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Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

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Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#51

Post by surgical_fire »

Mistletoe wrote: post #39
surgical_fire wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> debased by money printing Why is this a bad thing? This is repeated by the crypto people as some kind of root of all evil, and it puzzles me. I see monetary policy - including the ability of devaluing a currency - as a powerful tool central banks have to keep the economy working. I fail to see how "hard money", which normally comes peppered with some vague desire for a deflationary economy as desirable. In my view…

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE Does this seem normal to you? Imagine you are a patient and you took data like this to your doctor. Would he say you are healthy after having such a gradual rise all your life and then complete chaos? If things have been going great the past few years I’d say maybe it doesn’t matter, but things don’t seem to be going great for anyone except the wealthy (those by nature clos…

> Does this seem normal to you?

Yes. Currency is a mean of exchange, nothing more.

Economy is essentially how to satisfy the needs of its participants with the limited resources available. For the graph that you linked in a somewhat alarmist fashion to make sense, you need to compare it with a plethora of other information for it to make sense.

What is the productivity of people and corporations? What are the level of imports and exports? What is the cost of living? How much in taxes did the government earn? How adequate are the expenses in infrastructure? What is the level of debt held by the public and private sectors? Is that debt sustainable?

All those are just questions that I haphazardly put together while writing this reply, and they all tell other facets about the state of the economy that the money supply won't tell you.

>>Since 2007, wealth has declined for all but the top 20%.

>Oddly (or not oddly) enough that’s when the monetary base graph starts skyrocketing.

A deflationary economy would massively widen wealth inequality, as it heavily favors capital holders (as money itself gets more expensive over time).

A lot other things happened after 2007 that helped increase wealth inequality. I see the "skyrocketing" money supply as a side-effect of those things.

Correlation does not mean causation.

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#53

Post by vimda »

alphanullmeric wrote: post #49
vimda wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. > will decide they don’t need financial privacy The block chain is publicly auditable. That's the opposite of privacy. > that can get locked for having the wrong opinion Any actual evidence of this happening?

Canadian government did it last year.

Anecdotal stories are not evidence. Links?

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#54

Post by mellosouls »

zimbatm wrote: post #33
pontifier wrote: post #9

At some point there won't be any more suckers left. That's when crypto will really collapse.

That kind of argument can be applied to any value-based systems. s/crypto/ with /banks/, /religion/, /houses/. The real question is how big the risk is relative to inflation, central banks collapses, bank runs and all other types of institutional risks.

That kind of argument can be applied to any value-based systems. s/crypto/ with /banks/, /religion/, /houses/.

No. False equivalence.

The other examples have a long history of applications that add value to people's lives (as well as disbenefits depending on your viewpoint and ideology).

Crypto-currency has never yet demonstrated any significant value to normal people, though plenty of the latter.

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#55

Post by dboreham »

_trampeltier wrote: post #45
4gotunameagain wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you read the article, you would have been informed that through WASM they did not have access to existing PRNG (e.g. /dev/urandom), and had to roll a mersenne twister. Which should not be used. It is about implementation, not about WASM

Yes, that's my point. WASM is new. So why does it not just have strong cryptographic functions from the very beginning? Strong random generators are super important today. Why don't they just demand strong crypto functions in every implementation? I mean, this calls just for endless troubles, if you don't can trust a random generator in WASM (depending on the implementation).

WASM in the browsers doesn't seem to have the full force of support from the browser vendors.

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#56

Post by orangepurple »

tyingq wrote: post #12
pontifier wrote: post #9

At some point there won't be any more suckers left. That's when crypto will really collapse.

I don't know...multi-level marketing still seems alive and kicking.

Even MMM Global seems to be operating still http://www.mmmglobal.in/

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#57

Post by snapcaster »

detrites wrote: post #20
pontifier wrote: post #9

At some point there won't be any more suckers left. That's when crypto will really collapse.

The flaw here was in a dependency introduced by targeting WASM, and could apply to any project of any kind relying on random number generation for a cryptographic purpose. It is not a "crypto-currency" specific problem.

It sort of is because cryptocurrency inherently makes the stakes so high (all your money). Currently software development is more an art than a science, and even very competent people make mistakes or have unforeseen problems/behavior in their programs

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#59

Post by mike_hearn »

nailer wrote: post #32
mike_hearn wrote: post #15

I was writing about this exact problem of bad RNGs in web cryptocurrency wallets a ~decade ago. It is profoundly depressing that so little has changed: https://medium.com/mike-hearn/type-safety-and-rngs-40e3ec71a... Browsers have a number of problems that make it difficult to build wallets, but I’m not going to try and convince you to stop making them here. Suffice it to say there are alternatives for writing cross p…

> Browsers just aren't intended for doing things that require the generation and safe storage of private keys. This sounds like webcrypto and it’s interface which is designed to make some data unexportable.

Last time I used WebCrypto the implementation in Safari was buggy in subtle ways. It was possible to work around it. I filed bugs against Apple so maybe it's fixed now.

These days you can argue that a browser is intended to do anything, as there seems to be no scope limit to what goes into HTML5. But it's not what they're really about. Why did this exploit occur, well, WebCrypto apparently isn't directly exposed to WASM as C/C++ APIs even though that seems like an obvious thing to do. Or an even more obvious possibility: expose it as a subset of some existing API like POSIX. But WASM is api-lite, so everything beyond pure computation requires invoking JS and that's not how any existing C++ is written.

Eventually people will blast through this stuff. But, it was worked out in other platforms in the 80s and early 90s.

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#60

Post by dale_glass »

nailer wrote: post #30
Robotbeat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is fundamentally community based. It is based on exchange with your neighbors and colleagues and peers and anyone you do business with. You’re not getting away from the entity representing that community from exerting some control over it. Precious materials like gold are probably the best you can get as the material itself has some value.

Why do precious metals have value?

They're relatively useless for other purposes. Eg, gold is rare, heavy and malleable. In situations where you need those qualities other options exist, like lead. It has the advantage of not oxidizing, so it makes for great jewelry.

But all of that is extremely contextual. If it turns out there's a huge reserve of it somewhere, it will crash in value. Or if things crash badly enough there may be other things to worry about. Eg, a community that desperately needs water is probably more interested in pipes than gold.

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