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White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

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Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#251
post #3

Prior discussion of this incident (and the $2M bounty) here on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30289240 My (I'm the hacker) article / post-mortem this blog post is referring to: https://www.saurik.com/optimism.html At the time of this last getting traction a few days ago, some people were sad that the title of my article and the discussion that resulted focused more on the bug instead of the bounty…

Saurik you are a true legend

Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#252
post #3

Prior discussion of this incident (and the $2M bounty) here on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30289240 My (I'm the hacker) article / post-mortem this blog post is referring to: https://www.saurik.com/optimism.html At the time of this last getting traction a few days ago, some people were sad that the title of my article and the discussion that resulted focused more on the bug instead of the bounty…

Congratulations! Couldn't happen to a better person. Thanks a lot for Cydia!

Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#253
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure it's actually applicable. That Reddit comment is about poor people winning lots of money by chance, not smart people earning lots of money by working. The risks are very different, not to say that the scale between 2 million and 170 million is way bigger than you seem to think.

Poor people aren’t stupid

Why don’t they get jobs at FAANG then?

Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich people of HN, is this true? I’d always heard each million is worth about $50k a year. Was that just during boom times, or simply mistaken?

Not even close. There's no reliable way to get a fixed income, and inflation is very high.

State-issued debt from eurozone countries or the US is essentially risk-free. Any of them defaulting would mean they effectively stopped to print cash, at which point one should probably start growing their own chickens.

Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#255
post #185

Headline is misleading. Creation of wrapped ETH tokens on Optimism, thereby allowing _theft_ of ETH from contract escrowed funds.

Thanks. As somebody with a very basic understanding of ETH, it seemed super unlikely that a L2 would be able to able to mint arbitrary ETH. (That would obviously be vulnerability in the L1)

Right, this kind of exploit is in vogue right now.

Minting supply inflation bugs happen all the time, but not usually for something redeemable for something so liquid and valuable.

The bridges are a new unique target.

Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#256
post #2

It's not just any white hat hacker, it's saurik who was behind the original jailbreaking tools for iOS and the creator of Cydia, the unofficial app store back then. He is also now the "CTO" (if the term applies) of a well-known blockchain-based VPN, Orchid. Edit: He has a great write-up about the vulnerability and its discovery on his blog: https://www.saurik.com/optimism.html (which was on HN a couple days ago)

CXO titles in organizations do not exist without a board of directors. Businesses otherwise simply have members, managers, employees, contractors or vendors, or volunteers. You can pretend you're a CEO/CTO, but if you answer to no board, you're not.

> For Orchid, while I have no official/ratified title, I am "in charge of technology".

Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#257
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not expect to make any major expensive lifestyle changes as a result of having more money (and to the extent to which I have already been being paid better recently due to working on Orchid, I have only barely done so and usually only quite temporarily), which I realize disappoints some people who had wanted me to post a concrete picture of something expensive I purchase to help motivate others to reach for bug…

Please read this thread to see the pitfalls that might potentially lie ahead: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/c... It's about winning the lottery but still applicable to some extent, and shows how people's lives go horribly wrong.

Funny. This exemplifies the HN community and its distaste for startups. It’s because everyone here performs total population averages. Perhaps it’s likely that most HN members do behave as a total population average.

I am grateful for this insight.

Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#258

The title isn't really accurate. It wasn't a bug to create ETH, it was a bug to steal ETH from the Optimism contract.

That's not exactly accurate either - if I understand the situation correctly, it's a bug that allows counterfeiting of the contract's outputs. This could be a higher magnitude event if the counterfeiters could generate more purported liabilities than the contract can cover.

[deleted]

Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#259
post #147

I remember walking down the main street in my hometown on my way to drink at a bar and seeing saurik and some friends at a bars all with their laptops out and hacking on something. What caught my eye was a terminal open and a Vim session. I walked up and we all chatted for a bit. Back in the day you didn't run into that very often where we lived so it was pretty cool to see. That boosted my conviction for my choice o…

Wow the only time i have seen anything like that in a bar was the bar everyone went to after a functional programming conference! The only geeky things ive seen “in the wild” are swag (like AWS T-shirts)

Re: White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read this thread to see the pitfalls that might potentially lie ahead: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/c... It's about winning the lottery but still applicable to some extent, and shows how people's lives go horribly wrong.

Not sure it's actually applicable. That Reddit comment is about poor people winning lots of money by chance, not smart people earning lots of money by working. The risks are very different, not to say that the scale between 2 million and 170 million is way bigger than you seem to think.

> is about poor people winning lots of money by chance, not smart people earning lots of money

Assuming that was unintentional, now might be a good opportunity to reflect on unconscious bias.

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