> As trad(itional) finance morphs into chad finance, it's easy to get sucked up in the excitement.
This made me laugh. Interesting overall, adding it (b/c of what was exploited, not the exploit, kudos to that) to my reason list to not build on the blockchain. Thanks for the share
"... it has some special logic to detect when anyone other than the specified owner is transacting it, and in these situations it only returns 10% of the specified amount - despite emitting event logs which match a trade of the full amount"
Wouldn't be surprised if this comes under the definition of fraud.
Just because Facebook puts things in their T's & C's doesn't mean they get away with it.
That said, crypto is intentionally the wild west, because the Big Banks are bad. Libertarian economics, no oversight, no fraud protection, but freedom. Whether you want that is another matter. Personally I think it's a really really bad idea, and billions of monies have been lost, generated, stolen, etc because of it.
It's possible to commit fraud while being entirely open and forthright. The key is whether it can be argued that there was an intent to deceive, despite being forthright.
A famous example would be the Toy Yoda/Toyota fraud:
That's different. The manager made an ambiguous oral statement, and in contract law ambiguity is resolved in favor of the party with less power or who didn't make the ambiguous statement.
Just because something is publicly documented doesn't make it legal. I can't put "our price says $5 but actually we will charge you $5,000" into terms onto a website and expect to get away with it. The only difference is there is no actual enforceability of anything on the blockchain outside of smart contract code itself.
"I can't claim fraud just because I didn't understand/read/validate the contract language." is absolutely not true.
If you create a contract with intent to mislead people and having them sign it with the expectation that they won't understand/read/validate the contract language, then the other party definitely can claim fraud afterwards and (depending on the circumstances and evidence) may win such a claim. Contract law is about intent above all, the actual contract language clarifies and documents that intent, but in circumstances where the contract language and intent clearly diverge, any adjudication must and will take intent into account.
To be specific, "intent to deceive" is a key part of the limitations in contract law in pretty much every jurisdiction. Fraudulent misrepresentation, which explicitly includes withholding information as well, can invalidate the whole contract if you (for example) tricked someone into signing it i.e. 'fraud in inducement' and in such cases the harmed party definitely can claim fraud even if the contract language explicitly said that they will lose their money, if the other party mislead them into thinking otherwise.
> If you create a contract with intent to mislead people
The guy didn't intend to mislead. He didn't even advertise the thing besides publishing it on the blockchain. People bought it from him without auditing it. I sincerely hope this would be a difficult fraud case to make.
The part of contract law you're citing is used to prevent e.g. predatory lending. I understand that it exists and what the precedent means, and I disagree that this is the same thing.
Because law isn't code, although it might look like it. The law is interpreted by human beings, aka judges, who might decide that this is an attempt to deceive, even though the deception is hiding in plain sight.
But I'm not a lawyer, so I'd be interested on informed takes on that.
Actually this contract is not public, its source was not published on etherscan. You can read its opcodes and try to run it through a decompiler, but you can't get its original source.
That shouldn't really matter though. The contract was not advertised to the public, he could argue it was a private contract that could only be used by whitelisted addresses. Sandwich bots made the mistake of trying to interact with a random contract and assuming that it follows a particular kind of behaviour.
The author noticed that:
1/ Prices move after large trades are confirmed
2/ An variety of sandwich bots have sprung up to take advantage of this behavior by detecting the trade in the mempool (before confirmation), front running the trade with a buy order of their own, and posting a sell order for a profit after the large trade landed.
To profit from this exploitive behavior, he created a token that would trick sandwich traders into thinking a large trade was coming, but would keep their money when they tried to exit their position after the front run.
On DEXes, or Decentralized Exchanges, you can exchange any standard-compliant token with any other token. No "listings" needed. That's why DEXes warn users to make sure they are trading the real tokens, not their fake clones.
Normal users wouldn't be aware of this token. Sandwich bots monitor all pending transactions. The author sent transactions between his own accounts, and sandwich bots tried to take advantage.
Do traders buy arbitrary tokens? This is a custom token that op created, not the ETH token, correct? I suppose sandwich traders don't mind buying salmonella because there's another buyer at the other end.
This is quite interesting. I need to read up more!
