Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

roninblockchain.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 761 posts

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

#571

Post by abriosi »

saboot wrote: post #458
spicymaki wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why crypto is such a disaster. Every week there is yet another scam where people losing their money. The feedback from crypto enthusiasts is well look at those idiots for putting their money into some scheme or you are not smart enough use this thing. Look "nobody" understands what you are talking about. These financial systems are inscrutable and the problem is getting worse. You are building systems…

You are neglecting to mention the great upsides in crypto currency. * Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously. * Providing a source of funding North Korea's nuclear weapons program * Allowing nation states to engage in global commerce despite sanctions because they won't stop killing innocent people * Convincing older and gullible people to give their money to someone they…

Having access to basic finance and the ability of storing money safely, should be a right.

There are place in the world where these things don't exist because society doesn't get along.

Should decentralized and anonymous communication, like TOR tries to be, exist? Should a decentralized currency exist? Should and open, free and decentralized internet exist?

For some of us the answer is clear but complex. Between black and white there are many shades of grey

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

#572

Post by f38zf5vdt »

saboot wrote: post #458
spicymaki wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why crypto is such a disaster. Every week there is yet another scam where people losing their money. The feedback from crypto enthusiasts is well look at those idiots for putting their money into some scheme or you are not smart enough use this thing. Look "nobody" understands what you are talking about. These financial systems are inscrutable and the problem is getting worse. You are building systems…

You are neglecting to mention the great upsides in crypto currency. * Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously. * Providing a source of funding North Korea's nuclear weapons program * Allowing nation states to engage in global commerce despite sanctions because they won't stop killing innocent people * Convincing older and gullible people to give their money to someone they…

Here we go again. While these things have been enabled by cryptocurrency, especially ransomware, all these human activities predate it. For those of us old enough to remember the drama of the crypto wars, it all sounds eerily familiar.

> In fact, it's the proponents of widespread unbreakable encryption who want to create a brave new world, one in which all of us – crooks included – have a guarantee that the government can't tap our phones. Yet these proponents have done nothing to show us that the new world they seek will really be a better one.

> In fact, even a civil libertarian might prefer a world where wiretaps are possible. If we want to catch and convict the leaders of criminal organizations, there are usually only two good ways to do it. We can "turn" a gang member – get him to testify against his leaders. Or we can wiretap the leaders as they plan the crime.

> ...

> If unescrowed encryption becomes ubiquitous, there will be many more stories like this. We can't afford as a society to protect pedophiles and criminals today just to keep alive the far-fetched notion that some future tyrant will be brought down by guerrillas wearing bandoleers and pocket protectors and sending PGP-encrypted messages to each other across cyberspace.

> ...

> As encryption technology gets cheaper and more common, though, we face the real prospect that the federal government's own research, its own standards, its own purchases will help create the future I described earlier – one in which criminals use ubiquitous encryption to hide their activities. How can anyone expect the standard-setting arms of government to use their power to destroy the capabilities of law enforcement – especially at a time when the threat of crime and terror seems to be rising dramatically?

https://www.wired.com/1994/06/nsa-clipper/

My take on it as an outsider is that these are bridging technologies that will probably die off once the rest of the world moves to a secure private digital currency system analogous to cash, since we will no longer need these "wildcat cryptocurrencies" any longer. Like how modern banking progressively evolved from distributed roots.

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

#573

Post by sterlind »

virtualritz wrote: post #553
Sargos wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>encryption has many, many actually useful and productive applications So does crypto but likewise opponents of encryption disregard the positives and focus on the negatives to align with their preformed ideas. The only way out of this trap is to have an open mind and internalize the fact that all technologies can be used for good and evil and thus are relatively neutral overall. Humanity must take the good and bad a…

>> encryption has many, many actually useful and productive applications > So does crypto [...] I'd wager that this is a lie. Please name one. These systems are self referential. Great if all to do is speculate with value changes inside the system. Other use cases? In short: no one has come up with any solution to the oracle problem. As soon as you want to exchange anything crypto with anything but crypto (e.g. USD o…

I don't have much invested in crypto, and I find PoW hideous. I think crypto is most useful for illegal things and tradecraft, but illegal doesn't mean immoral, and useful to criminals is still useful.

* Buying VPN relays anonymously, for connecting to through Tor, VPSes etc.

* Buying drugs.

* Donating to causes sanctioned by your country.

* Paying informants.

* Allowing you to prove you're the author of something, or knew a secret, later on.

* "Dead hand" schemes which release information if your wallet activity stops for more than a couple weeks. This keeps people from killing you to keep something from getting out.

* Online gambling.

* Evading financial controls to send money to your family abroad.

Some of this doesn't require any trust (e.g. proving you knew something before some date), most of the rest requires trust, but what makes crypto useful for these cases isn't lack of trust but auditability, anonymity and/or lack of control by authorities.

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

#574

Post by the_gastropod »

gonehome wrote: post #538
the_gastropod wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not all governments are good and even good governments can implement bad policy. Indeed! Many governments are truly awful. And it's a deeply complex problem to solve. The strategy of "screw it, let's just bypass the laws when I feel like it" is deeply troubling. And I think you needn't look further than the fact that so many despots have wholly embraced Bitcoin: Bukele, Putin, Kim Jong-un, Erdogan, Maduro, Assad, e…

You're arguing a strawman.

With all due respect, I don't think you understand the full weight of what you're arguing. Which was the point of my original comment. You don't get to just pick-and-choose which aspects of crypto are beneficial and ignore the side-effects. Crypto, by design, bypasses the legal system. There are some heavy consequences to that design.

