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FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

coindesk.com

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Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#821

Post by isthisthingon99 »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #798
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The harmony bridge hack by Lazarus group (north korean actor) is a good example: The first address used is 0x0d043128146654c7683fbf30ac98d7b2285ded00 It's a bit harder to trace using public tools because they immediately start splitting off the various coins to other addresses, but looking at just the USDC: They split it off into a single purpose address that is just responsible for converting it to ETH. They do this…

What's "slippage"?

In every market, a certain number of people are willing to buy at the bid and sell at the ask. When you are trying to get rid of more than the market is able to absorb, you will wipe out multiple levels of bids. Slippage then refers to the price difference between (say) the mid price of the bid and ask and the price that you finally got filled at.

Say I want to sell 100 pokemons as fast as possible. I will take whatever the market wants to pay me. This is a market order.

Before my order goes in, people are willing to buy 10 pokemons at $50 and willing to sell 10 at $52. The midpoint is 51.

I put in my order.

10 of my pokemons get sold at $50. My slippage is $1x10.

The next level down is $48 where people are willing to buy 25 pokemons. So I will get filled now at $48. My slippage is $3x25=($51-48)x25.

Etc

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#822

Post by kevinak »

Stention314 wrote: post #795
kevinak wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to start backing up your statements with facts. Please show us that bitcoin fees are "often not" cheap at all. Here's some actual data you can look at: https://mempool.space/graphs/mining/block-fee-rates#all Look at the "Min" fee rate; regularly very close to 1. That's $0.02 at current prices.

Sources? I was buying and transferring bitcoins over 8 years as I bought weed through it. Of course you can even pay 0 but you know it's not the normal someone would wait days for the transaction going through. You clearly did not use Bitcoin often enough otherwise you could just looked the spikes up yourself. That first corona year was even worse with the fees.

That's not a source.

I literally posted a source showing you it's very cheap. The minimum fee is the lowest fee you'll pay to get into the next block.

I used Bitcoin way back in 2010. Though I don't understand why that makes a difference since you can look up the prices in hindsight.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#823

Post by kevinak »

Stention314 wrote: post #796
kevinak wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that's the case for some of the landfills, but definitely not all of them. In the US 70% of the methane from landfills is vented, rather than flared. That means that for some reason, either it's too expensive to do or something else is blocking this. And that's just the US. You can also imagine that landfills in the developing world are better targets. Infrastructure is not as good there as it is in the US o…

The profit is too small. Easy to solve with laws. Shouldn't be allowed anyway to just pick the good things from a gas field...

Yeah, let's use laws instead of something that makes monetary sense...?

It's not a gas field, it's a land fill.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#824

Post by kevinak »

ipython wrote: post #813
kevinak wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I've never claimed that. Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, if it's useless or not, don't you agree that net negative is better than zero? Burning methane (flaring) is most definitely an improvement over not doing it. That's just a fact. It accounts for about 20% of global emissions and is 25 times as potent as CO2. https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane You would use Bitcoin mining as a monetary inc…

I would agree that not performing useless computations is better than performing useless computations. If monetary incentives are all we need, then just use tax incentives to do so. That seems much easier than shipping mining rigs and the corresponding cooling to locations apparently too far from civilization to produce energy for anything useful.

A tax would result in a cost for the business.

Bitcoin mining results in a profit.

Why would you pick the first one?

Transporting miners is not the hard part, you just keep them in containers. What is hard is building the necessary stuff to actually flare the gas properly.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#825

Post by api »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #713
api wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a coincidence that the founder of FTX seems to be fleeing to Argentina? Of course one would assume he or his conspirators would do a better job, but maybe not if this busting out was initiated under time pressure. Once again almost everything in cryptocurrency proves to be a scam.

