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

roninblockchain.substack.com

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

#641

Post by SilasX »

jandrese wrote: post #39
bayesianbot wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which was 6 days after the original transfers. Unbelievable.

Wait, no, it's totally believable because this is the same story that happens over and over again with blockchains. It turns out that all of those pain in the ass compliance laws on traditional finance are there for a reason, and when you ignore the past you end up repeating it.

Well, yes and no. True, there are a lot of corners that banks would cut if not for regulation, I think we can all agree. But this one is so appalling and self-destructive that no bank would deliberately cut this kind of corner on purpose; it's just stupidity.

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

#642

Post by AustinDev »

kemotep wrote: post #519
cinntaile wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Axie Infinity is some sort of NFT game? How is that going to replace the dollar?

The article covers that it was Ethereum that was stolen. On the surface it appears none of the Axie Infinity based tokens were touched.

Because ETH has much more intrinsic value than AXS and the other tokens created by Axie Infinity. Why would they bother with pennies when they can take 100 dollar bills?

AXS's value is derived from a pseudo-feudalistic share cropping model called 'play to earn'. People in low income countries put up their real assets to borrow AXS tokens and NFT's to play the game to earn an income and farm items to sell to western players who can't spend all day grinding. Imagine if Blizzard designed WoW's monetization around exploiting all the Gold farmers?

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

#643

Post by saboot »

netheril96 wrote: post #623
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…

You must be against end-to-end encryption for chat messages too. Think about how the terrorists and pedophiles can take advantage of that!

Surprisingly (?) no! Only against a wasteful, overly complicated system, that's proven itself to be a haven of fraud and crime.

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

#644

Post by bigtex88 »

cinntaile wrote: post #437
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 building systems that are ruining peoples lives and making things worse for everyone. Don't invest more than you can afford to lose, it's the basis of any investment strategy. If someone puts enough money into highly risky, speculative assets such as these that it would ruin their life, then they only have themselves to blame if you ask me... People have to take responsibility for their own choices. Edit: -…

Sorry you're getting so downvoted. Not surprising on HN. Somehow super-anti crypto, even though people here seemingly understand technology.

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

#645

Post by chemmail »

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…

Sounds like you should here to China, where the CCP controls all the money and every action is logged and checked by the CCP. Wanna play games? You need that cleared by the CCP first and you are only allowed a quota. All your problems are solved over there. As for me in HK, its time to get out.

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

#646

Post by woah »

phphphphp wrote: post #596
woah wrote: post #495

As usual on HN there are a lot of useless comments in this thread that are ill-informed dunks on cryptocurrency, but the real story of what happened is actually about the hazards of not using a blockchain. The system that was compromised was a "proof of authority" chain. These are different from proof of work or proof of stake chains that have hundreds or thousands of distinct validators. In a "proof of authority" ch…

Most cryptocurrency dunking is because of exactly what you describe: the technology, in its purest form, can avoid a certain category of problems... but those problems are rarely relevant and instead the "cryptocurrency" industry is just a bunch of people chanting the word "blockchain" over and over again as they code their way into a plate of spaghetti. Axie Infinity is one of the shining stars of the cryptocurrency…

> the fact that they use a side chain with centralised validators is immaterial. The hack happened because private keys were stolen, which is just as much of a vulnerability if this happened entirely on the main ethereum chain where acquiring the various private keys required to create a legitimate multi-signature is just as possible.

No, you're wrong. The number of unique validators is at the heart of this hack, since these validators were also responsible for bridging money. If the chain had a decentralized validator set and the bridge used that same set, the hackers would have had to compromise 20-100 systems to execute the attack, which is very unlikely.

I'm also genuinely curious: why do those who criticize blockchain most stridently on HN also know the least about it? It seems like there is an echo chamber of people who hate blockchain, refuse to learn anything about it, and yet talk about it a lot.

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

#647

Post by xur17 »

dheera wrote: post #43
adtac wrote: post #22

This probably sounds like an insanely dumb idea to crypto people, but is it absolutely infeasible to reverse transactions when there's consensus that it's a hack? The TX fees need not be reversed (consider it to be a small price to pay for being hacked). A little bit of centralisation could make the whole network safer. Who is that centralised authority to decide what's a hack, I hear you ask. I don't know, but the a…

Maybe someone could invent the "FDIC" of crypto in smart contract form where everyone pays a periodic premium but if a hack occurs and there is consensus they get a payout. Only problem is everyone would have to use their own wallets for it to work, and for most people it's safer to store large amounts of crypto on an exchange instead of a wallet for personal security reasons.

> Maybe someone could invent the "FDIC" of crypto in smart contract form where everyone pays a periodic premium but if a hack occurs and there is consensus they get a payout.

Nexus Mutual, and a few other on chain insurance protocols offer exactly this. You pay them some premium, and they pay out in case of losses due to hacks, smart contract vulnerabilities, etc. So far they've worked fairly well, and paid out in hacks like this that occurred.

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

#648

Post by xur17 »

Sargos wrote: post #532
peterweyand0 wrote: post #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. Ca…

>Does this have implications for blockchain as a whole or was this company just dumb? They were just dumb. The Ronin bridge where this money was stolen from wasn't decentralized at all and wouldn't even be recognized as a blockchain by even moderately experienced user. It was just a 5 of 9 multi-sig where the security was very poor and susceptible to social engineering. This was akin to a company keeping 100 gold bar…

> It was just a 5 of 9 multi-sig where the security was very poor and susceptible to social engineering.

Taking this a step further, the article mentioned that 4 of the 5 were under one companies control and compromised together. It wouldn't shock me to learn that all 4 had the same access rules, and as such all were accessible if one was, essentially reducing the 5 of 9 to 2 of 9.

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

#650

Post by bhewes »

bena wrote: post #634
bhewes wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been cooking the books forever. WorldCom or Tyco being examples.

But that isn't solved by the blockchain. These scandals were found out by using the very books they had. There's no such thing as an uncookable book. As long as I can lie about information going in, I can manipulate it. Even in the crypto space, you have wash trading and the like.

Makes it easier to track with more then one copy of the ledger and immutability of entries (lies or not). Probably would not take three years to find the fraud as in the case of WorldCom. Though this is all spec as not been tested in real life.
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