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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

#331

Post by dragonwriter »

odonnellryan wrote: post #327
dragonwriter wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gambling is not a waste of resources. Yes, it is. > It is a transfer of resources from one entity to another. It's a zero-sum game. All real gambling consumes as well as transfers resources, and is, therefore, negative sum.

What do you mean consumes? By your definition it seems literally everything is a "waste of resources"

> By your definition it seems literally everything is a "waste of resources"

Most activities use resources.

Many produce value and are not a waste of resources.

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

#332

Post by xur17 »

sfoley wrote: post #323
hbbio wrote: 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)

Wtf is a “blockchain-based VPN”?

I think the simplest explanation is that it's a VPN system with a "blockchain based" payment system such that anyone can be a user or a provider without have a central intermediary. I haven't dug into the specifics yet, but that's my high level understanding.

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

#333

Post by capableweb »

rosndo wrote: post #240
capableweb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IRS doesn’t care as long as you pay taxes on the money. Lol, you never actually handled the sums the submission is about right? The IRS will definitely ask questions about where the money you spend come from, if you end up on their radar. And if the answer is not satisfactory, they will grill you on it.

IRS isn’t going to do a deep dive into your purported monero mining activities unless you go out of your way to give them cause to do so. And even if you did, there’s no way for them to ever prove where your monero came from unless you fucked up during either the hack or the swap to monero. Even if the IRS suspected that you’re lying to them, how could they prove it?

Again, depends on the amount of money. Sure, there is not gonna be a lot of action from the IRS or any other government entities for $2 million. But when we're talking about $100 million, you start to ruffle some bushes. So they will start to dig where it comes from. If you describe that you got $100 million from mining Monero, you're gonna have to show proof that you have the equipment to actually get that, over the timeframe you're claiming you have mined. If it doesn't match up, they'll dig deeper.

But yeah, I'm not claiming it's impossible to clean stolen ETH. The only claim I did was that the IRS will definitely start asking questions if you go from a declared income around average in the US to a declared income around $100 million from one year to another. To believe that they are just gonna accept "I mined it lol" is a grand delusion.

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

#334

Post by rosndo »

capableweb wrote: post #333
rosndo wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRS isn’t going to do a deep dive into your purported monero mining activities unless you go out of your way to give them cause to do so. And even if you did, there’s no way for them to ever prove where your monero came from unless you fucked up during either the hack or the swap to monero. Even if the IRS suspected that you’re lying to them, how could they prove it?

Again, depends on the amount of money. Sure, there is not gonna be a lot of action from the IRS or any other government entities for $2 million. But when we're talking about $100 million, you start to ruffle some bushes. So they will start to dig where it comes from. If you describe that you got $100 million from mining Monero, you're gonna have to show proof that you have the equipment to actually get that, over the…

Yeah, you probably don’t want to cash out $100 million at a time. That is obviously going to draw attention.

But $10 million a year? Perhaps much more if split over a couple of jurisdictions? No problem.

In the end this was about stolen $100 million being worth more than totally legit $2 million. I firmly believe that it would be downright easy to safely cash out $2 million a year from the stolen $100 million.

> To believe that they are just gonna accept "I mined it lol" is a grand delusion.

Unless you keep evidence of your crimes sitting around, at some point they’ll have to.

Assuming you use monero correctly, no amount of forensic analysis will be able to go back from your funds to the original crime.

And besides, the “early miner” story is hardly incredible. Many people have recovered huge sums of money from old hard drives.

> If you describe that you got $100 million from mining Monero, you're gonna have to show proof that you have the equipment to actually get that, over the timeframe you're claiming you have mined

This isn’t really a problem as long as you claim to have started mining early enough, fairly basic hardware would probably suffice.

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

#335

Post by anchpop »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #325
antishatter wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be “that guy” but make sure you get an accountant to help you avoid like a $1m tax liability to the extent it is possible. Probably a lot you can do.

Which tax liability? That’s news to me.

Any income is subject to taxes in the US

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

#336

Post by tenuousemphasis »

colesantiago wrote: post #186
tenuousemphasis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has a system built on top of it called Lightning, which allows for millions of cheap transactions per second inside of payment channels. Only the opening and closing of channels requires a transaction on the blockchain.

Lightning isn't really using Bitcoin is it? The strike app (which uses Lightning) is not available worldwide which really doesn't give the image that Bitcoin lightning is decentralised at all.

It is, all Lightning transactions are valid Bitcoin transactions. Strike merely uses the Lightning network, similar to how Coinbase uses the Bitcoin network. Coinbase and Strike aren't available everywhere, but Bitcoin and Lightning is.

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

#337

Post by CRConrad »

capableweb wrote: post #286
heartbreak wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I come from a poor family and now my family is no longer poor because of my work. I wouldn't say I'm smarter than the average person, but somehow I'm luckier. But with that said, I don't seem to be even smart enough to realize what unconscious bias you're referring to, care to spread some light for me?

They use "smart" as the opposite of "poor", which implies that they see "poor" as pretty much synonymous with "stupid".

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

#338

Post by CRConrad »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #192
hbbio wrote: 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.

> Businesses otherwise simply have members, managers, employees, contractors or vendors, or volunteers.

Clubs have members; businesses have employees.

I think I'll take my lessons on business terminology from someone else, if it's all the same to you.

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

#339

Post by CRConrad »

AviationAtom wrote: post #290

Why is there such hostility towards crypto? I can understand the anger at Proof-of-Work cryptos, or perhaps the current somewhat "wild west" state of them, where fly-by-night operations work to separate people from their money, but ultimately I see them as the wave of the future. Ultimately I think the cryptos that see the most success will likely be those that can be better regulated, which is somewhat at odds with…

No post body was provided.

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

#340

Post by CRConrad »

balefrost wrote: post #309
AviationAtom wrote: post #290

Why is there such hostility towards crypto? I can understand the anger at Proof-of-Work cryptos, or perhaps the current somewhat "wild west" state of them, where fly-by-night operations work to separate people from their money, but ultimately I see them as the wave of the future. Ultimately I think the cryptos that see the most success will likely be those that can be better regulated, which is somewhat at odds with…

In case you hadn't seen it, there's a rather well-received video called "Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g ). It really covers crypto in general and treats NFTs as a crypto offshoot. It's 2 hours long but still feels rushed. Dan's general attitude is that crypto isn't revolutionary and isn't really trying to be. It's not trying to democratize money. It's trying to bui…

> It's great that miners tend to use more renewable sources on average than the average utility customer, but they're still using an awful lot of nonrenewable sources as well.

And they're crowding out better uses of those renewable energy resources, too.

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