Math Prodigy Whose Hack Upended DeFi Won’t Give Back His Millions | Hacker News Reader

Math Prodigy Whose Hack Upended DeFi Won’t Give Back His Millions

bloomberg.com

35 pointslnguyen17 comments

>“It was definitely very impressive,” Kellar says. “But it was a poor use of his talent.”

I mean how ignorant do you have to be to hold this perception about someone who has just outsmarted you.

A poor use of his talent… obviously not? The guy is 16 million wealthier and has quite the legal leg to stand on in regard to being sued.

Also, if you’re capitalizing on an unregulated market and trying to apply your own ideals and goals to that market, you’re inherently a market manipulator. I mean what a fucking astonishingly bold claim it is, to accuse the person who took advantage of your error in market manipulation, as being guilty of some sort of market manipulation. The whole thing’s unregulated, that’s how slimy slithery people like y’all get people to drain away their money in the first place right? “Decentralized Finance”. I mean in my opinion these guys can just go fuck themselves and we all call it a day.

The guy has a warrant out for his arrest and is currently in hiding. He’s brilliant but this was stupid.

I did not see that there was currently a warrant for his arrest, I thought he just refused to acknowledge that he was being sued at this point in time.

Nonetheless…he’s got more than enough to pay his legal fees now, which in his mind will be unfrozen when the lawsuits are over.

The automatic trading program didn't account for this tricky trade, is that illegal (what if he caused a float overflow or div by 0 and benefited, is that illegal)?. Another reason why I wouldn't put serious money into eth contracts, because there's just an endless series of people figuring out tricky holes or bugs. It was definitely market manipulation, but what is legal and not is pretty tricky. If I buy up all the land someone needs ahead of time around a building site that needs to expand is that market manipulation (mm)?. If I realize that say wheat prices are going to crash because the weather will be bad in Kansas, and then that means that tractor prices in that area will go down because there's less money and I short tractors and put options on wheat contracts to go way up is that illegal? Probably not, but I guess if you made the weather bad on purpose? Then I could wait for land prices to crash and buy up a bunch of farmland more cheaply, sell it later.

There's the current case of that giant fund trader who controlled a huge percentage of the trading on several stocks and he made the prices go up just because he bought so much (and when prices crashed he lost so much he had a margin call).

https://archive.ph/iNIOh

Good. Cryptocurrencies are a Ponzi scheme. Let him retire to an island somewhere and enjoy.

Preach.

Tokens are ponzi schemes. Cyptocurrencies aren't any worse than any other modern currency.

The kids these days have a little saying that ends in “find out”, and when you do things on a programmable blockchain that’s you don’t understand you’re definitely engaging in the first part of it.

Given that crypto tokens value is purely from their online market price, I don't see how anything can ever be "market manipulation".

Stocks, bonds, commodities and their derivative products all have value tied to real world things- a barrel of oil, the future cash flow from a business, etc, and correspondingly it makes sense to have and enforce regulations to maintain in essence "the price of a bushel of wheat in the real world should be accurately represented by this contract to deliver wheat".

But if I create a new coin, ExampleCoin and hype it up on Twitter and discord so people are buying and selling it... Whatever price they agree to is the price. It's all imaginary and/or social consensus so by definition every trade is legitimate. The market isn't an abstraction, the market is the product.

Tl;Dr if I was the judge, I'd throw the case out and say this guy got his tokens by using the encoded rules and they're his to keep.

Hmm, I'm tempted to comment on Strosses blog what one of the fans of his book did... but I guess it's better to spare him that.

RIP Finney

I don't understand the first step in this process, how does someone acquire a $150M "flash loan"?

At a high level, "flash loans" work by being acquired and repayed atomically. For example, this is useful for arbitrageurs

What does atomically mean in this context? Automatically? Can't tell if that's a typo or not.

I think automatically is not the best term here. I'm not an expert, but there are borrowing and lending protocols that let you borrow a large amount of their token pool as long as it is paid back within the same block (plus some fee). So you can write a script to run a transaction that:

  1. borrows a large amount of money
  2. use the large amount of money to do arbitrage
  3. pays back the large amount of money plus any fees
  4. keep profits

and it does so "atomically", so if you can't repay the loan then the transaction fails and the whole thing never happened. or you could lose money if the transaction is successful but the trade is not profitable.

like I said, I'm not an expert so someone correct me if I'm wrong

It means the tx consists of

    1. take out huge loan
    2. do a bunch of things with huge loan and exhaust gas fees if any of them have don't have desired effect
    3. replay loan

The only way miners can include the tx with the loan taken out, is if all the things the attacker does in step 2 do have the desired effect. Otherwise the attacker pays the gas fees of a failed tx.

An atomic operation is one where multiple actions occur "simultaneously", or, rather, where none of the actions occur if any one of them fails. There should be no risk in offering an "atomic" loan because the loan will be disbursed and repaid in a single "step".

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