Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake • Hacker News Board

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#151

Post by noduerme » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 3:24 AM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #133

noduerme wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they thought I produced the bluffing player's card to prevent the other player from folding. But you're right that a dealer who was trying to do that could've done so in any number of subtle ways. I couldn't really figure out why they were accusing me at the time, or what I would've gained from it, but it all happened very fast. There are dealers who are true shuffle mechanics and either know for sure or have…

> the default assumption is that there's a scam and the employee is guilty until proven innocent. To answer your real question - my guess is that this was a place that had a history of moving fast and breaking things. But probably more importantly - there was no way for that person to benefit from the mistake. The BTC price recovered automatically through the quick arbitrage market. The only way they could have benef…

Why do you think they didn't have a counterparty with a lot of purchases queued up at certain trigger levels on the exchange? It would have been an easy way to make a lot of money. Then blame a nameless employee for an honest mistake and come out looking as if they'd just absorbed a loss for moving too fast.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#152

Post by noduerme » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 3:27 AM UTC

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #113

noduerme wrote: post #27

Honest question: How do you determine that something like this was an honest mistake? Once, when I was much younger, I had a side gig dealing poker at an underground club in NYC. One morning at the end of 10 hours dealing, I accidentally exposed a burn card which turned out to be something one of the players was representing (bluffing), with about $10k on the table. It was an honest mistake - literally a fat finger m…

Funny that the top comment here is about poker - there's a rumor in the poker world that SBF was a whale in some of the biggest private app games, and owed the game runners north of $10m when he went down, which the winners in that game (apparently including legend of the game Dan "Jungleman" Cates) are now never going to see.

That's an interesting coincidence... it wouldn't surprise me in the least. Never heard he had a bad losing poker habit, though. Sounds juicy if it comes out.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#153

Post by anonymoushn » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 3:29 AM UTC

anonymoushn wrote: post #94

Contacts who worked at Alameda claim that this guy did not work at Alameda, or if he did, they never met.

Turns out that the author of TFA did work at Alameda as confirmed by court documents.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#154

Post by pests » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 3:29 AM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #127

paulpauper wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah a lot of "dumb" mistakes. whoops accidentally sent to wrong address, which i happen to own the private key too...

In this case, it wasn't anything like that. Someone exploited a weakness in CloudFlare and was able to replace the Badger website. When someone clicked on the site to execute an approval transaction, it went to the attacker first, which gave the attacker full control over their wallet. It did take a manual step on the part of Celsius though... which should have been checked more closely. The UX around that checking i…

> It is also clear that the frontends really need to be hosted in a way that they can't be modified.

Years ago the advice was IPFS and IPNS.

I agree. This is not the Web3 dream everyone was promising us when frontends and nft media assets themselves are mutably stored on some server relying on serveral entities in the DNS chain to maintain security, behave, and stay available.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#155

Post by keyle » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 3:47 AM UTC

denimnerd42 wrote: post #145

keyle wrote: post #32

Reading stories like this makes me wonder why I don't have a long term trade in place for a low amount and hope to fish a good one during a flash crash. Seen them on the stock market too. Back in my day I wrote a few trading bots, they never went anywhere positive after about a week of profit. Seems to me now that the smartest robo-trader algorithm is... 10 wait for human mistake... 20 goto 10

I made 17.5k doing this by dumb luck. I was trading crypto back in 2016-2017. Making a few thousand here and there. Mostly just from time in the market during the run-up of ethereum. The whole thing drove me crazy because I thought it was so stupid, like gambling. So in 2017 I withdrew my several thousand dollars and put in a trade on coinbase pro for 5 etherum at $100. (I had left $500 to do this, the most I was wil…

Glad it worked out for you! Thanks for sharing.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#156

Post by quickthrower2 » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 3:49 AM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #36

noduerme wrote: post #27

Honest question: How do you determine that something like this was an honest mistake? Once, when I was much younger, I had a side gig dealing poker at an underground club in NYC. One morning at the end of 10 hours dealing, I accidentally exposed a burn card which turned out to be something one of the players was representing (bluffing), with about $10k on the table. It was an honest mistake - literally a fat finger m…

Not a poker player, so maybe I'm missing something obvious, but: How did he think you were cheating? You had no way of knowing what that card was, right? And if you did somehow know what it was, surely you could have pre-arranged more subtle ways to tip off a player you were conspiring with?

If there is a bluffer on the table, revealing a burn card is going to be net neutral or negative for them. Then add in the meta game! A mob bosses son won't want to look like they did nothing in a situation like this. They need to show they are not a pushover.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#157

Post by quickthrower2 » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 3:55 AM UTC

zdw wrote: post #28

NelsonMinar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good news is that the world's Bitcoin network can only process ~100 transactions in 12 seconds.

Has this improved as of late? Maybe with other blockchain systems?

Snarky (flamewar starting) answer is it improved massively since they made the blocks bigger in 2017.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#158

Post by trogdor » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:05 AM UTC

I used to work in operational risk management at a major investment bank. This kind of thing is not at all unusual.

Fat finger errors would often result in unintentional gains. We incorporated them into our models as if they were losses of the same magnitude.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#159

Post by cortesoft » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:11 AM UTC

Cruncharoo wrote: post #92

testfoobar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind explaining the second story? I don't play casino blackjack. Isn't the goal of the house to get blackjack? So if the dealer had Ace face up and King down, isn't he assured to win the hand and collect all the stakes?

If he has ace face up and checks and sees a king he is supposed to flip it over, show his blackjack, and take everyone's money. He instead let them play the hand out as if he didn't have the king.

Minor point of clarity... it doesn't have to be a king... in blackjack, a 10, jack, king, and queen all have the same point value (10), so any one of them paired with an ace makes a blackjack.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#160

Post by School-Cotton » Thu, Sep 21, 2023, 4:17 AM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #98

FireBeyond wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once watched a new (I assume) dealer make two large mistakes at a blackjack table, in Vegas, of all places. One, I had put down $500 in twenties, and he was giving me chips, except he was going to give me $1,250 in chips, like he thought they were fifties. Pit Boss looked at him, looked at the chips, "What are you doing??", let him fix the error. A couple of hands in, dealer gets an Ace, so he checks the hole card.…

Based on the second mistake, on pure speculation, I think that might've been a dealer who recently came from Eastern Europe, where typically dealer blackjacks are not announced until the end of the hand (a significant loss in EV for the players). Since never exposing a card early is the one thing that's most drilled in, exposing one is counter to training, and that might be a hard habit to break. A lot of Eastern Eur…

> typically dealer blackjacks are not announced until the end of the hand (a significant loss in EV for the players).

That’s not just Eastern European, it’s European in general. In fact, that ruleset is well-known as ENHC (European no-hole-card) among blackjack players.