Cross-Chain DeFi Site Poly Network Hacked; Hundreds of Millions Potentially Lost (coindesk.com) 85
Cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Poly Network was attacked on Tuesday, with the alleged hacker draining roughly $600 million in crypto. From a report: Poly Network, a protocol launched by the founder of Chinese blockchain project Neo, operates on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. Tuesday's attack struck each chain consecutively, with the Poly team identifying three addresses where stolen assets were transferred. At the time that Poly tweeted news of the attack, the three addresses collectively held more than $600 million in different cryptocurrencies, including USDC, wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), wrapped ether (WETH) and shiba inu (SHIB), blockchain scanning platforms show.
"We call on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses," the Poly team tweeted. The $600 million figure would place the Poly Network hack among the largest in crypto history. Tether froze approximately $33 million in relation to the hack, Tether CTO Paul Adroino tweeted. About one hour after Poly announced the hack on Twitter, the hacker tried to move assets including USDT through the Ethereum address into liquidity pool Curve.fi, records show. The transaction was rejected.
"We call on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses," the Poly team tweeted. The $600 million figure would place the Poly Network hack among the largest in crypto history. Tether froze approximately $33 million in relation to the hack, Tether CTO Paul Adroino tweeted. About one hour after Poly announced the hack on Twitter, the hacker tried to move assets including USDT through the Ethereum address into liquidity pool Curve.fi, records show. The transaction was rejected.
Re: ...and nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
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Let me guess, you've been doing your own research lately.
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...and nothing of value was lost
Just the energy wasted creating and mining the crypto
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Then why steal it?
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Someone better let all the exchanges know that crypto is worthless...
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Someone better let churches know faith is worthless. ;-)
Re: ...and nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
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Hey, as long as people keep trading cash for BTC, exchanges will exist. The best way to make money in the crypto "market" is as a middleman.
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Unless you're a whale with enough leverage to move the market in your favor, it's the only way to consistently make money.
A casino is a perfect analogy. If you play poker or roulette with other players, the house doesn't care in the least who wins or loses. The house takes its cut of the action regardless.
But the difference is that reputable casinos don't tolerate cheaters and thieves. A crooked game is bad for business. But in the worl
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That isn't true. On short time scales in a short term BTC goes up and down in speculative markets but over the long term BTC has only gone up. So if you take your perspective back a few steps to see the larger picture any behavior resulting in increasing holdings over time has been consistently profitable. So both legitimate for-profit activity using BTC and very long positions are con
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The recent boom in BTC price is, what, 1 year old now?
If you plan your profits on an asset going nowhere but up, you'll lose money fast. It's scary to see so many people in the HODL crowd sharing this belief.
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I said long term. BTC has been booming for more than a decade. Or in clearer terms, its entire span of existence. The "BOOM" to 100k USD predicted over a decade by some is ridiculously conservative with only about a 2.5x increase in your money over that time. If you purchased BTC at $1 and sold for $600 I think you'll find that was a substantially bigger boom. If you think the BTC boom is recent you are being fooled by the way your charts are scaled and possibly using USD an indicator rather th
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BTC has been booming for more than a decade.
Um, no. Not even close.
Profits? Perhaps you are confusing speculative fiat rates with value. BTC is a deflationary asset. It is mathematically guaranteed to go nowhere but up in value.
The fact that BTC has a limited supply does not grant it any inherent value. Anyone can create a BTC fork tomorrow, with the exact same characteristics: what gives it (or not) value is the demand.
Given its track record over last year alone, i'd be weary about betting on anything going up in value forever.
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That certainly gives the appearance of all the growth being recent until you look more closely and see that giant flatline is in the part of the scale going from $2 to $15000. That giant bump only goes from $12k to $60k. I don't know about you but I'd rather have invested a million at $2 and sold at $15k than at $12k and sold at the $60k peak. At a quick glance ending with 7000 millions seems like a
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I don't recall saying you could. But what you can do is implement a search engine to compete with them all by yourself in under a week. Faster depending on how much of the backend you can farm out while still calling it your own implementation. Put an uncluttered interface on it with only text based ads clearly separated from the results and TADA you've cloned the selling points of google. Except some reason for people to use your se
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Then why steal it?
The way I understand it, the stolen coins are removed from the ledger. This makes the remaining coins worth more. Therefore, if I had a wallet that I wanted to cash out, it might be useful to me if a sockpuppet were to steal other people's coins just before I went to sell mine.
It wouldn't be a surprise to me if that sockpuppet created an exchange just for this purpose.
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This has been the pump-and-dunp mechanism dujour for Bitcoin for a good while now. Every recent large value swing can be directly tied to whales moving liquidity into and out of exchanges.
Re: ...and nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
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Then why steal it?
For the nerd tears, duh.
Risky to hold any currency (Score:2)
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Except that crypto != currency. This needs to be stressed more often.
Pretty much all cryptocurrencies form value as (very) speculative assets. And some, like the so-called "stablecoins", are downright scams.
