101–105 of 105 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First question: yes, the missing part is that the attacker also had to buy a bunch of spot mango tokens on centralized exchanges to drive the price up after establishing the large position. Second question: Mango Markets lets you trade perpetual futures with leverage, so you don't need collateral equal to the notional value of the contracts you buy.
Okay, let me see of I got this right. User acquires an/a set of in perpetuity futures contracts. (A future without an expiry date, effectively, what? A pin I guess?) Idea being, this order indicates intent to swap at volume $MNGO to $USDC at $RATE. Centralized exchanges sees the futures order, and starts cranking up the price of $MNGO due to the increased interest in swapping based on the presence of the Futures. The…
No, a perpetual future is like a basket of daily futures that roll over automatically when they expire. Also, an order is different from a position. The user acquired a long position in one account and a short position in another.
> Centralized exchanges sees the futures order, and starts cranking up the price of $MNGO due to the increased interest in swapping based on the presence of the Futures.
No, the activity on the Mango DEX had no impact on the price of MNGO on centralized exchanges. The user had to separately buy a bunch of MNGO on centralized exchanges to manipulate the price.
> The Futures contracts are leveraged, but require no collateral, because there is no expiry date on the Future (no intended date of delivery).
They require collateral. That's why the user had to send $5mm to each of the two accounts they used at the Mango DEX as the first step of the attack.
> So the order volume (spot token purchases) induced upward price movement and... What? Caused other uninvolved investors to buy his acquired tokens at a peak, and he just takes the money and cashes out never intending to actually honor or settle up the perps, which won't margin call, because they're still "good" but will never mature? I'm failing to see an exfil path for ill-gotten gains/financial chicanery beyond the seemingly obvious wash trading.
The user could withdraw dollars from Mango because their long MNGO-PERP position was in profit.
Code is law working out real well over here. The code said that we should value MNGO at the current spot price, so that's what the code did, and poof went the entire network. In the real world we have things like leverage ratios, anti-manipulation laws, circuit breakers, etc. Some of this is regulatory, and others are just things we figured out were good ideas many years ago. I think there's a sense of hubris in the…
Playing devil's advocate here, since I'm generally of your opinion: there is nothing that prevents more code being written covering more unintended uses of the technology, including injuctions and reversals. If at all, there is a hubris that complex problems can be solved with clean, minimal code and simple concepts. After all, when rendering their decisions, human courts are also solely refering to rules written bef…
Yes, certainly we can write courts, injunctions, reversals, etc into code, but that's massively increasing the surface area for bugs. Oops, a hacker just injuncted the entire network and now the entire network is frozen.
Courts exist, to a certain extent, so that an impartial human can take a look at the situation and act according to thousands of pages of laws and hundreds of years of precedent. Humans are good at thinking like other humans, so we usually have pretty good intuition around what a judge will say and the limited possible outcomes from there, whereas the same really can't be said for computers.
Oops, robojudge just awarded all the money in the network to the hacker, too bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, let me see of I got this right. User acquires an/a set of in perpetuity futures contracts. (A future without an expiry date, effectively, what? A pin I guess?) Idea being, this order indicates intent to swap at volume $MNGO to $USDC at $RATE. Centralized exchanges sees the futures order, and starts cranking up the price of $MNGO due to the increased interest in swapping based on the presence of the Futures. The…
> User acquires an/a set of in perpetuity futures contracts. (A future without an expiry date, effectively, what? A pin I guess?) Idea being, this order indicates intent to swap at volume $MNGO to $USDC at $RATE. No, a perpetual future is like a basket of daily futures that roll over automatically when they expire. Also, an order is different from a position. The user acquired a long position in one account and a sho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulating bodies are not capable of performing cyber-security protocol audits on emerging technology. 'Throwing regulation at the problem' is an embarrassing proposal that I'm sure many regulating bodies will pat you on the back for stanning.
Like we have chemical analogue laws that prohibit new drugs that are similar to existing drugs, we could have financial services / product analogue laws that prohibit bullshit like this, that enables regulators / LE to prosecute bad actors. I'm not suggesting that we ought prohibit innovation, and I'd prefer we tax and regulate drugs too, and laws don't prevent bad actors, but we should be able to go after and exact…
What would be much better is if more crypto skeptics had more nuance. Most of them treat crypto like the D.A.R.E program treated drugs - in reality there are a concentrated subset of categories of crypto which have an outsized probability of being extremely high risk, but when counter-shills tell everyone to avoid all crypto, those a bit more open minded are less equipped to make distinctions within crypto.
I say the bad example of this is https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ which is fraught with cynicism and absolutism.
The good example is https://rekt.news/ which keeps track of every hack and exploit while at the same time acknowledging what is progressive about crypto.