So these traders didn't fully "parse" the meaning of the token, and are just assuming it's some kind of "standard"/"patterned" trade that they are used to?
Somehow the real details of the transaction must be machine readable and parseable if they bother.
The sandwich traders didn’t decompile the contract before calling it and instead assumed it’s like all the others, based on pattern-matching I assume. This is sort of like signing a contract without reading it.
I suppose simulating what the call would do using a trial run would also work?
Right, don't traders have everything necessary to run the smartcontract locally (i.e. via Ethereum's virtual machine), with the input they expect it to have at the time of execution? That doesn't require decompiling, any more than I have to decompile a calculator app to verify that it gets the right answer for 2+4.
If so, then yeah, sometimes judges do throw out deceptive contracts based on "gotcha" clauses with non-obvious implications the counterparty couldn't have reasonably expected. But here, it would be like if the signer had continuous access to a resource that would instantly answer any implication about any scenario they had in mind, and the signer refused to test it for even one scenario they were planning to use the contract for. I image judges being a lot less sympathetic to that kind of mistake.
The deception works because the sandwich-traders are generalizing their code to 'work' for all kinds of contracts. This with the intent to just about frontrun anything that matches their pretty broad criteria. Since there's likely multiple predators operating, only the fastest one wins. This doesn't leave time to test individual contracts out locally. Or so the rationale most likely goes
> he created a token that would trick sandwich traders into thinking a large trade was coming, but would keep their money when they tried to exit their position after the front run.
The token doesn’t do anything intelligent like this. It just divides the send amount by 10 for anybody but him.
I am not familiar with crypto and barely understood half of the terms in the article, but shouldn't the buyer confirm again the trade if the price changes?
I understand it works like this:
V = victim/sandwich bot, S = Salmonella guy, X = asset (Salmonella token?).
S -- purchase intent -> X ($5)
V detects the intent, purchases X for $5, X price increases to $6
Now it was expected that S would still buy X at $6 (would have this normally be done automatically without confirming the increased price?). But S never pays money for X, so the ETH is now in the hands of the original Salmonella token owner (S) and the attacker is stuck with a worthless token?
If you want a similar vibe, another space is VR. I am part of that mass adoption wave from oculus 2 and before I got it I binge watched a lot of content about VR on youtube. The amount of excitement in those videos was amazing and infectious. With the quest 2 also doubling as a dev platform I think next few years in this space are going to be exciting.
Edit: There are a few differences though, mainly a lot more female representation.
Yep, 100%. The thing that bugs me about Oculus is the facebook connection, and there isn't a viable alternative at a similar price point. Otherwise, spot on. There's also a dotted line between VR and AR which kind of makes it a combined discipline imo.
> In layman's terms, you see that someone will buy an asset, so you buy it first to artificially inflate the price, before selling afterwards at a profit.
This sounds familiar. Isn't this a tactic used on the stock market as well? Something something microtransactions.
I think they call it front running. It sounds similar to the stuff that high frequency traders can do and what market makers like citadel do when they buy the order flow from brokers.
The terms "wash trading" and "order stacking" come to mind, even though it's not strictly either of those things. It's more a combination of them.
order stacking == placing bids(or asks), lots of them, that I have no intention of letting them fill. The reason I would place them is to falsely give the impression to retail traders that there are tons of buyers just waiting to snap something up...if you don't buy it first. The moment you buy it, I cancel them, and re-create them as asks. This tanks the price on the contract you just bought.
wash trading == lots of transactions with yourself(or your partners), to give the impression of high levels of activity. This can lure other traders to place a trade they wouldn't otherwise place.
front running == illegal with futures, I don't know about stocks. But the idea is this... I [as a broker or market maker] receive your orders to buy. I buy for myself before I execute your orders - your buy orders increase the price, which is good for my own position I opened initially.
> front running == illegal with futures, I don't know about stocks.
"Front running" is only illegal if you're trading on private information. The classic example is a broker receives a large order from a client and before executing it they buy some of the same asset, assuming the clients larger order will drive the price up.
