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

roninblockchain.substack.com

241–250 of 761 posts

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

#241
post #121

"We are working with law enforcement officials..." If the promise of ETH contracts is that code is law and to eliminate needing trust, then how and why would law enforcement get involved? Did the attackers break down the door and steal the money? Or did the provide a widget that met the contract and which just happened to have the unfortunate side-effect of siphoning off tokens, a bug which will be fixed in the next…

I recently stumbled on this and it illustrates the situation perfectly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrbDWq64BNg

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

#242

> We are working directly with various government agencies to ensure the criminals get brought to justice. It's amusing to see these kind of statements from the decentralized no goverment/no authorities crowd. To quote RKL: Well it's anarchy, fuck the cops Of course, how else, through peace. But when the looters come to kick your ass I bet you cry "Police!"

> It's amusing to see these kind of statements from the decentralized no goverment/no authorities crowd I see this meme and I don't get it Why do you think this studio was a no government no authorities crowd? I havent seen anything from Axie or its founders that suggested that, my assumption is that you see one word or one piece of technology that overlaps with the aspirations of completely different people that are…

What other value is there in cryptocurrency over traditional money?

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is true about cryptocurrency as well.

What percent of BTC has been stolen? What percent of USD has been stolen?

And that shows the difference in how each is protected.

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be laundered in millions of $1 transactions, with others that are doing the same. Then it will be sold at a discount for Monero or a shitcoin, and then theyll get a couple thousand dollars in cash in the mail for the rest of their life. im jealous at this point,

No they’ll add some liquidity to Tornado cash And then a bunch of other large hacks will notice that Tornado cash is big enough to handle their large amounts too, adding more liquidity to Tornado cash And then some FAANG engineer is going to take their clean $50k paycheck and buy into a new launched token on Uniswap And that token is going to rally 100x because the tornado cash withdrawals keep buying that token And…

No post body was provided.

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

#245

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...

tornado.cash

what kind of volume does tornado.cash process? If it normally processes e.g. $1M/day, it'd take a while to use it as a mixer right?

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This incident reinforces the rule never to use your debit card for credit card transactions.

Ever, never, never use your debit card where credit card can be used in its place. The mechanisms for restoring the charge on your credit card are much stronger than on your debit card. And a credit card is a FUTURE charge, so you have time to fix the problem. Whereas a debit card is your CURRENT money, so it's just gone unless you get it back. I do not understand why people use debit cards linked to their actual ban…

Agreed. I almost never use my debit card. And now, my wife doesn't either. Though her card got skimmed at an ATM, not during a debit card transaction, so this advice doesn't work. Now she just doesn't ever use ATMs. For better or worse, we now keep a few grand in the safe at home and pull from that for the occasional cash need. When I need to replenish that, I walk into the bank and take it out the old fashioned way.

It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you...

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

#247
post #74
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…

> Imagine how preposterous the idea of storing $650mm in USD in a random game studio's checking account would be. But it's decentralized. (Do the same hand movement as if saying "It's got electrolytes")

Its got what the internet craves!

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't like monitoring would have done anything. Once the transaction goes out it is gone. The core problem here is the massive private-key bounty being created by a ton of organizations that don't have world-class security teams.

True, but you would think they’d notice $650,000,000 missing before a user reported an issue withdrawing $5,000 (edit - 5k ETH). It’s honestly so impossible to believe that I’d wager the real story is they knew and were actively trying to recover the funds.

just a poke: it was 5K Eth ($16,924,050), not 5K USD, but i agree with your wager.

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

#249
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

The shifting of the goalposts is incredible.

Yes, there are flaws in the real world financial system as well.

Yet, we’ve heard of more of these scams in years of crypto than in decades and centuries of banking.

And no one has still provided an explanation of why crypto is better than the established working system other than “it’s decentralized” except as we find repeatedly, it’s not decentralized.

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

#250
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even if that is desired and wouldn't spark a philosophical debate about wether centralized entities should get involved at all, there is a much deeper problem. Every transaction that is occurring now on the chain will be invalidated. That means you can't even reverse a single transaction you will have to reverse one transaction and ALL other transactions that happened after the one you want to reverse. If that happen…

You're thinking too narrowly about the types of "hard forks" that are possible and what the space of all possible regulations could be. For example, one possible idea (with a lot of downsides! this is just an example, not a proposal), is that the US government could just promulgate a "US super-key" that allowed it to sign any transaction and have it be considered valid, and require users running blockchain software in relation to financial applications to respect those transactions. This would be a bad proposal for a number of reasons, but it's possible, because blockchains and the code that enforce them are inherently a social construct, an agreement made between all participants.

But the answer to "why would I want to to transact on a chain that is under constant threat to be forked off" is even simpler: It's because, in this hypothetical, the regulatory environment you operate in gives you no other choice. Unless you and everybody you transact with has the ability to boycott or subvert the regular financial system entirely (e.g. you're doing entirely black market transactions), then you'd have to fall in line if a government that was crucial to your operations or your downstream supplier's operations required it.

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