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FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

coindesk.com

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Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#551

Post by fortran77 »

wmf wrote: post #94
fortran77 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been around the block a few times, and I've had people over the years tell me about an "investment" or a fund, or their brother-in-law who could get me 15% or more on my money. And every time I've been smart enough to say "no thanks." I must admit, I don't have a lot of sympathy for Madoff's victims. Especially the charities! If I donate money to a charity, I'd expect the money to go to help people or to further…

The Renaissance Medallion fund made over 30% per year, so people who had heard of that would be primed to believe that 15% was possible.

Yeah, but anyone who thinks about it realizes that a rate that high simply isn't sustainable.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#552

Post by stephc_int13 »

lordnacho wrote: post #550
stephc_int13 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a technical standpoint, how difficult it is to hack your own company? What would you do, if you spent years building a Crypto/Ponzi scam and that you were the first to know that it was going to crumble? Let it go and face the consequences? Or try to save a few bucks knowing that you don't have much more to lose if it fails?

> From a technical standpoint, how difficult it is to hack your own company? It would be easy. If you're the founder might have special access to the keys, in fact you probably need to for emergency purposes. Whether that's a "hack" I don't know, it seems to just be theft. The real question is what do you do with the fact that you have the keys? If you are tempted to nick all the money, you might end up in a bad plac…

What if you already are in a bad place?

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#553

Post by xeromal »

jnwatson wrote: post #540
WeylandYutani wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do banks get hacked very often? They seem to have their security in order. Probably because they would have to reimburse their customers if something went wrong.

I have direct knowledge of several bank hacks. Most of the time they don’t publish it.

Isn't the difference that banks have insurance for those hacks?

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#554

Post by dan-robertson »

mjburgess wrote: post #350
yalogin wrote: post #242

This whole saga has done irreparable damage to crypto. It will take a lot of time for it to come out of this hole. When there is money involved, and that too this much, there will be conspiracy theories flying around and the regular retail investor will be tough to win back. It will be very interesting to see what happens from here on out. Crypto doesn’t have any uses to begin with, if it’s purely used as pump and du…

All it takes is a business case: how will this business make money? Where will its cash flow come from? Where's the value-add? How easy is it to be out-competed? Who are the existing market players? How do they make money? What are you offering customers that will attract them to your business? What is the horizon for profitability? You know, absolutely fundamental questions that have never been asked or answered of…

I don’t know what you’re suggesting here really but in general running an exchange seems like a reasonable looking business – you match someone who wants to buy with someone who wants to sell and collect a tiny fee – and FTX appeared to be well run and profitable. The risks would mostly be getting hacked, massively (unintentionally) screwing up the accounting or being outcompeted. I don’t think one could have easily predicted this from first principles and if you’d told me a year or 5 months ago that one of the big N exchanges would blow up before 2023, I wouldn’t have guessed FTX.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#555

Post by lordnacho »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #552
lordnacho wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a technical standpoint, how difficult it is to hack your own company? It would be easy. If you're the founder might have special access to the keys, in fact you probably need to for emergency purposes. Whether that's a "hack" I don't know, it seems to just be theft. The real question is what do you do with the fact that you have the keys? If you are tempted to nick all the money, you might end up in a bad plac…

What if you already are in a bad place?

If you use non-privacy chains, which are the common ones, you can get found out as soon as you try to do anything meaningful with it. Eg you move to some country, you want to buy a place, you find a seller willing to take crypto, ding-ding-ding, authorities will ask them where they got the coins from and there you are in your pool.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#556

Post by xeromal »

rvba wrote: post #431
crypt1d wrote: post #420

This last week has been a rollercoaster. I've been in crypto since a long time ago and have seen quite a bit, but this FTX implosion takes the crown. And to be honest, I don't think its over.

What is the difference between this, terraluna earlier this year or MTGox?

I think MTGox was actually worse just due to the small size of the market then and how much of a joke their security was. FTX just seems like a fleecing job that tons of crypto exchanges and businesses have pulled off. MTGox was sheer incompetence.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#557

Post by [deleted] »

themihai wrote: post #499
WeylandYutani wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do banks get hacked very often? They seem to have their security in order. Probably because they would have to reimburse their customers if something went wrong.

When the banks get bankrupt (i.e due overleverage, stealing/using customer's money etc) their customers get nothing back. A such example is MF Global. I'm not going into the whole story why banks and centralised/opaque finance is bad. Now the whole point of crypto was the tech behind it which was supposed to replace banks, exchanges and missuse of your OWN money. It's supposed to be an alternative to the trash financ…

[deleted]

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#558

Post by tenpies »

hestefisk wrote: post #256
douglaswlance wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a crypto failure. Crypto works. This is a human failure. FTX didn't collapse because of the technology. It collapsed because of human error. The fix is rather simple. If an organization looks like a bank and quacks like a bank; it should be regulated like a bank.

Indeed. Beyond the failure of human greed in the crypto Ponzi schemes, FTX is also a massive regulatory failure. These firms have been allowed to play with people’s money for too long.

It's probably no accident that SBF made substantial donations to one of the major US political parties. And by substantial, I mean that party's second biggest donor in the '20-21 cycle.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#559

Post by tootie »

rippercushions wrote: post #48

It gets worse: somebody has pushed what appears to be a malicious update to the FTX app, and the official FTX telegram channel is warning people not to even browse to the website! https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1591293813519253504

If half of this drama happened to JP Morgan, it would be bank runs and global depression.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#560

Post by cesarb »

irusensei wrote: post #418
me551ah wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy which is used to mindlessly calculate dumb hashes, trillions of which are discarded every second for the winning 'hash'. Proof of Work is basically lottery, but which consumes energy instead of tickets.

Not a miner. I do use a computer to calculate dumb stuff all the time for entertainment purposes. I mean… Cyberpunk 2077 could run acceptably on an integrated 65W APU but instead I chose to crank everything on max with ray tracing through a 4090 just to see some dumb frames on a screen that are discarded at a hundred per second. And I don’t ever remember having to ask permission to use the kW h I’m paying for.

> just to see some dumb frames on a screen that are discarded at a hundred per second.

If these frames were really discarded (that is, not shown on your screen), then yes, it would be a waste. But my understanding of your example is that these frames were displayed, and their light reached your eyeballs.

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