10/10 for tenacity, I guess… but he’ll have to hurry.
I wonder if this is at all related:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9
An international security conference explored how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons. A thought experiment evolved into a computational proof.
The part here I don’t understand is that they are apparently working with law enforcement to get the funds back.
Isn’t the whole point of cryptocurrencies that the blockchain itself is the evidence of ownership. So if the chain says funds belong to Person A, they do?
And if they don’t (how could that possibly be?), isn’t it supposed to be possible to simply roll back the transactions to an agreed upon point?
What’s that? These people took the two things central to cryptocurrencies - the secure cryptography and the blockchain - and deliberately side-stepped the latter and fucked up the former?
Why would you do that?
If you need the power of the state to deal with bad actors, what’s the point?
That will also alienate both the real and hypothetical main user bases, for whom “law enforcement” is anathema for practical and ideological reasons, respectively.
I find this beyond irony, since crypto exchanges apparently either circumvent, fail to use, or just plain ignore the very cryptographic and consensus mechanisms used to demonstrate token ownership (i.e. no “inter-blockchain-blockchain” appears to be in play, probably because that would provide traceability where none was actually desired). Then they complain that this time the mechanism that is supposed to demonstrate transfer of token ownership doesn’t apply, holding up as a reason that their (probably illegal or, at best, complicit) business has failed to keep “secure” the very thing that they are in the business of breaking.
At least nobody died… /s 
A Ponzi scheme, you say? Nobody could have predicted.
Now I’ll never be able to afford that new Light Cycle. /s
(Tron)
so, uh…
Solana, Phantom blame Slope after millions in crypto-coins stolen from 8,000 wallets
Millions of dollars worth of Solana cryptocurrency and other tokens were stolen from seemingly thousands of netizens this week by thieves exploiting some kind of security weakness or blunder.
From what we can tell, and details are still light, somewhere between $4.5 million and $8 million in coins – including stablecoins USDC and USDT, and Solana’s SOL – were taken from roughly 8,000 Slope and Phantom mobile app wallets.
[…]
One way Bitcoin miners can make money: Selling electricity back to Texas
A Bitcoin mining outfit said it made $9.5 million in credits selling electricity back to the power grid of Texas at a premium when energy demand rose to record levels during a heatwave last month.
[…]
Rule number 1 of libertarian economies: “Privatized gains, socialized losses.”
Additional info & links:
[…]
According to Paradigm security researcher “samczsun,” Nomad was exploited as a result of a bug in what people – some without a hint of irony – call a “smart contract.”
Coincidentally, this bug appears to have been cited among a number of flaws identified in a June 6, 2022 security audit [PDF] of Nomad’s code.
_Identified as “QSP-19 Proving With An Empty Leaf,” the report calls out a validation check that accepts an empty bytes32 value and recommends: "Validate that the leaf input of the function Replica.sol:prove is not empty."
Nomad’s response to this recommendation was to dismiss it, to which the auditor responded, “We believe the Nomad team has misunderstood the issue.”
[…]
Oh, and:
And here are some recently hacked bridges: Ronin Bridge ($600 million); Qubit Bridge ($80 million); Wormhole Bridge ($320 million); Meter.io Bridge ($4.4 million); and Poly Network Bridge ($610 million that was returned).
Finally, here’s James Prestwich, talking to Wired in April: “Any capital on-chain is subject to attack 24/7/365, so bridges will always be a popular target.”
Bloke robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency by fake wallet app wants payback from Google
Last October, California resident Jacob Pearlman downloaded an Android version of a cryptocurrency wallet app called Phantom from the Google Play app store.
That was four months before San Francisco-based Phantom Technologies actually released an Android version of its digital wallet. The free Phantom Wallet app that Pearlman downloaded early from Google Play was a fake. And when he connected his actual Phantom wallet to the app, it cost him a small fortune.
[…]
Another version of the first rule of libertarian economies: “Caveat emptor, unless I’m the emptor.”
Nothing to worry about.
