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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

medium.com

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#431

Post by mgraczyk »

I didn't study the specific contract in detail, so I could be way off base here, but...

It seems like the money could have been safely claimed using a tiny amount of crypto. Something like creating this contract:

    contract Example {
      function Example() public {
        if (keccak256(msg.sender) == HARD_CODED) {
          do_transfer();
        } else {
          do_something_terrible();
        }
    }
Would be bots be able to automatically determine that they need to swap out HARD_CODED with the hash of their own address?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#432

Post by lolinder »

sukilot wrote: post #400
lolinder wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scam here relies on someone having compromised the network of the company sending the instructions. In that situation, wouldn't you have to assume the intruder found the secret key?

The scam relies on absolutely insane system of financial institutions sending critical key information over email, instead of any controlled channel.

I'm not saying that cryptography wouldn't help in general, or that it's not incredibly stupid that we're not using it. What I'm saying is you can't just slap crypto on this particular scam to make it go away. These people have insider access to the machines that would likely be used to sign the email. If that is the threat model, it's a mistake to trust anything not delivered in person, signed or not.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#433

Post by e12e »

schoen wrote: post #246
iSnow wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper is 2y old - which is a bit of time in blockchain space - and yet, no one has performed this attack successfully in the wild. So, either everyone is just loving Bitcoin and wouldn't harm it for profit, or it's not so easy (hint: you cannot short Bitcoin for hundreds of millions, it's not liquid enough). Also, this is strictly about PoW, the ETH roadmap (and this is where we are coming from in this submission…

> you cannot short Bitcoin for hundreds of millions, it's not liquid enough That seems like a great explanation, but the paper's argument is definitely not that cryptocurrencies can't exist or can't work, just that they have a limited range of levels of adoption where the incentives will continue to point in the right direction. In the paper's model it seems that Bitcoin has just not reached that level, right? If you…

Just a thought - is negative proof of stake a thing? Could you incentivice everyone else to sabotage the system by "shorting" it?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#434

Post by novok »

boring_twenties wrote: post #303
novok wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its easy to get fake ids that look very real (ask a local 20 year old). Also you often do not even need to take a picture of an ID to open an account online, just have the info of an identity that you steal. After that, you get an atm card, wear a covid mask, shades and hat, call to raise the limit and take it out asap.

Which banks allow non-trivial ATM withdraw limits? My experience with 4 different banks: 1. Limit of $500 cannot be changed 2. Limit raised to $1,100 over the phone; apparently if I show up at a branch and bring my first born, I can get it as high as $1,500. 3. Limit of $500 suddenly reduced to $200 (!) with the option to call in and raise it to $400. 4. Limit raised to $2,000. Some years later, suddenly reduced to $…

Rich people banks, like schwab.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#435

Post by acjohnson55 »

cynusx wrote: post #123
hooande wrote: post #9

"Better yet, if you happen to know a miner (we didn’t), you could have them include the transaction directly in a block, skipping the mempool—and the monsters—entirely." ugh. It's not what you know, it's who you know That said, this looks like a very interesting and rewarding system to hack. But it seems to serve little purpose. The other comments comparing it to Eve Online are spot on

sounds like a legitimate service a miner could offer for (real) money

I don't see how that would work. Wouldn't that miner have to win the race to find a block in order to help? Seems like this would greatly lengthen the amount of time for a transaction to commit. You'd have to tell your transaction to a bigger set of miners to increase your chances, but that would also increase the chance of your transaction leaking to a front-runner.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#436

Post by rstuart4133 »

ballenf wrote: post #102

Have a friend who lost more than $12k in the process of buying a house. Scammers sent the wiring instructions a few hours before the legit closing attorney sent the real instructions. The email looked exactly right except for a minor change to the domain name from address. After one hour, wire transfers sent in error are no more recoverable than crypto. How the thieves knew so much about the process and timing is sup…

> Scammers sent the wiring instructions a few hours before the legit closing attorney sent the real instructions.

In my view, this mess is temporary. It's caused by a partial transition from an old system (manual via solicitors, cheques, and bank managers) to a new one. The old one was pretty reliable, but involved a lot of expensive people. The new one is like operating in the matrix. When communications happens electronically, the checks built into the old system break down and it's near impossible for a human to know if a electronic message is real.

