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$625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

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Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#161
post #74
post #31

I'm out of the loop and trying to understand - people lent over half a billion dollars of their 'real' fake money (ETH) to a game studio so they could transact on the studio's sidechain because gas fees are prohibitively expensive on ETH, and then the game studio got hacked and lost it all? How was this ever going to end any other way? Imagine how preposterous the idea of storing $650mm in USD in a random game studio…

> Imagine how preposterous the idea of storing $650mm in USD in a random game studio's checking account would be. But it's decentralized. (Do the same hand movement as if saying "It's got electrolytes")

Someone actually made a gif of that scene with those words at that point, during the bitcoin scaling debate (where some wanted the block size to increase and decentralization was being ridiculed as a spurious defense of the small size).

I’ll see if I can find it.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if it was drained from a bank account, you have recourses to get it back.

Not true in the EU, we got scammed into making a bank transfer from Germany to Belgium for a bicycle that never arrived. We contacted the police and bank with all the details, and had to pay our bank about 40 euros to ask the scammer if they would refund the money, they said no and that was it. EU banking laws protected them. On the plus side the website appears to be gone now.

Banks won't reverse transfers depiberately initiated by the account holder. You would have had to go through the legal system to get your money back.

But that's a different case than money being "drained" from an account by someone else.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a cryptocurrency person, but my understanding is that that's happened before: ETH effectively rolled back the DAO hack[1] in 2016. The end result was the "Ethereum Classic" split, which continues to this day. There are all kinds of financial ramifications to this kind of split, nearly all of which (to the best of my knowledge) remain unsolved. The problem that you've correctly observed gets to the very root o…

they hard-forked the DOA, the old fork is still traded as ETH Classic no?

Yes, Ethereum Classic is still traded (although I have no idea how thinly). That's exactly why it's a problem: every account pre-fork now exists on two blockchains, and it's not clear what the tax, contractual, legal, etc. ramifications are of essentially doubling everybody's money. The nature of the blockchain also means that forks are destructive against innocent transactions: users doing "business as normal" who have the misfortune of being included in or after the rollback block have to re-coordinate all of their work.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#164
post #47

In a system run by people, the transaction could be reversed, traced, and the culprits eventually brought to justice. In a system run by algorithms, designed to avoid oversight by people (governments), there is no such powers. There's no reversal. There's no checking the name on the account the transfer was to. It's just gone. I do not understand why people who have legal intentions would want to be part of the crypt…

Because there are people in the world who can wake up and have lost all money they had deposited in a bank. There are people who have to pay 20% transfer fees to move money overseas. There are people who don't have the ability to open a bank account. There are people who can lose all their banked money if their government doesn't like them. The first world doesn't have these problems. Crypto is a bigger play than 'ge…

Where in the world is it common to lose all money deposited in a bank? And, why not just create better banks?

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when it comes to banking, random checking accounts are hacked into very rarely. to the point that in USA the FDIC is protecting your account up to $250,000. I don't recall last time seeing news on someone's bank account being hacked and drained, if anything its mostly family fraud. also there are all sorts of checks when you try to wire or withdraw more than $10,000, not to mention wire hundreds of millions. Such tra…

> I don't recall last time seeing news on someone's bank account being hacked and drained, if anything its mostly family fraud. Anecdote time. My wife and I have a shared checking account that got hacked and drained. First her debit card got skimmed. Then the perp called USAA a half dozen times claiming to be her and asking for account credentials. Finally they got a helpful account rep to reset the password, disable…

Weird, USAA froze my cards and funds immediately the only time I've had suspicious transactions. I guess the social portion is where we diverge though, they definitely tried harder to get in to yours. Ours was just a guy in Vancouver trying to order Thai food through a delivery app.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#166
> We are working directly with various government agencies to ensure the criminals get brought to justice.

It's amusing to see these kind of statements from the decentralized no goverment/no authorities crowd. To quote RKL:

Well it's anarchy, fuck the cops Of course, how else, through peace. But when the looters come to kick your ass I bet you cry "Police!"

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#167
post #150

Can someone attempt to explain or speculate at what the attacker is doing with their wallet right now? https://etherscan.io/txs?a=0x098b716b8aaf21512996dc57eb0615e... As I write this at about 17:00 UTC, they seem to be doing lots of small transactions (about $1 USD), and they are coming "From" many different places, but only showing "To" the "Ronin Bridge Exploiter". I don't understand this stuff well enough to see w…

It will be laundered in millions of $1 transactions, with others that are doing the same.

Then it will be sold at a discount for Monero or a shitcoin, and then theyll get a couple thousand dollars in cash in the mail for the rest of their life.

im jealous at this point,

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re describing a hard fork - exactly what created Ethereum and Ethereum Classic after the DAO hack. Even now it’s still considered a controversial move.

I think the majority sided with the move (which is why Ethereum soldiers on and EC is basically useless). It's a good final social check on bad behavior. I think Vitalik as written about this (I'm pretty sure I read about it in one of his long form posts).

> I think the majority sided with the move (which is why Ethereum soldiers on and EC is basically useless).

This should really be phrased "which is why the fork is called Ethereum and the original chain is called Ethereum Classic". And the majority (of what?) really had only indirect input - the exchanges decided which chain would get which ticker, and if they'd kept ETH=the original chain, it would still have the name Ethereum.

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all well and good when the thieves are in the US or a country that will extradite them. What happens when the thieves are operating out of a country without an extradition treaty? In the regular financial world you can at least reverse the transaction. With crypto, is there anything you can do?

In principle if you had enough desire among world governments you could plausibly try and legally force a blockchain fork.

And do that every time a hack occurs? What would the threshold be for when that would be worth it?

Could I recover $100k that got stolen? What about $10k? $1k?

Re: $625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network

#170
post #150

Can someone attempt to explain or speculate at what the attacker is doing with their wallet right now? https://etherscan.io/txs?a=0x098b716b8aaf21512996dc57eb0615e... As I write this at about 17:00 UTC, they seem to be doing lots of small transactions (about $1 USD), and they are coming "From" many different places, but only showing "To" the "Ronin Bridge Exploiter". I don't understand this stuff well enough to see w…

I think it’s random people just trying to get their name to show up on a currently very popular etherscan address.
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