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The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

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Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

#81

Post by meetups323 »

motohagiography wrote: post #60

This isn't a hack, it was straight arbitrage. I distinguish them because there was at no time a transfer of administrative power or control over the contract or targets infrastructure to Medjedovic. In a smart contract, I'd make a legal distinction between syntactic parsing and calculation, which has to do with the purity of functions and data. An arbitrage would be fair game if it levered an unanticipated calculatio…

> If he has the money, fleeing before charges were laid was probably even rational, as there is no reason to expect the legal system is equipped to deliver justice in something so new.

Except what's next? Live in hiding in a foreign country? Craft a new identity and find new chains to exploit? I suppose 18 years old is a good time to learn that you can have all the money in the world, but it won't do shit for you if you can't spend time with the people you want to.

I'd wager this individual could get much more satisfaction out of developing novel, interesting mathematics that do actual good for humanity, surrounded by a group of like minded high performing individuals. But he seems to have thrown hopes of that out the window. It's sad, really.

But I'm perhaps projecting.

Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

#82

Post by DannyBee »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #65
SamBam wrote: post #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, mode…

I've seen this argument regarding smart contracts several times now, and I don't think it makes any sense. It's like robbing someone in real life, then claiming you did nothing wrong because you didn't violate the "laws" of physics. Those are two entirely separate things. In the world of smart contracts code is indeed law, but that doesn't change the fact that in the real world law is law, and the fact that you used…

This claim makes no sense. In the real world, crimes have very specific definitions. Most are physical, in fact.

For example, robbery is when, with intent to commit theft, you take property by force.

Anything else is not robbery.

Theft by taking is: when a person unlawfully takes or, being in lawful possession thereof, unlawfully appropriates any property of another with the intention of depriving him of the property, regardless of the manner in which property is taken or appropriated.

(The above is georgia, robbery/theft/etc are state crimes so defintions vary a bit)

Again, it requires doing so unlawfully (or converting unlawfully).

If doing what this person did isn't unlawful in the real world, it's not theft, it's not robbery, it's not anything.

So you have to find a crime that actually matches what happened.

It's not wire fraud - that would require " false statement, promise, or misrepresentation in order obtain money or something of value from someone else."

etc

So what crime do you believe this actually is?

(So far i've only seen a civil lawsuit, and while there is a warrant for his arrest, that's for refusing to move the tokens to a neutral third party, or show up to court :P )

Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

#83

Post by billpg »

postalrat wrote: post #34
onepointsixC wrote: post #16

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?

If you discovered a significant shortcut to hashing and then went back to block 1 and re-mined every block until your branch was the one with the most proof-of-work, I'd have a hard time trying to claim that your branch wasn't the legitimate one, according to Bitcoin's own rules.

I suspect in this hypothetical scenario, however, the bitcoin developers would write a new rule.

Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

#84

Post by kristjansson »

drcode wrote: post #48
vmception wrote: post #13

> 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/

MEV is something different though? GPs (excellent) point is that anyone can play out the effects of their transaction locally ad infinitum, and chose to transact once they're convinced of its behavior. Of course, this can't account for the response of other actors, but the point stands that Medjedovic (should have) been taking far less risk than implied by that quote.

Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

#85

Post by uoaei »

plandis wrote: post #54
omarhaneef wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When two or more parties sign a contract, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all the terms in that contract are enforceable.

That's true if you are litigating the enforcement of the contract through traditional legal systems. Crypto enthusiasts want to be completely divorced from those.

Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

#86

Post by Brian_K_White »

kristjansson wrote: post #73

This is an outright copy of https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-05-19/crypto-pl... . e: missed at the end of the article: > (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.) So perhaps this is reproduced under a legit syndication deal?

It says "(c) 2022 Bloomberg Christopher Beam, Bloomberg Businessweek" right in it.

Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

#87

Post by uoaei »

antifa wrote: post #46
omarhaneef wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that will expose the fundamental contradictions and hypocrisy of the crypto community writ large, if they accept that help from the legal system.

Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

#88

Post by postalrat »

grumple wrote: post #71
postalrat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be an exploit if I discover the math to move all bitcoin in existence to whatever address I want then do so?

Uh... yes? Are you seriously trying to imply that would be legal? If someone ever cracks modern encryption, that doesn't mean they can do whatever they want with everyone's accounts everywhere. If you find an exploit and exploit it, that's illegal.

What doesn't owning bitcoin really mean? If I had the math to generate keys why wouldn't I also be considered an owner?

Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds

#90

Post by Ajedi32 »

daveed wrote: post #72
Ajedi32 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this argument regarding smart contracts several times now, and I don't think it makes any sense. It's like robbing someone in real life, then claiming you did nothing wrong because you didn't violate the "laws" of physics. Those are two entirely separate things. In the world of smart contracts code is indeed law, but that doesn't change the fact that in the real world law is law, and the fact that you used…

Respectfully disagree. I think I've seen several times the belief(from crypto supporters) that the code is the code is the code, and these are the rules that we play with. The "laws of physics" analogy doesn't match up. I feel like it would be more appropriate in an anarchist society (physics are the only laws, thus everything that obeys physics is game). This feels more like discovering an exploit in a video game. I…

That's not how the law works though, at least not in any country I know of. If you exploit flaws in computer code to steal something of real-world value, that's a crime.

We're all bound to the laws of physics, just as in the world of smart contracts all are bound to the laws of code. But none of that changes the existence of the laws of men.

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