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The collapse of the IRON stable coin

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Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#411

Post by meowface »

bootlooped wrote: post #390
meowface wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, even if they lose their anonymity, many are in places like Eastern Europe where suing them won't be so easy.

"Smart contracts and cryptocurrencies - great for anonymous people in Eastern Europe who want to avoid the law, less so for other types of people" It's not an argument that's going to convert many people, but at least it's honest.

I don't think that's generally true. It is very useful for criminals in countries that don't extradite to the US, but

Many of those same people could make and were making money through other forms of cybercrime for years. Even without cryptocurrencies, new technology will always keep coming out that'll facilitate and potentiate more cybercrime.

To me, the answer there is and has to be geopolitical. Whatever crime they're committing, if it's against a foreign national, they have zero fear of repercussions, and that lack of fear is totally rational because there's basically no chance they'll ever face repercussions even if their real name and address is plastered in a million places. If they knew they could be extradited, or at least sentenced to serious prison time in their own country, and that there was a significant chance of it happening if they were to be identified, then I'm convinced most of them would behave differently.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#412

Post by diveanon »

I got burned by this crash.

The biggest issue for me wasn’t TITAN itself, that was a risk I considered and had a plan to manage.

What really got me was the Polygon network crashing and breaking all of the safeguards I had put in place.

There is evidence that a DDOS attack was carried out against Polygon while this was happening, blocks were packed with self transfers for 0 MATIC.

This took down rpcs and shot gas fees through the roof, preventing many people from exiting their positions.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#413

Post by meowface »

fomine3 wrote: post #352
meowface wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ethereum interpreter bytecode is stored on the blockchain, but the source code isn't. (It'd be inefficient both for storage and CPU cycle reasons.) Basically like storing a Python .pyc or Java .class file. There's pretty much a rule of thumb that tokens should always be open source, in part because it's much easier to hide a backdoor if you don't publish the source, and also because cryptocurrency communities gen…

Generally is it reproducible build?

My understanding is it's always reproducible if you submit the compiler version and flags you used. The (EVM compiler version, flags, source code) tuple should always generate the same bytecode.

(Though I guess it would be hard to imagine how that wouldn't be the case, if you're assuming the same reference compiler is used and that each release, no matter how minor, has a different version. A non-deterministic compiler is probably a bad idea, unless you're trying to make a Malbolge-type language or something.)

In theory perhaps you could discover some major compiler issue where benign-seeming source code generates malicious bytecode for a certain version, and then use that specific version to deploy and verify your contract, but I'm not aware of any such issues. I imagine there would probably have to be an incredibly big fuckup for that kind of bug to occur.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#414

Post by diveanon »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #3

Interestingly Mark Cuban got taken for a small amount of money by this and is already calling for regulation around stablecoins: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-17/mark-cuba... I read about it. Decided to try it. Got out. Then got back in when the TVL start to rise back up As a percentage of my crypto portfolio it was small. But it was enough that I wasn't happy about it. But in a larger context it is…

His wallet address is available online, by my math he lost about $8 million.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#415

Post by acjohnson55 »

lupire wrote: post #308
SiliconAlley wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where’s the part where anybody defrauded anybody? This was clearly incompetence that benefited nobody (certainly the developers would rather not have TITAN implode and all of this USDC locked in a contract...). Embarrassing yes. Fraud? Pretty clearly no

How can it be "locked"? Can't they deploy a protocol update to the members of the compute pool?

Depends on how you write the contract. If you make a smart contract unilaterally updatable, then it's no longer decentralized and trustless, because people with admin rights can plunder it, or can be extorted, or compelled by authorities to turn over the capital.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#416

Post by acjohnson55 »

DennisP wrote: post #314
aazaa wrote: post #311

> _share_price here refers to the price of TITAN, as provided by an oracle, which is correctly reporting it as… 0 (somewhere in the distance, you can hear a room full software engineers burst into laughter ). Aside from the amusing programming error, the main problem with much of the "smart contract" activity today is that doing anything remotely interesting requires an oracle. An oracle is basically a server that re…

I'd say Uniswap is interesting. That doesn't use an oracle.

But it also only works with on-chain cryptoassets.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#417

Post by acjohnson55 »

ikeboy wrote: post #383
3np wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general consensus is that it's a terrible idea to rely on Uniswap (or any other dex) as a price oracle for valuation/pricing for other on-chain defi applications/dexes. With enough capital (which can be acquired through flash loans) you can absolutely perform economic attacks though atomic transaction chains involving moving the dex price. Uniswap, Kyber, and others will tell you the same thing. This makes me thi…

Flash loans are not relevant to the uniswap TWAP oracle, which ignore any transactions in the current block. That oracle was written specifically to be resistant to manipulation and I don't think there's any consensus not to use it.

Could you not still use flash loans in attacks that take longer than one block? You'd have to pay the loan back within each block, but it seems like you could still shift markets enough to take advantage, if you were willing enough to take on some risks.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#418

Post by acjohnson55 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #251
sashimi-houdini wrote: post #8

I wrote Skepticoin as a serious parody of Bitcoin. Articles like these about the "state of the art" of cryptocurrency make me wonder: would a parody of a more "modern" cryptocurrency even be recognizable as such?

That reminds me of a discussion a while back on whether or not "Snow Crash" was a parody. The main character was named "Hiro Protaganist" who worked delivering pizza for the mafia and there was a character who could take on pretty much any number of people completely unarmed, plus had a nuclear bomb wired to a dead-man's switch which caused quasi-governmental organizations to leave him alone. That's two items, but th…

He wasn't completely unarmed, he had a knife that had an edge that was only one atom thick, IIRC.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#419

Post by everfree »

ineedasername wrote: post #388
marcosdumay wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, people write legal contracts without fully understanding what they are writing all the time too. I do disagree that people understand them on most cases. Things are better on consumer law because it assumes from the start that people are stupid and have no idea what they are doing. But other kinds of contracts have quite large security risks.

Yes, and when normal contracts don't ( because they can't ) anticipate every possible scenario, there is a meta layer on top of that to resolve edge cases. In the case of a smart contract, it can even happen that both parties agree in how things should take place when there's a problem! But bad code doesn't work that way, and you can find yourself in a null state of indeterminacy without a built in layer to resolve t…

> Trusting any smart contract of sufficient complexity is like trusting that a code base has absolutely zero bugs and zero unanticipated edge cases. I just don't see that as realistic.

You can do this to some extent using formal verification. Most code doesn't get formally verified because it's kind of a pain to do, and you can usually fix bugs later, but smart contracts are the perfect candidate for it since they are (1) mission critical, (2) naturally limited in size and scope, and (3) cannot be fixed after the fact. You can write perfect code if you have the right tools and do it carefully.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#420

Post by jon_adler »

lupire wrote: post #310
bombcar wrote: post #55

> Non-collateralized stablecoins require continual growth to be successful. In the event of a price crash, there is no collateral to liquidate the coin back into, and the holder’s money would be lost, as seen with many past projects trying to utilize such design [sic]. Isn’t that just a Ponzi scheme?

Isn't that how USD works too? It only holds value if people keep wanting it.

Yes, and the government demands that taxes be paid in it, so there will always be some demand.
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