$256M in ETH stolen from cross-chain protocol Wormhole
theblockcrypto.com
theblockcrypto.com
The people that transferred this wealth to their account are not thieves. They are not villains. They are smart people who saw a code path that resulted in a desirable outcome for themselves. Given both parties agreed that code is law, there is absolutely nothing unethical or immoral about what they did. They simply were more clever than the original holders of the ETH. They should be cheered on and rewarded for their smarts.
Code is law. As long as the original people were not physically harmed or coerced out of their funds, they never got robbed. Their ETH was simply transferred to another party in accordance with the laws both parties agreed to.
If what I say is wrong and code is not the law, than what is the point of ethereum at all? Might as well run on AWS or something.
This is far from agreed upon.
The DAO hack says otherwise. Defeating the point of 'decentralization' and 'permissionless blockchains'.
> If what I say is wrong and code is not the law, than what is the point of ethereum at all? Might as well run on AWS or something.
Exactly. Even when 44% of Ethereum Nodes are running on AWS. Amazon's own announcement defeats the whole purpose of decentralization again and the idea of 'code is law'. [0]
[0] https://coinful.net/amazon-managed-blockchain-supports-ether...
That may be so, but in all real-world countries law is law, so it's reasonable to describe these actions as "stealing".
The value of Ethereum is not that it suddenly becomes moral to steal money from people. Or at least, that statement will have to be true if we want the real-world legal authorities to happily coexist with Ethereum.
There is no rule that because something is legal makes it ethical and moral. It's amazing how common this sleight of hand is used to justify doing shitty things for personal gain.
Crypto enthusiasts (in particular those involved with ETH) continuously push this narrative that code is law, code is law. Other people, who are less naive, immediately pointed out how that kind of "contract" would not fly in the real world with real people, because, turns out that real people make mistakes all the time and it is nice to have a social structure behind it (like a true-ish framework of law) to save your ass when you actually mess up or things do not go as the parties involved in it wanted it to go.
I can give you an embarrasingly simple example that I think anybody could understand. You go to your favorite bank to pay for something, you tell the clerk you want to put $400 in someone's account but you hand out $500 in bills. The clerk (or you) could notice this and state "hey you gave me $500, but you told me you only wanted to deposit $400, here's $100 back", and literally nothing else happens. In the crypto world you would've just lost $100. (See the news from yesterday or so, about a guy who accidentally lost half a million dollars like this).
So then, crypto enthusiasts, instead of trying to address this issue, pretty much doubled down on their foolish stance that "code is law, code is law!" and everybody involved in it then knows (or SHOULD know) that they playing with fire regarding this. And people who play with fire shouldn't be surprised if/when they burn themselves and would look quite ridiculous if they start discussing about the ethical and moral implications of fire burning stuff when it does happen.
Unless you are talking about cryptobros on twitter or something, but I don't think anyone considers what they say important.
Where?
Did a google search and also searches on ethereum and ethdev subreddits listed as part of the community, the stack exchange and research board from the link above. There were a couple legitimate discussions about it, none of which really came across as described by the OP.
I did do a search on twitter and also greater reddit, but those posts were in the same vein as wallstreetbets memestock investor posts which I assume people aren't using to base their opinion on this subject.
Code is nothing but a way to implement a certain set of rules a majority agrees with. And the object of agreement can indeed change over time. This does not threaten the decentralized nature of the Ethereum network, or its capabilities as a core tool for all sorts of decentralized instruments that simply were not possible with anything that came before.
From the Bitcoin paper:
> They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
My questions are: Are the majority of victims in both exploits ordinary small-scale traders, investors in the companies that operate/promote these services and protocols, or other entities?
Is there any realistic hope to make the victims whole without the cooperation of the people responsible for the exploits?
This is exactly the problem that hundreds of independent groups of humans had faced throughout tens of thousands of years of history and to which all came up with the same solution: central authority.
I do think the exploiter takes the $10M deal. As it stands, attempting to cash any amount out is somewhere between very dumb and life-threatening.
Also, that's what patsies and false credentials are for. It's easier to buy new identities in other countries where money talks and ethics are flexible.
Furthermore there are decentralized mixers that run on Ethereum so it's no longer possible to go after the operators of mixing services. tornado.cash has billions of dollars available to mix with which is more than enough to obscure millions of dollars worth of ETH at a time.
I don’t doubt that they could move the money but their bigger problem is a single misstep between the wallet and a bank account immediately putting an end to the scheme.
Is this not hacker news? Is this not of interest to technologists?
I think you must know a bunch of not very interesting technologists, because I know countless technologists who are deeply passionate about decentralized monetary systems. They think the kind that reject all new technology as luddites. Which is what you and the nocoiner are. And we don’t like luddites on hacker news, because we are hackers. Savvy?
The wrong function call was made in a program, exposing it to a vulnerability that allowed a cryptographic validation bypass. That had economic consequences as hundreds of millions of dollars worth of collateral was now worthless.
This is definitely of interest to hackers. If you ignore it the whole living on Solana blockchain thing, this Would be front page news in any cryptographic context.
I don’t think the NSA invented Bitcoin, there is no evidence of this. It does however serve the purposes of information assurance mission by generating some real world metrics of the cost, in both energy and compute/memory, and also an early warning and bounty system on SHA2 and ECDSA sigs.