The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by randomhodler84 » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

turtledove wrote: post #145

randomhodler84 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Love to see your retirement 401k investments lose, eating away at your life’s labor and rendering it worthless.” This is a nasty position to take. You should never take joy at others losses.

Nope. Sorry. Those are not the same. I'm cheering to see the grift coming apart. Yes, some people are losing. But the early the grift falls apart, the fewer future people get destroyed by it. I'd rather cheer seeing crypto fail, then stand by and watch it suck in vulnerable person after vulnerable person in perpetuity. Also, I absolutely do cheer the losses of bad people. If a scammer or ethnonationalist loses their…

Its the same. You have an irrational fear/hatred of decentralized peer-to-peer money. Grifts unwinding is a thing, but don’t throw out the baby with the bath water here. I fully intend on using Bitcoin for the next few decades, both as a saving and international remittance system.

It’s from a place of spite. Don’t be spiteful, it makes you a bad person.

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

#202

Post by grumple » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:26 PM UTC

postalrat wrote: post #88

grumple wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you copy my signature does that mean you can sign my checks?

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

#203

Post by xur17 » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:27 PM UTC

caymanjim wrote: post #187

Forget about the exploit itself. Why are people trusting two young nobodies (Day and Kellar of Indexed Finance) with so much money in the first place? Ok, so Day has some decent academic credentials, but he's just one person. Who was doing risk analysis? Which independent experts analyzed their algorithms? Which accounting firm audited them? Where's the oversight? These two guys whipped something up, threw it out in…

Because people want to and decided the risk was worth it to them? If a consenting adult wants to deposit their money into a system that they have full visibility into, why should we stop them?

> This is how crypto operates. Buyer beware.

This statement rings very true for me, and perhaps is the bit we agree on. With crypto there is no "oversight" that blocks you from depositing your funds into unsafe contracts, etc. It's up to you as the user to do your own research before depositing funds.

There are many projects within crypto that ARE well built, and have been carefully tested, analyzed, slowly released to the public, etc. I like having the ability to make this choice myself instead of relying on some gatekeeper to decide what I can do with my money (cough "accredited investor rules").

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

#204

Post by Jon_Lowtek » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:32 PM UTC

-- EDIT --

i found the address and i take everything back and declare the opposite, that address is not random at all.

-- original post --

> The Ethereum address used for the attack included the number ... shorthand for ...

So Bloomberg thinks people choose the numbers in their wallet addresses and are responsible for any perceived numerological meaning. Are they for real?

Sure the guy could have sat there recreating addresses until one includes this number, but i consider it more likely this is the result of searching randomness for patterns they want to find.

Someone noticed the pattern in the randomness and Bloomberg includes it, as it makes the antagonist more evil and the story more interesting.

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

#205

Post by LeifCarrotson » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:36 PM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #186

godelski wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a thing that confused me about smart contracts. I don't see how they can exist without a judicial system. They do seem to have some uses under that framework. Like the system is auditable so you can prove if someone cheated and changed a contract out from under you (and you lost your copy), but that's only a minor improvement on the current system. The US has a lot of legal policy that is based on spirit of t…

The legal system has failure modes that are just as easily exploitable, but humans can intervene and reverse the failure, make people whole, etc. The problem with smart contracts isn't that there are bugs, but that buggy results are final with little to no recourse, by design, unless you get everyone to agree to hard fork the chain (rolling the "bad" transactions back and eplacing the buggy contract) and/or the imple…

I think a lot of the appeal of crypto/smart contracts is that they are final with little to no recourse, humans can't intervene and exploit failure modes which individuals using the so-called contracts can't defend against.

Corporations and wealthy individuals with influence in the writing of this legal system, with massive amounts of financial resources, with negligible moral agency, and with limited criminal liability find very different utility in the ability to use the legal system to roll back contracts, to enforce them, or to ignore them.

Those who find themselves on the other side of this power disparity would often prefer to risk a potentially buggy but inviolate contract than one which they expect to be abused against them.