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

#575

Post by acdha »

narrator wrote: post #518
acdha wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, now think about what would happen if Argentinians used Bitcoin. The same government would use the same powers to make the same request. Any business which accepted or made transactions in unapproved currencies would be punished. Any person keeping their money in a local exchange - as almost all Bitcoin users do given how expensive it is to do it solo - would have the seizure done automatically. The blockchain w…

Everyone who had overseas bank accounts in 2002 Argentina did just fine. Bitcoin on a foreign exchange or in a self-custody wallet would also be just fine. Getting a foreign bank account is too expensive for your average Argentinian because you have to show up in person to set it up, but a self-custody wallet can be had on any minimal smart phone.

People who wanted self-custody could also keep their money under the mattress. The reason why most cryptocurrency users do not do that is because there are many failure modes which result in your money being gone forever.

You also left out the other part of the overseas bank accounts: you have to be rich enough not to need to touch the money — otherwise you'll run into the various restrictions on transfers. The same would be true of Bitcoin for the vast majority of people because very few people receive a paycheck in Bitcoin or can use it to pay their bills. Those meatspace connections are not easy to bypass as long as the government in question is willing to make an effort.

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

#576

Post by mrjin »

spicymaki wrote: post #409
Barrera wrote: post #225

This is the kind of pain that comes from trusting scammers and nincompoops about unworkable blockchain "scalability" fixes. Here's the sequence. Those dumb enough to ignore it are doomed to repeat the pattern. I'm probably getting some details wrong in this Rube Goldberg scheme, so feel free to correct. 1. Citing "Ethereum network congestion," Axie Infinity announces an ethereum side chain, Ronin.[1] 2. Ronin was a c…

This is exactly why crypto is such a disaster. Every week there is yet another scam where people losing their money. The feedback from crypto enthusiasts is well look at those idiots for putting their money into some scheme or you are not smart enough use this thing. Look "nobody" understands what you are talking about. These financial systems are inscrutable and the problem is getting worse. You are building systems…

Because the creator of crypto concept never understood why there are centralized institutions in the first place. It was so naive to think the problem was the correctness of the records and thus everyone should keep a copy of the global ledger!! I hardly if not never heard of any fraud that actually altered records held by the authority institutions and in fact, in all the fraud cases I know the records held by the authority institutions indeed correctly reflects what happened. So the problem was never about records but rather how to ensure the transaction happen as expected without having to know or trust the counter party. Of course in most of the cases the parties in a transaction don't know or trust each other and neither should they. So here come the neutral authority institutions which provides the instruments to allow the transactions to complete. So you can see that cryto is actually barking at the wrong tree and thus we again see authority institutions, exchanges or in this Ronin, emerged. Traditional institutions are heavily regulated and there is almost nothing for those so called exchanges.

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

#577

Post by sfifs »

mrmuagi wrote: post #476
saboot wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are neglecting to mention the great upsides in crypto currency. * Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously. * Providing a source of funding North Korea's nuclear weapons program * Allowing nation states to engage in global commerce despite sanctions because they won't stop killing innocent people * Convincing older and gullible people to give their money to someone they…

>* Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously. I don't see how this is any different than the bog standard "encryption lets criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously.". Should money/txns be fundamentally track-able/examinable/un-encrypted but your private data/messages not? Surely this contention is something you also consider -- care to ex…

> . My initial viewpoint was why would scammers bother to fish for bitcoin when bank transfers/gift cards are a lower barrier

Because bank transfers at least are inherently traceable. It just requires a sufficiently motivated government agency or prosecutor to go after them. On Gift cards, there's a lot publicity regarding scams and stores are increasingly flagging scams.

Crypto for now at least is far safer from a scmer POV as it requires far higher level of investment and expertise to trace and unmask, so only the ultra big fish seem to get chased

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

#578

Post by alanlammiman »

dpiers wrote: 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…

Cash app, Venmo, Wise, and hundreds of other payment apps are also this - perhaps a bit larger, more reputable, more regulated, but not fundamentally different (or am I missing something?)

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

#579

Post by ibejoeb »

saboot wrote: post #458
spicymaki wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why crypto is such a disaster. Every week there is yet another scam where people losing their money. The feedback from crypto enthusiasts is well look at those idiots for putting their money into some scheme or you are not smart enough use this thing. Look "nobody" understands what you are talking about. These financial systems are inscrutable and the problem is getting worse. You are building systems…

You are neglecting to mention the great upsides in crypto currency. * Giving criminals and scammers the ability to exchange goods and services anonymously. * Providing a source of funding North Korea's nuclear weapons program * Allowing nation states to engage in global commerce despite sanctions because they won't stop killing innocent people * Convincing older and gullible people to give their money to someone they…

The ransomware actually wouldn't exist at all without cryptocurrencies making the scheme viable.

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

#580

Post by cdiddy2 »

mplewis wrote: post #452
narrator wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Argentina, in 2002, they took everyone's dollars denominated accounts at the Argentinian banks, converted them to Pesos and devalued the peso by 75%. Everyone in the country now had 1/3 of the money they previously had. The country is arguably still recovering from that theft. Currently, people who left Ukraine are finding out that their Ukrainian credit cards no longer work. Some people who have bitcoin are still…

What are Ukranians using Bitcoin for, specifically, right now?

A few examples.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-enables-ukrainia...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/03/ukraine-raises-54-million-as...

and a bonus from afghanistan: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60715707

Post reply on HN