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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

#111

Post by Brian_K_White »

omarhaneef wrote: post #40
lbriner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A judge is not deciding whether something is "fair" they are deciding whether it is illegal to the letter and/or spirit of the law. The reason this is at odds with us is that many things are legal that are not "fair". The specific danger here legally is trying to apply general laws into an unregulated market. It's a bit like borrowing money from your mate and then trying to take him to court because he's asking for t…

Well, this is going to send us down a rabbit hole but the reverse is also true: there are multiple interpretations of a given law and the judge tries to use their judgement to square the law with the facts. (Rabbit hole because I sense this is a debate lawyers have all through law school, and there are various schools of thoughts about the nature of the law etc)

Right? There probably is not agreement on fundamentals like the root purpose of law.

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

#112

Post by hiq »

tzs wrote: post #55

> It would take weeks to figure out precisely what had happened, but it appeared that the platform had been fooled into severely undervaluing tokens that belonged to its users and selling them to the attacker at an extreme discount. Q: is the programming language these things are written in powerful enough and have sufficient data access for the developers to include sanity checks that would halt trading automaticall…

See this very good comment about Solidity, the main language used to write software on Ethereum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691212

More to your point, you can always have more logging, slow things down to make them safer and allow communities to react in a timely manner, but it's far from trivial. The real problem is that any mistake can be fatal from the defender's point of view.

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

#113

Post by nomel »

Ataraxic wrote: post #94
SamBam wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is the premise of smart contracts. Sure, it doesn't excuse you from the law if your contract is to pay someone to shoot someone, but it's supposed to be the final word on the actual financial transactions that happen within the contract. Plenty of crypto hypers say the same. E.g. from a quick search of "Smart Contract advantages," the very first article, by a law firm: > Guaranteed Outcomes: Potentially the…

That may be the premise, but has that actually be held up and recognized as such in courts in major countries? Like are there precedents regarding this? At that point it's no longer a premise (for those particular countries), but until then it's just a supposition. I think courts are wary to wade deeply into a new financial system like this but at the same time I find it hard to believe that the judiciary and the leg…

> be held up and recognized as such in courts in major countries?

Only having a slight understanding of crypto, if local courts are required, what's the point of crypto? Why not use the existing financial systems, where all of this is built in?

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

#114

Post by WhitneyLand »

Some insight as to what this guy is made of:

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.

Completely counter to every experience I’ve had working with Waterloo people. My sample group always seemed smart, interesting, kind.

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

#115

Post by vmception »

richbell wrote: post #108
vmception wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

d) I genuinely believe that Medjedovic should show up in court to test that theory. The only thing interesting about this case is how incompetent he was, while having his entire brand and identity be based on intellectual superiority. He should have used a virgin address and Tornado cash. He should have not needed to risk any funds for failure, as he should have tested the transaction in a localhost staging environme…

> The only thing interesting about this case is how incompetent he was I'm astonished at how poor his OPSEC was. He could have taken any number of precautions to shield his identity -- did he really think that deleting the messages on Discord would be sufficient?

yeah its strange. one of his addresses was funded previously by a Tornado Cash balance as well

oh well, he slipped up and is now probably a fugitive since he keeps using his court "frozen" funds.

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

#116

Post by sushid »

bombcar wrote: post #76
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…

Many people in crypto want to not have to comply with "real world" laws right up until the point where it would be to their benefit to do so. And if "smart contracts" depend on real law, then they're not really needed in many of the supposed use cases.

Just because there are crypto anarchists doesn't mean that all crypto proponents are anarchists. And smart contracts (not sure why they're in quotes in your comment) can depend on real law and still operate fine (e.g. I'm sure NBA Topshot would file a legal case again Dapper Labs if they did something significantly damaging to their brand/NFTs, etc.).

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

#118

Post by knorker »

twox2 wrote: post #57
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…

"Code is law" is a dream that is not actualized. It's not actually law, it's just code. I'm pretty sure law enforcement will gladly prosecute for a lot of these "hacks".

Indeed it cannot be actualized, as it connects to the real world.

This is why things like "land registry on the blockchain" will never happen. When a court decides that a sale of a house was unlawful, then the blockchain is wrong and irrelevant.

Code isn't law. Law is system that ultimately sends people to your house and puts you in a locked house that you're not allowed to leave, and lets other people live in "your" house now.

Math can't enforce who lives in your house.

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

#120

Post by motohagiography »

meetups323 wrote: post #81
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…

Regarding these like minded high performing individuals surviving in institutions - after a couple of sigmas and making some money, it can become difficult to value their esteem. Canada is full of people who have fled their home countries with their money, foreign capital flight drives our entire real estate and supercar markets, wealthy fugitives as a lifestyle choice are probably more common than we expect.
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