> Once again almost everything in cryptocurrency proves to be a scam. Once again people on HN hate on cryptocurrencies for no good reason. This isn't a cryptocurrency problem, it's a fractional reserve banking problem. These centralized exchanges are unregulated banks in disguise. It's no surprise to anyone that they exhibit all of the problems of unregulated banks. Problems such as "we used customer deposits to gamb…

That’s kind of my point. The things being done with cryptocurrency are mostly scams and failed schemes. Cryptocurrency can be used in this peer to peer way like you describe but virtually nobody does that. It’s too technical for 99% of users and meanwhile you have all these scams that have advertising budgets. Decentralization will never have a Super Bowl ad.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#826

Post by jl2718 »

tevon wrote: post #722

This is additionally a reminder that crypto currently holds a fairly irreconcilable catch-22. "Freezeable" tokens completely defeat the purpose of a decentralized currency. Why create nodes/verifiers etc if a wallet can be unilaterally frozen, either under pressure from gov't, community, or another entity. However NOT allowing freezeability allows for massive hacks, either by insiders, poor security, or sloppiness. S…

It seems to me that validators aren't taking their sovereignty seriously. They are either following the exact suggested rules of the blockchain, or they are following the laws, but I have not seen the idealized consensus scenario where each node is soft-forking their rule-set to align with their own values. This was explicitly suggested in early discussions of bitcoin. There are three basic scenarios where a block participant may make a values judgement:

1. Including a transaction into a block

2. Block acceptance and propagation

3. Chain acceptance by the client

Everything else is cryptographically locked, as in, a full-chain audit would reveal discrepancies, but these choices maintain internal consistency. You may hate this idea, but it is coming, and the default rule set will come from the jurisdictions. However, they will only have the power of transaction censorship by unanimous consent, total power of block censorship, and almost no control over chain censorship.

I just had a half-baked idea: a chain that has the ability to hard-fork only in small differences, but essentially allows an infinite number of forks and merges in such a way that each transaction is valid if not explicitly invalid. In other words, a transaction fork does not invalidate the proof of an unrelated transaction that descends from the forked root hash. This would have to be a very different kind of hash/proof. Such a chain would greatly reduce the risk of rule modifications such as censoring transactions from an attacker, while also supporting the choice to use a chain without censorship, and enable reconciliation between the two.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#827

Post by VagueMag »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #764
VagueMag wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If authorities wanted to freeze a subset of DAI, could they do so by directing USDC to refuse to back those tokens?

Nope they'd have to freeze the entire collateral that Dai has (~33% of all collateral they have rn), Dai could not freeze individual addresses and almost assuredly wouldn't even if asked.

Ok, so, "blacklist these particular addresses or we will seize your entire collateral"?

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#828

Post by jl2718 »

lupire wrote: post #731
tevon wrote: post #722

This is additionally a reminder that crypto currently holds a fairly irreconcilable catch-22. "Freezeable" tokens completely defeat the purpose of a decentralized currency. Why create nodes/verifiers etc if a wallet can be unilaterally frozen, either under pressure from gov't, community, or another entity. However NOT allowing freezeability allows for massive hacks, either by insiders, poor security, or sloppiness. S…

51% vote to freeze (by validators) is decentralized.

This 51% number is not really relevant in blockchain consensus. There is Byzantine consensus, which derives from a specific set of assumptions, but those don't really apply. In reality, consensus is not at all a vote. Coinbase and Circle can accept a chain with only 1% validator support, and that will probably be the canonical chain. Apologies to the many blockchain economists and computer pseudo-scientists that spent the last decade on this, but Consensus is mostly an irrelevant concept. The good news is that new cryptographic primitives are there to fill the same role, and we're just getting started with that.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#829

Post by hoytschermerhrn »

bombcar wrote: post #765
FormerBandmate wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t an insider be an expert on crypto markets? They literally ran one

1. Not all the insiders are very skilled, as we can see from these things blowing up in expected ways. 2. Even if you ARE a skilled insider, you may have no experience with laundering coin. 3. The biggest/best coin launderer was killed (tornado?) recently, so you may have to learn everything again. 4. You may be an expert with a gun to your head in some basement in God knows where, and trying to not be shot.

Source on this tornado comment? This entire story is just so wild that it’s hard to keep up.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#830

Post by ipython »

kevinak wrote: post #824
ipython wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree that not performing useless computations is better than performing useless computations. If monetary incentives are all we need, then just use tax incentives to do so. That seems much easier than shipping mining rigs and the corresponding cooling to locations apparently too far from civilization to produce energy for anything useful.

A tax would result in a cost for the business. Bitcoin mining results in a profit. Why would you pick the first one? Transporting miners is not the hard part, you just keep them in containers. What is hard is building the necessary stuff to actually flare the gas properly.

A tax incentive, as in an offset on their costs.
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