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

#206

Post by sushid » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

fao_ wrote: post #174

sushid wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart contracts allow for guaranteed outcomes. Some commentary added by a random law firm does not mean that guaranteed outcomes == no need for litigation and courts. Just think of non-smart contract parallels. If a bank had an ATM, the premise is that this ATM will execute a series of commands and allow you to withdraw/deposit/transfer funds. If a nefarious back actor found a series of user input that allowed them t…

> Some commentary added by a random law firm does not mean that guaranteed outcomes == no need for litigation and courts. But it would appear that you expect us to believe that some commentary added by a random hacker news poster means the opposite?

I'm not extrapolating on the premise adding my own commentary. The parent commenter asserts an axiom (that we all purported agree with) and then links an observation to said axiom. I'm merely stating that the observation is not part of said axiom.

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

#207

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #90

daveed wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue that this wasn't really a code flaw. They made a synthetic asset that calculated its price in a dumb way. That happens plenty often without code, and gets exploited by savvy buyers without code.

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

#208

Post by chx » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #186

godelski wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a thing that confused me about smart contracts. I don't see how they can exist without a judicial system. They do seem to have some uses under that framework. Like the system is auditable so you can prove if someone cheated and changed a contract out from under you (and you lost your copy), but that's only a minor improvement on the current system. The US has a lot of legal policy that is based on spirit of t…

The legal system has failure modes that are just as easily exploitable, but humans can intervene and reverse the failure, make people whole, etc. The problem with smart contracts isn't that there are bugs, but that buggy results are final with little to no recourse, by design, unless you get everyone to agree to hard fork the chain (rolling the "bad" transactions back and eplacing the buggy contract) and/or the imple…

There was a wonderful summary of what smart contracts are.

https://twitter.com/qrs/status/1395784294451265536

> Smart contracts should be considered self-funded bug-bounty platforms.

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

#209

Post by buzzy_hacker » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:40 PM UTC

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #204

-- EDIT -- i found the address and i take everything back and declare the opposite, that address is not random at all. -- original post -- > The Ethereum address used for the attack included the number ... shorthand for ... So Bloomberg thinks people choose the numbers in their wallet addresses and are responsible for any perceived numerological meaning. Are they for real? Sure the guy could have sat there recreating…

I’ll give the full quote:

> The Ethereum address Medjedovic used for the attack included the number “1488”—shorthand for a neo-Nazi slogan—and he’d written the N-word into the code itself, 16 times. A Twitter user called him the “Dylan [sic] Roof of Balancer Pools,” a reference to the mass shooter who killed nine Black people at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. Medjedovic liked the tweet.

Here’s another:

> Medjedovic apparently flirted with extremist ideas: The classmate says he heard him speak favorably about White supremacy and eugenics.

He is clearly a white supremacist, how is this “searching randomness for patterns they want to find”? This is speculation, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this guy generated lots of addresses until he got one that did have 1488 in it.

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

#210

Post by oldgradstudent » Mon, May 23, 2022, 8:41 PM UTC

colinmhayes wrote: post #125

bombcar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of an NFT is that the ownership is on the blockchain and guaranteed by said blockchain - if the courts can "force" return of the NFT than the NFT isn't actually synonymous with the ownership, and so then is kinda pointless.

There are 2 different issues here. Do courts physically have the ability to change the blockchain so that an NFT goes to a different wallet? No. Do courts have the ability to arrest someone when they ignore a court order to transfer an NFT? Yes. I don't think the courts really care about some pure intentioned "code is law" argument, because they tend to think law is law.

With the ledger being public, it could be very simple for courts and police to deal with it given the appropriate legislation.

Mark the result of theft or other illegal transactions, and any subsequent transaction as dirty.

Make any exchange, any vendor, any trader, and any user check with a government database before or immediately after receiving a payment, with penalties prescribed by law.

You immediately limit stolen crypto to the black market.