totally normal and sustainable.
Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
#204> The attacker used hacked private keys Why do people write "hacked" instead of "stolen"? To make it look like robbing them is harder than it actually is?
If you have a legal system, then breaking my lock is unlawful intrusion, and if you take something from behind my locked door, it's theft. Without a legal system, e.g. crypto, if you solve my puzzle, then you deserve the reward. It's just math!
> Without a legal system, e.g. crypto, if you solve my puzzle, then you deserve the reward. It's just math!
My fear keeping me from getting into the... offensive crypto space has been that the original owners of the wallets won't see it that way, and an imperfect opsec will leave me as one of the 70% of murders that don't get solved in the US.
Someone with millions to billions in crypto has a decent chance of being diversified, and use to backfilling the lack of access to the state's monopoly on violence with some of their own.
Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't recall last time seeing news on someone's bank account being hacked and drained, if anything its mostly family fraud. Anecdote time. My wife and I have a shared checking account that got hacked and drained. First her debit card got skimmed. Then the perp called USAA a half dozen times claiming to be her and asking for account credentials. Finally they got a helpful account rep to reset the password, disable…
Weird, USAA froze my cards and funds immediately the only time I've had suspicious transactions. I guess the social portion is where we diverge though, they definitely tried harder to get in to yours. Ours was just a guy in Vancouver trying to order Thai food through a delivery app.
They froze the card, but only after six consecutive withdrawals from an ATM in Miami. I was getting notifications on my phone about the withdrawals (did I mention I'm paranoid) but since I was driving, I didn't see them for about half an hour when I arrived at my destination. Called USAA immediately and they had already frozen the card. But the money had already been withdrawn.
I can't explain why it took many consecutive withdrawals in a short time, in a city that I've never visited, 3000 miles away from the most recent use of the card, to trigger USAA's protection algorithms.
USAA did finally take care of it. My biggest beefs with them are 1) they dragged their feet a couple days on the investigation until I called them myself (I'm the veteran, my wife is not, and they were much more responsive to me), and 2) they really do punish my wife for something not her fault. You know those questions you get which are sourced from your credit file? What street did you live on, what's your mortgage payment, things like that? That's what they ask every time, after asking for a secret password and PIN code to be used for phone calls.
I'll give them credit though, for actually sharing the gory details with me once they were done tracking down everything, and admitting that one of their own employees had broken their rules and handed over the credentials to my wife's account.
Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
#206Earlier 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?
You can't always reverse the transaction in regular financial world. It is typically possible if all parties involved act in good faith, and often possible in other cases too, if you act fast, or the bad faith actor is less than competent. However, this is not always the case.
Imagine the following scenario: bank A sends $100M to bank B, which then sends it to bank C. By "reversing" the A->B transaction, all you're doing is making bank B on the hook for the $100M. Bank B will obviously not be very happy about this, and if you try to force it through some legal means, this will effectively amount to stealing $100M from bank B and its customers.
Reversing erroneous transactions is a useful feature of regular financial system, and lack of it in blockchains often poses huge and avoidable practical problems. At the same time, this in no way should be seen as panacea for restoring stolen money, neither in real financial systems, nor in blockchain.
Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't recall last time seeing news on someone's bank account being hacked and drained, if anything its mostly family fraud. Anecdote time. My wife and I have a shared checking account that got hacked and drained. First her debit card got skimmed. Then the perp called USAA a half dozen times claiming to be her and asking for account credentials. Finally they got a helpful account rep to reset the password, disable…
This incident reinforces the rule never to use your debit card for credit card transactions.
Absolutely do not use your debit card ... well, anywhere if you can help it.
(Apologies, saw the wrong parent comment) How many utilities, credit card companies require a checking account for autopay? How many times have you thrown out an old checkbook that contains routing and account numbers on a carbon copy pages?
Bank accounts are not especially secure, we mostly hope to limit the risk/reward calculation for hacking them and basic security controls.
Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
#208Earlier 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.
Hammurabi's laws only work when they have a monopoly on violence to enforce said laws. Shitcoins (all of them) remove the potential of violence as a means of corrective action. Instead, you have crazy hard math stopping you. Can't do the math? Then you're not forcing your decision.
> Shitcoins (all of them) remove the potential of violence as a means of corrective action. Instead, you have crazy hard math stopping you. Can't do the math? Then you're not forcing your decision.
Oh no they don't. You can still go to prison, and they can still smack you around. To pretend otherwise is to play emu.
Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
In principle if you had enough desire among world governments you could plausibly try and legally force a blockchain fork.
And do that every time a hack occurs? What would the threshold be for when that would be worth it? Could I recover $100k that got stolen? What about $10k? $1k?
Sure, why not? You could even automate it, using a SWIFT-like messaging pipeline that all mining companies have to subscribe to. Blockchains are fundamentally a social construct, and governments have the ability to regulate the individuals who are creating the blockchain. If there was enough political will for it, you could absolutely bolt a "reversal" mechanism onto any existing blockchain. Unless you're doing your mining operation entirely on the black market, you're going to rely on the government for enforcement of your colo rent agreements, your electricity agreements, etc, so there's lots of incentive to comply.
Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like if they had a checking account with their bank credentials stored in ENV variables and someone got access to that server it would be the same outcome. The details of it being on a crypto-currency are interesting but when password/passphrase/private key security is poor it doesn't really matter the medium holding the money.
No, $625M transfer out of a single bank account would raise tons of eyebrows. No way it’s authorized by some env vars.
Maybe, but 30d ago it would have been "No way someone would store $625M USD in a game dev bank account".