If the information is public though it's not illegal. For example, index funds publicly disclose their balances, and if there is a large market event that means they need to rebalance other traders may rush orders in because they know the index fund is going to buy/sell certain instruments in large volumes. This is legal because all the information is public.
One thing that makes cryptocurrency trading special is that you get access to L2 trading data, for free. At least that's how it was when I was playing with it, when gdax existed. I'm not in this industry but, I suspect this level of access has a financial barrier to entry on the stock exchanges.
Are you referring to seeing the depth of market? That's been free for many years in many stock and futures trading platforms as well. How is it different in crypto?
That hasn’t been through with my TD Ameritrade account for many years. I get level two depth on stock and futures for intraday trading, no additional fee.
> TD Ameritrade offers Level II quotes free of charge to both professional and non-professional traders. This is a very generous policy. Not all brokers offer Level II quotes at no cost. For example, TradeStation charges $10 per month for Level II quotes for non-professionals, while professional traders must pay a very steep $110 per month for the same data.
Is there an actual cost to
The provider in providing this data?
Or do providers just charge because they can, as with commissions?
(Turns out in a post Robin-Hood world, transactions could be zero-commission, but the commission charging providers just chose to continue despite other revenue available to cover the cost).
I normally trade futures but I just checked and I’m also getting full level two depth on stocks with TD Ameritrade‘s desktop platform. I do not pay any fees to them for this.
Real exchanges do not take custody of assets (unlike crypto exchanges) and do not sell info to end users. In the retail space, brokers provide this data. Their policies vary. From free for all traders, free for active/fee for inactive, no level-2, etc.
> free for many years in many stock and futures trading platforms
Where can I get free depth of market for futures? eg for CME/CBOT L2, I pay roughly $50/mo as a retailer, or approx $500 for professional. It's not high enough that I would consider changing brokers, but I didn't know it was legal to redistribute Rithmic/CQG L2 streams(they are the only games in town last I checked, and everyone resells them).
edit to add: To be clear, my L2 is 10-levels deep from both bid/ask. I know you can get infinite depth from Rithmic for absurd quantities of money, but don't see the value in it(for me).
While information is public on blockchains and everyone has same level of access to it, transaction execution is not democratized.
The premise of this whole reverse-exploit is that there are people who are extracting value by getting preferential treatment with their transaction execution by doing deals outside of the blockchain itself (which are hidden and not public by default).
Trading in exchanges doesnt happen in the blockchain though. But the exchanges provide apis to the order books and all the L2 data you'd usually pay $24k/yr for via a bloomberg terminal for the stock market.
Its specific to the kind of blockchain/DLT that it runs on.
If you use an DEX that doesn't rely on miners who can pick Tx then you dont have this problem.
For example the XRPL DEX does not allow any party to pick which order to execute. There is also no mempool where someone could look for bundles of Tx. A DEX order is, once submitted, added to the state of the ledger (added to the blockchain) and executed as soon as possible.
And this is why you have to understand fundamentals.
Flash LOANS in ONE transaction actually work because unsharded blockchains suck and do one transaction at a time. You can be sure nothing else is executing, so you can safely rollback if you don’t like the result.
On the other hand, if your transaction completes and you try the same with multiple transactions, you don’t have any ACID guarantees.
This actually makes me like blockchain technologies more. Finance has always been a game. A game in which the price of entry can be prohibitively high to a lot of people.
Blockchain really levels the playing field. People are free to play the game (and metagame) with virtually no cost of entry besides time.
Granted this may change as the meta evolves. Bigger players with more resources may be able to find new "exploits". However the risk increases as well and there has never been this much financial leverage introduced as with blockchain.
Wasn’t present-day ETH a 51% attack against now-called Ethereum Classic (ETC) because they wanted to roll-back a transaction/vulnerability they didn’t like?
No. ETC was simply a hard fork of a minority of people that didn’t like a change to the blockchain that fixed that DAO contract bug. A 51% attack involves a group acquiring 51% of the hashing power in order to confirm transactions that otherwise would be rejected (like double spends)
Any group of miners (less than 51% in the case of ETC) are free to update or not update their clients as they choose. When any set of groups begin to diverge, then you have a hard fork.
