Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an exploit no matter how you look at it.
Would it be an exploit if I discover the math to move all bitcoin in existence to whatever address I want then do so?
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The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
41–50 of 409 posts
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#42The fact that Ethereum code is public seems to weigh in favor of allowing him to get away with his "hack". For any other financial instrument, we rely on verbal descriptions of how it will be conducted and behave. With Ethereum, the code speaks for itself -- for better or worse. This leads to a rather absolutist dog-eat-dog rationality that I don't much like, but also don't see how to avoid.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#43Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#44Good for the hacker then and well played. If you really hate crypto projects so much, rather than complain all day long about the crypto-bros getting rich off of their tokens, just hack the smart contracts themselves and the project should offer a bounty if not beg for a negotiation for that and once the project creators fix the bug, you keep the rest. Job done, until the regulators come.
easier said than done. you can be sure that when news breaks of a contract being hacked it was only after maybe dozens, if not hundreds, of contracts had been tried and failed, by many hackers all over the world. Also, likely illegal: Code may be law but the judge may not see it that way.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#45> Medjedovic added that he'd taken on “substantial risk” in pursuing this strategy. If he'd failed he would have lost “a pretty large chunk of my portfolio.” (The 3 ETH he stood to lose in fees was worth about $11,000 at the time.) This is misleading, either intentionally or due to Medjedovic's incompetence. You can fork the current head of the mainnet blockchain to localhost and try infinite permutations for free to…
> You can fork the current head of the mainnet blockchain to localhost and try infinite permutations for free to see what the next state of the blockchain will be. And then if you like that state, you can then pay to send the working transaction to the mainnet to make that same state occur, in a sure bet. You have described mining.
Yeah good observation. But instead of arbitrarily hashing a algorithm used in consensus to find a block, this would be hammering specifically constructed bytecode at a smart contract’s ABI endpoints to see how many other things get effected.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are lots of stories lately about stolen NFTs. The podcast ReplyAll did an episode where they tracked down the current owner of a stolen NFT. He had sympathy for the original owner but he had no intention of turning it over. I don’t get why purchasing a stolen NFT is different than purchasing a stolen guitar from a pawn shop. Shouldn’t the previous owner be able to use the courts to demand the return of the item…
One of the points of digital assets is that the code is the contract, so whatever the code says is what was agreed to. There can be no cheating (in theory) hence no need to resort to courts etc.
And there is a chance that the courts will recognize law as law instead of code as law.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#47Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#48> Medjedovic added that he'd taken on “substantial risk” in pursuing this strategy. If he'd failed he would have lost “a pretty large chunk of my portfolio.” (The 3 ETH he stood to lose in fees was worth about $11,000 at the time.) This is misleading, either intentionally or due to Medjedovic's incompetence. You can fork the current head of the mainnet blockchain to localhost and try infinite permutations for free to…
> And then if you like that state, you can then pay to send the working transaction to the mainnet to make that same state occur, in a sure bet.
That often isn't true anymore, see https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/mev/
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop regulating crypto! (Unless I've been hacked, then we need to regulate it)
Or unless you've lost money! Lots of people saying "the fed could make crypto losers whole without putting up a sweat" the last few days.
And they already do for all crypto that's FDIC insured.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#50> But in our email exchanges, he argued that he'd executed a perfectly legal series of trades.
In real finance, there is an understanding that technical loopholes can exist, since not every outcome can be foreseen when writing laws, but the legal system can frequently prosecute against a series of actions which are, individually, legal, but which together are taken in order to achieve something illegal.
That is, modern finance and the law also attempt to deal with intent.
But in the Ethereum smart contracts world isn't the whole premise that the code is the law? That we don't need any of these pesky courts or banks or auditors or anything: the code is the law, and the decentralized blockchain will enforce it.
With this worldview, if the attacker simply exploited poorly-written code to find a loophole, how do the owners of Index have a leg to stand on?