Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

coindesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

831–840 of 890 posts

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

#831

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #504
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we're tired of a dumpster fire of scams and fraud being sold as the revolutionary future of all finance and money. We do not want that future. We don't even want the bitcoin present. We think it's bad and will cheer as it implodes. There was a time I thought something like bitcoin had a useful role to play in the world, never as a consumer/retail thing, but more a zero trust alternative to existing clearing h…

I am saddened about the baggage that blockchain technologies hold in less technical circles now. They’re not just for cryptocurrencies. My grandfather hears “blockchain” and he assumes he is looking at a crypto scam.

Merkle trees and consensus algorithms predate "blockchain." So far blockchain has very little to offer other than solutions to Sybil attacks that so far are net negative in externalities.

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

#832

Post by sweetbitter »

arithmetiqa wrote: post #651

Honest question. How is it that the traditional banks stay comparatively secure from hacks and the crypto scene is an endlessly reporting the next big breach? Maybe the crypto exchanges should hire some bank security experts or at least adopt their best practices

Well, you should consider what exactly would be hacked. Banks don't really hold huge amounts of gold or physical cash anymore, most of what they have is 'credit' and debt.

Cryptographic currencies are not credit, they are the gold. They are what gold would be if it were easily divisible and could be transferred anywhere, instantly, for only several cents worth of transaction fees.

Despite how quickly you can transfer cryptocurrencies, you could secure it as well as you physically secure gold if you really wanted to. The problem is that there are a bunch of businesses who are holding peoples' gold for them in such a way that bidirectional channels exist between front-end machines and back-end machines that have the private keys on them, and there is no regulation instructing these wannabe banks to perform cryptographic signatures on airgapped machines. It is as if Fort Knox were just leaving all of its entrances open.

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

#833

Post by hestefisk »

tootie wrote: post #559
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.

Indeed. But JPM is at least regulated so it shouldn’t happen (post GFC…).

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

#834

Post by hestefisk »

Gasp0de wrote: post #429

FTX is just an exchange right? Any sensible person only puts funds into an exchange that they want to trade. Not your keys, not your crypto.

I think you can say “not your keys…” to people like you and I who understand why. The problem us bulk of retail investors in crypto have no clue and probably couldn’t care less (until they lose their money).

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

#835

Post by landemva »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #803
landemva wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can build whatever language features you want, though it still should deploy into the EVM. Vyper is an existing alternative to Solidity. I would like to see more alternatives, so stop ranting and start building. https://www.quicknode.com/guides/smart-contract-development/...

Observing that you can implement any semantics atop a turing complete mechanism isn't interesting. You're also ignoring the very interesting possibility of using a total language. I am perfectly fine expressing a criticism without trying to become the next ETH developer. That's a pointless and rude behavior. If you find my criticism uninteresting you are free to simply scroll on.

I pointed out that Vyper is an alternative to Solidity which already is available, and that any language can be created to run in the EVM. I would even like to see a subset of COBOL ported to the EVM with an eye toward simple security constructs. Am curious what specific shortcomings you found in Vyper.

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

#836

Post by [deleted] »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #541

The hacker has spent the last 11 hours slowky and incrementally converting all the various tokens they got to ETH. They've been using a variety of different defi exchange and have eaten large slippage fees, at least once over 5M lost in slippage. We're not seeing any else, e.g. laundering through another exchange, splitting into different accounts, automating the liquidation of tokens to ETH, off loading ETH into a c…

[deleted]

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

#837

Post by hestefisk »

Am I the only one who is worried about the potential identity theft that could emerge from the hack? Ftx would have documentation used for KYC checks for thousands of customers / users. Passports, social security etc. If the attacker is interested in more than siphoning out assets to secret wallets, this could get them more ugly. I have an Ftx account.

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

#838

Post by wsc981 »

Stention314 wrote: post #386
wsc981 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working in what sense? That you can securely and cheaply transact value without a third party being involved? That governments can’t directly block your account the way Trudeau blocked protestors bank accounts? Probably a few other ways as well ...

Bitcoin fees are often not cheap at all. Just a week ago someone got cought and the fbi took his 3 billion dollar worth of BTC. Sending crypto to someone in Iran or Russia is against the law independent of how you do it. And just because you can send BTC to Iran someone in Iran also needs to exchange it to something real again. While banking is more restrictive, when you go to your bank with your passport, you actual…

> Sending crypto to someone in Iran or Russia is against the law independent of how you do it.

One thing to keep in mind: laws are not always just.

I believe it's okay to sometimes not follow the law, if the law is unjust. One example: in WW2 Germany there were many laws against minorities that were unjust [0]. Most law obedient people would follow these laws regardless.

Perhaps a person want to support his family in Iran or Russia that's going through difficult times. And perhaps crypto is the only way to help. In such cases I think it's okay to oppose the law.

---

[0]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremb...

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

#839

Post by zen21 »

goodSteveramos wrote: post #816
solardev wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto doesn't need Wall Street types to give it a bad name. It does that just fine on its own...

> In the summer of 2013, Bankman-Fried began working at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm,[2] trading international ETFs. Somehow Satoshi and Andreessen managed to not start a ponzi scheme and this guy did. Still waiting for your argument on why the big 7 wall street banks should be involved in the money supply instead of democratically elected leaders, which was my primary point.

Satoshi didn’t start a literal Ponzi scheme. It’s known as a greater fool scam.

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

#840

Post by ShredKazoo »

acdha wrote: post #566
ShredKazoo wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, however I think the argument ultimately still holds. If customers or regulators learn that the application is crypto-powered under the hood, they'll be turned off. And it might be that the crypto part can't be stuffed under the hood. It's a frustrating situation for someone like me who enjoys geeking out about designs for alternative institutions. I see many ways our institutions could be better-designed…

> It sucks that people put their faith in tech geeks like me, and they got let down. Well, not like you since you’re genuinely trying to solve real-world problems. I had that feeling a lot during the dotcom era because you had a similar, although less pronounced, dynamic where some companies were focused on selling their technology as some kind of magic cure for every problem (this was also the era where you’d see st…

>Well, not like you since you’re genuinely trying to solve real-world problems.

Clarification: I'm not actively trying to help people, I just enjoy thinking about institutions in my spare time. Here are some relevant HN comments of mine to give a sense:

* fixing gerrymandering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33517757

* settling antarctica as the planet warms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33483424

* depolarizing social media https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33483177

* fixing america's constitutional amendment process https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33355325

* getting hedge funds to actually be useful https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33274789

* combining the best aspects of both capitalism and socialism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972790 -- more details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32974503

I don't have much formal training in this stuff so you should take all these proposals with a grain of salt.

Post reply on HN