It is not near impossible for a computer to know of course. A computer validate a series of cryptographic assertions anchored at the titles office relaying what bank to credit, and it can do with far greater accuracy than the old "human relationship" system, and it can do it in factions of second. But right now we use the new system to communicate because it self evidently more efficient to do so, and still use the checks from the old system to validate those communications.

You see this all the time. Phishing fraud, where accounts are sent fake invoices from what appears to be a valid supplier is essentially the same thing - humans using eyeballs to verify an electronic document is valid (which is essentially impossible), as opposed the supplier just signing it and the bank account details it contains.

It's almost comically bad. I was asked by the accounting section of one of the top computer contracting organisations to verify I controlled another bank account. They demanded a bank statement to prove it. Problem: the details on the bank statement were inaccurate. I raised a ticket with the bank to get it fixed, but as seems to happen depressingly often the bank screwed it up. So in the I downloaded PDF, edited it, rendered it to TIFF, added noise, and sent it. It was accepted of course.

Right now most organisations are wide to being exploited because they are communicating electronically, and using eyeballs to validate the result. They seem oblivious to the idea The Matrix wasn't just a move, it was a prophecy. And now the future it prophecised has arrived.

It will change, but only after quite a few companies have been ripped a new one.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#437

Post by rstuart4133 »

josh2600 wrote: post #10

I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures. Remember that all complex systems operate in a degraded state. If there's ever a way that only part of a complicated swap executes correctly the trade can get really far out of position. People in Ethereum land…

Of course DeFi is playing with fire. And of course a lot of people are going to get badly burnt.

But the analogy is closer than you think. People still get badly burnt by real fire every day. Without coal fired power stations, blast furnaces and internal combustion engines we would not have modern society. If currently thinking is correct, without cooking food on fire there would be no intelligent hairless apes contemplating a future when DeFi actually does something useful.

PS: As the article says, transaction fees are of the order of $10..$20 per trade. DeFi trades derivatives in crypto currencies that have found no useful niche whatsoever (bitcoin being an exception, if you regard being the currency of choice for illegal activities as useful). In that environment, the only people who are reliably making money are getting those fees.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#438

Post by boring_twenties »

siberianbear wrote: post #427
boring_twenties wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to know, thanks. Fidelity is actually my example #1. I've been told multiple times on the phone it can't be changed from $500, but that was years ago. Will try again. Back to the topic, we're up to $3-4k now which is more than I thought, but still not enough to pull off this $12k scam.

Fidelity outsources their debit card servicing. A Fidelity rep told me that the cap is set per customer, and the withdrawal limit is set depending on the account balance and history with that customer. They told me that I could request a higher withdrawal limit if I wished to do so, and they may or may not approve it.

Interesting, I didn't think it was per-customer. At the time these conversations happened, I had plenty of money, most of it in my Fidelity account.

They could have saved a lot of money on ATM fees (which they always refund me) by increasing my limit, that's for sure.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#439

Post by CryptoPunk »

redahs wrote: post #135
Qworg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? This is unnecessarily encumbering the utility of money. Real and Useful: people can use the money as a store of value, medium of exchange, and a unit of account - and enough people believe in it.

Because allowing new public legal tender to be created on security of fictitious capital such as speculative land values and deposits of credit created by other banks is accounting fraud, transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, creates speculative bubbles in financial asset markets, promotes disinvestment in the real economy, decreases demand for labor, inflates the price of land relative to wages for unsupervise…

The only reason inflated valuations based on speculative hype, i.e. your 'fictitious capital', are able to redistribute wealth from the productive economy to rent-seeking interests is that parties taking irresponsible risks are bailed out by government programs that socialize losses. These programs are sold to the public as making the market safer for consumers:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w22223

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#440

Post by pkilgore »

boring_twenties wrote: post #300
pkilgore wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, property is the slowest and old-schoolest of all the branches of law. Some systems of deeds and recorders have existed for hundreds of years. As an attorney I used to look at a lot of boilerplate skeptically but is a RE attorney told me I had to sign in the presence of a clergy, my mother and law, and three local stray dogs I'm marching my butt to a pet store and making some calls without a question.

As an attorney, you should know to read your contracts more carefully :) nothing in a pet store should qualify as a "stray dog," so is the whole thing null and void now?

To buy treats, to lure in said strays :-)
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