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Except that crypto != currency. This needs to be stressed more often.
Pretty much all cryptocurrencies form value as (very) speculative assets. And some, like the so-called "stablecoins", are downright scams.
Explain current stock value in a not-quite-post pandemic where billionaires gained trillions in wealth as entire industries were shuttered and continue to remain shuttered today. IPOs worth billions where they blatantly state they have never made a profit, and may never make one.
Not to mention the non-stop printing presses that have been "easing" for endless quarters now.
If you're looking for the punch line, it's pretty much the house of cards of US currency. Rather pointless to try and single out the st
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Sure. Explain to me why BTC gained 18% last week.
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Sure. Explain to me why BTC gained 18% last week.
No one, is questioning the utter insanity of the crypto market.
Explain the stock market that has the gall to laugh at crypto right now. THAT is the challenge.
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It was a rhetorical question. Your reply to "cryptocurrencies are not currency" was some big gotcha regarding how stocks market form value. Well, i don't get the point, because the exact thing applies to BTC et al just as well.
If not more. At least with the stock market i can evaluate fundamentals.
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The thing is you can easily look at a public company's current stock price, revenue, expenses, profit, P/E ratio, future growth opportunities, CEO reputation, etc. etc. etc. to come up with an idea what the company is worth and make a decision whether to buy or sell stock.
And yet none of that "intel" could predict or prevent the 2008 financial meltdown.
And none of that "intel", will help you predict or prevent the next crash, because we haven't done a damn thing to prevent Greed from doing it again.
Most tech IPOs make no sense on financial paper, and go public based on hype and bullshit alone. Not sure why you think old-fashioned analytics still matter in the 21st Century. The current stock market value, makes little to no sense during/past a global pandemic that crushed e
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There were a bunch of people that predicted the 2008 financial meltdown. They didn't make it onto the main stream media except to be mocked but they did their analysis and made their predictions and made a fortune.
You can almost always find somebody who will predict some future event to some degree of accuracy. That is the problem with predictions which do not make it mainstream. There is so many of them and they are mostly wrong. But it is easy to find somebody predicting an event which already happened. There is a lot of (garbage) predictions to search in for a good enough match.
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And yet none of that "intel" could predict or prevent the 2008 financial meltdown.
You're so wrong someone decided to make a movie about it. [imdb.com]
Yes, one of my favorite movies. And to clarify how "wrong" I am, basically none of the traditional intel and analysis listed here was really useful or even necessary to highlight the sheer insanity of the CDO market.
And they still could not prevent it, since their accurate analysis was mocked so hard it made flat earthers look like Nostradamus.
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It is hard to reply carrying that goalpost around?
Only when forced to explain to the layman that 2008 was a different game altogether.
One we're likely going to play again soon, since we did fuck all to prevent Greed N. Corruption from doing what it does best.
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Explain current stock value in a not-quite-post pandemic where billionaires gained trillions in wealth as entire industries were shuttered and continue to remain shuttered today.
Simple. You are conflating two different groups.
There were "billionaires who gained trillions in wealth" because their companies gained value because they were positioned in industries such as on-line gaming, meeting, shopping, and delivery.
There were million and billionaires who lost millions in wealth because they had most of their assets in things like movie chains, retail real estate, restaurants, hotels, etc. that were shut down by the pandemic.
IPOs worth billions where they blatantly state they have never made a profit, and may never make one.
It is called gambling. The investors are gambling that
Ahh, but is currency really currency anymore? (Score:1)
Except that crypto != currency. This needs to be stressed more often.
Why should this be stressed, if it's not longer true?
What do you imagine makes something a "currency" anyway?
I think that needs definition before you can declare crypto is not currency. and fiat (like the dollar and the euro) are....
Is it only currency if you can use it to snort coke?
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Why should this be stressed, if it's not longer true?
Looking up the definition of currency might help. A hint though: anything that has double-digit value swings is pretty useless as a reserve of value.
Cryptocurrences are "currency" in the same way baseball cards, or stocks are.
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Except with stocks and baseball cards, it's much easier to figure out the value of the asset in that the value is tied to something physical. I can check card auctions and get a rough idea of what my card is worth (and cards generally increase their value over time). I can check how much a company is worth based off of the assets they hold and how much money they make among other things. The value of crypto is what? whatever people will pay for it at the time, crypto's value is pretty much what people think
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Indeed. Cryptocurrencies are a market with zero fundamentals - i.e. a pure Keynesian beauty contest. [wikipedia.org]
The only think driving market value is what people guess others will pay in the future.
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Thats a great link, thanks for posting
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Looking up the definition of currency might help. A hint though: anything that has double-digit value swings is pretty useless as a reserve of value.
Hmm, what was the increase in housing prices over the past year.... or the annualized CPI right now assuming the same level of increases all year as we have had to date.
Of yeah, it's 13.2% [cnbc.com] (though that was June, higher now) and approaching 10-12% [bls.gov] for this year, respectively.
