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OptiFi Program Incident Report

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Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#131

Post by targ65 »

When are we going to admit that DeFi is a regression, not progress, versus the status quo financial system?

Crypto is all about disintermediation. But that doesn't work when people's money / savings are on the line.

So we can easily tell exactly where this leads: Once enough pain has been sustained through errors like this, DeFi code bugs, fraudulent transfers, etc... a whole industry of HUMANS will pop up that will (a) become an intermediary in crypto/DeFi transactions to ensure that fraud, errors, etc are prevented; (b) introduce mechanisms to revert transactions (controlled by said HUMANS); (c) perform the massive paperwork on compliance (KYC, register big transaction, check against blacklists, etc)

Is there really a different outcome?

Crypto fans claim finance is an overbloated industry and they are here to disrupt it. In reality all they are doing is recreating exactly the same system but with one more layer of indirection (instead of transferring dollars you transfer a stablecoin that points to a dollar).

Will there be exciting use cases for crypto at the edges? maybe. Will it 'disrupt' the broader financial system, in the sense that it will make it better/faster/cheaper? I don't see it.

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#133

Post by prepend »

I like that errors can be quantified as it removes some doom ambiguity from mistakes.

The first company I worked for sold access to data on a per minute basis and it was like $1.50/minute or something (dialup access in the 90s to an interactive ClarionDB session).

So any outage would be quantified by some curious programmer. I remember even small outages being quantified in hot washes as 10 minutes x 2000 users x $1.5 = $30k outage.

I remember one of my bosses was nicknamed “Commander Crash” as he once crashed the whole system for hours based on a single live config file edit.

No one was fired but it was actually liberating knowing how much mistakes cost.

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#134

Post by wzwy »

krageon wrote: post #70
vicnicius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple confirmation step with a relevant warning could possibly make developers think twice before proceeding.

From the many depressing years I've done UX work I can promise you no amount of changes they make will protect users from their own mistakes. It is far better for your own sanity to accept people make mistakes. This is what development and staging environments are for.

Accepting that people make mistakes is one thing, but reducing those mistakes is another.

If it’s a simple change, why not do it? Though, I can see your point if the change is monumental but barely reduces rate of mistakes.

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#135

Post by Nextgrid »

targ65 wrote: post #131

When are we going to admit that DeFi is a regression, not progress, versus the status quo financial system? Crypto is all about disintermediation. But that doesn't work when people's money / savings are on the line. So we can easily tell exactly where this leads: Once enough pain has been sustained through errors like this, DeFi code bugs, fraudulent transfers, etc... a whole industry of HUMANS will pop up that will…

> a whole industry of HUMANS will pop up that will (a) become an intermediary in crypto/DeFi transactions to ensure that fraud, errors, etc are prevented; (b) introduce mechanisms to revert transactions (controlled by said HUMANS); (c) perform the massive paperwork on compliance (KIC, register big transaction, check against blacklists, etc)

When they do that they'll realize they no longer get any benefit from the underlying asset being a cryptocurrency (since it is no longer trustless as the humans are able to reverse transactions) and will switch back to a trust-based system with a good old database as the ledger.

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#136

Post by glofish »

jdasdf wrote: post #78
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #39

This is one of the biggest flaws in crypto. Small errors can erode hundreds of millions of value. That's when most crypto companies right now are very small. Can you imagine the chaos if crypto were to actually become big and dev count were to grow to 1k+ people spread across multiple offices? There's definite efficiency gains with crypto (a dex like Uniswap can do massive volume with very few developers for instance…

> This is one of the biggest flaws in crypto. Small errors can erode hundreds of millions of value. That's reality. Same thing would have happened if they had put all that cash on a boat, and accidentally sunk it.

> Same thing would have happened if they had put all that cash on a boat, and accidentally sunk it.

Are you saying that it is impossible to get valuables out of a boat that sunk?

"Treasure trove of gold and jewels recovered from a 366-year-old shipwreck in the Bahamas"

https://www.livescience.com/bahamas-shipwreck-gold-jewels

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#138

Post by dark-star »

I have not understood most of that article (optifi, mainnet, solana, PDAs, deployer address, program, tvl, ...what?) but what I get from it is that people who run crypto-anything make costly mistakes.

Funny that people still ask me "hey, why do you trust those evil banks? you should do all in crypto instead!" and then laugh at me when I tell them I trust banks more than some random dev on the internet...

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#139

Post by jpambrun »

jdasdf wrote: post #78
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #39

This is one of the biggest flaws in crypto. Small errors can erode hundreds of millions of value. That's when most crypto companies right now are very small. Can you imagine the chaos if crypto were to actually become big and dev count were to grow to 1k+ people spread across multiple offices? There's definite efficiency gains with crypto (a dex like Uniswap can do massive volume with very few developers for instance…

> This is one of the biggest flaws in crypto. Small errors can erode hundreds of millions of value. That's reality. Same thing would have happened if they had put all that cash on a boat, and accidentally sunk it.

But we moved away from moving currency in sinkable boats hundreds of years ago. Error in plain old finance today can often be fixed. Do we need to regress back to antiquity?

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#140

Post by zeroclip »

targ65 wrote: post #131

When are we going to admit that DeFi is a regression, not progress, versus the status quo financial system? Crypto is all about disintermediation. But that doesn't work when people's money / savings are on the line. So we can easily tell exactly where this leads: Once enough pain has been sustained through errors like this, DeFi code bugs, fraudulent transfers, etc... a whole industry of HUMANS will pop up that will…

Crypto is already an "industry of humans". OpenSea is a centralized company, run by humans, and they sometimes need to intermediate when there are bugs or problems in their platform that causes users to lose funds. They also have to comply with the laws of whatever country they are registered in. If an OpenSea developer fat fingered their contract deployment, it would cause massive losses.

But what does that matter? The point of decentralization is not to abolish humans, services, platforms, user-experience designs. The blockchain acts as a neutral base layer, and competing services can operate on top of the same shared data. OpenSea has limited control over the NFTs being listed on it, which is why you can buy and sell the same assets on other platforms.

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