I totally agree with you about thing with double digit value swings not being stores of
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I'm sorry, why are you relating housing prices with currency? Because the USD projected inflation for this year is 4-5% - which, yeah, is stupidly high. But predictable. And a third of that value you pulled out of thin air.
Hey, mortgages are at a all time-low [themortgagereports.com] right now. Imagine if that meant anything.
Are you insane??? CPI is higher than that NOW (Score:1)
Because the USD projected inflation for this year is 4-5%
How does that work exactly, with the CPI for the year currently at 5.4% [nytimes.com]??? Do you seriously expect us to believe that magically CPI will be negative for the entire remainder of the year, even as the cost of everything heads up and up?
You are utterly delusional; You can response but I'll not be reading more of your delusions. I hope you can fare well is what is to come over the next few years, but I seriously doubt it. Good Luck, and I truly mean
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This will blow your mind, but it turns out there's waaay more to price indexes than just inflation.
I know!
Re: Risky to hold any currency (Score:2)
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They weren't holding it in cash (or e-coin). The company was holding it for them.
It was like keeping gold in a bank safe deposit box where no one locks any doors.
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Few investors really hold that much of their portfolio in cash.
Few investors hold cash because holding cash is not investing, it is saving.
Mostly you want to hold something of physical value, like ownership in a company, real estate, commodities, or precious metals.
Ownership in a company isn't physical. Commodities are actually contracts. Real estate is a physical asset. Precious metals may or may not be actual physical assets as precious metals are often commodities.
Stocks being a good way to increase the value over time.
One invests in stocks for just that reason. Buying equities is investing. Holding on to currency is just savings.
As a percent (Score:2)
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Not sure that'd be of much value though, because the impact of a hack in the cyrptoverse is far more damaging than bank fraud.
In the real world, transactions can be reverted.
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Error bars (Score:2)
News reports like this need error bars on the reported value. It was $600 million at time of writing, but to properly convey what's happened, it should be reported as $600 million ± $200 million. Don't believe me? Wait 20 minutes.
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And its GONE (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
DeFi = say goodbye to your money (Score:2)
The larger centralised exchanges will more often than not reimburse "investors" when a hack like this occurs.
But in DeFi world, as you "hold custody over your assets", game over if there's a hack - there is NOBODY to help.
Decentralised cryptocurrency exchanges compound the risk of the cryptocurrency casino considerably.
If it wasn't enough that you are participating in an insane casino gamble, by using a DEX, you basically take whatever tiny protections you may have had away.
"But it's freedom from 'the man'!
What About the Coin Owners? (Score:2)
Do the people who deposited the cons get replacement ones? If so, who mines them? If not, are they just out the value of their coins?
What about the stolen coins? If they're blacklisted, it is that they cease to exist? If so, that would put more deflationary pressure on the system and increase the riskiness of cryptocurrency as a means of exchange.
Fortunately for me, these are all just mental exercises.
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Do the people who deposited the cons get replacement ones?
They lose them.
What about the stolen coins? If they're blacklisted, it is that they cease to exist?
For bitcoin, they can't be blacklisted unless the majority of the network agrees. So the coins will not be lost. You can try to prohibit the exchanges from converting them to cash, or track the person down when they do convert it to cash.
Anyone else notice how centralized crypto is now? (Score:2)
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I guess you've never heard of the 51% attack. The ability to control the network seems to be a feature of crypto rather than a bug.
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They asked the miners not to validate it, but good luck, it's like herding cats. You'd need 50+% to do so. It's not the exchanges that matter, they can huff and puff all they want, it's the miners, or potentially later the validators in ETH 2.0, that decide what transactions go into which block. Mining pools don't necessarily care about any particular exchange, 1 ETH = 1 ETH as far as they're concerned.
The trading on exchanges happens with a layer of abstraction where currency isn't actually moving from one
Just like that they can decide your token is worth (Score:2)
So, do their customers get new 'tokens'?
Is it really DeFI if you can still get blacklisted (Score:2)
~nt~
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Not sure of cyrptos advantages over cash (Score:2)
because cash in the bank has (some) insurance and cash under the mattress can be physically protected. Crypto can be stolen anytime by anyone with skills.
Enabling criminal activity (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another example of crypto currency being just as vector for criminal activity rather than any true store of wealth. I'm sure the guilty party has already converted that haul into (gasp) fiat currency where it will disappear from view and re-appear as a Lamborghini parked somewhere in Eastern Europe, and eventually after passing through the laundry more fiat currency in bank accounts in Cyprus.
Once again... (Score:2)
Excellent (Score:2)
Makes it more obvious this whole thing is basically organized crime.
Poly is now begging for funds to be returned (Score:2)
I really cant decide if this is hilarious, or sad. [twitter.com]
Users need not be concerned (Score:2)
This is after all a well regulated financial institution backed by insurance and the government. Even if a company like this screws up the users aren't left out of pocket.
Oh wait... Crypto.
Never mind then. Enjoy your freedom.