The difference being with a 51% attack there’s one chain everyone agrees on, however, someone’s been able to get everyone to agree on fraudulent transactions. A hard fork creates 2 chains that those two groups then maintain totally separate transaction histories on.
It’s a democracy. If you can convince enough people that it makes sense then you can implement a change.
The ETC fork occurred because ETH was in its infancy and it was deemed by that majority that there was a legitimate bug that wasn’t in the interest of anyone to allow to go unfixed.
Anyone is free to disagree. The value in the blockchain is in its democracy. As soon as you fork, if you have enough people you still maintain value in both forks, so it’s no loss to anyone.
It’s not YOUR code. It’s a PUBLIC blockchain. The contract you publish is public! Your gifting your code to the world in the hopes it solves a real world problem, and it depends on me and everyone else who runs your code on my/their computer with my/their resources to care or agree.
There’s not “code roll back”. That’s not a thing, that doesn’t exists. A hard fork is possible, which is very different; it requires the consensus of millions of miners. The contract and transactions and history still all exist.
And why would your little contract get changed? Why would that happen? It wouldn’t.
Again, it’s public, it’s consensus driven.
These are just uneducated straw man fallacy fud stuff that gets passed around.
If you don’t understand how the blockchain works on a fundamental level then please spare us all from political comments. Let’s talk about facts and technology.
Educate yourself before you comment. Read something other than Twitter and Reddit.
What are you talking about? Can you read? I’ve already said it was a hard fork. It’s just not a 51% attack as the parent said. No one is claiming that there wasn’t a hard fork.
“Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?” —- Ripley
Between this and "What are you talking about? Can you read?" and other things you posted, you've crossed well into bannable territory. Devolving into flamewar and personal attack is not acceptable on HN. No more of this, please.
Is there anything being done by HN to curb misinformation? Or is it left up to users to downvote purposeful misinformation campaigns by users?
Unfortunately HN is becoming less useful as the same types of tactics which are occurring on Facebook and other social media platform begin to manifest here.
Twitter at least now tags for posts with misleading claims.
I do appreciate all the work you do, I’m sure it’s a constant battle. And I definitely regret getting personal.
But please also have some compassion for users that want this to be a place of facts and elevated discussion. When threads are flooded with these comments it gets super frustrating.
I attempt to combat actively misleading information with facts, data, and neutral discussion, and am met with more of the same falsehoods, prejudice without any data or facts to support their assertions. And then I find that some users get swayed by the falsehoods.
In addition there are clearly vote rings, since my most balanced positive contributes with facts that counter false assertions are heavily downvoted, while thin comments posting blatant misleading information often get upvoted.
So I have gotten angry with those posts, and I do regret that.
But please... HN is drastically in need of a better moderation system. It can’t rely on the positive nature of a limited crowd of users any more as it gets more popular.
Again, thanks for all you do. I hope HN rises to the occasion.
It's really baffling to see you keep posting as though you are some protector of truth and decency on the internet when you're literally running a shill campaign here, posting literally false information continually, name calling and flamespraying anyone who doesn't agree with you.
Please don't pile on. Another commenter breaking the site guidelines doesn't make it ok to break them yourself—on the contrary, that's arguably worse than the original transgression, since it's the cascade of responses that lead to all-out flamewar.
Edit: we've had to warn you about this kind of thing repeatedly in the past, and unfortunately it seems that your recent comments have been breaking the site guidelines frequently, and even egregiously. That will get you banned here. I don't want to ban you, so would you please review the rules and stick to them?
Sure. Even if someone else posted bad comments or broke the site guidelines, it doesn't make it ok for you to do that. If you don't see how your comments like
I thought your drawing was a joke, but I just realized you are trying to diagram a rollback of the chain or something.
The problem is, that is not at all how it worked, or how the block chain works.
If what I think you are trying to show happened, then all the transactions for all the other users that happened around the same time of the DAO hack would have also been rolled back. That most definitely did not happen.
So, then the parent is right: it was rolling back a transaction (smartcontract with oversight) they didn't like. It wasn't like a bug with the reference implementation, it was one of a zillion contracts where the code diverged from author intent, on a platform that defines itself by "code is law, trust the code over any natural language description thereof".
And the only reason this transaction got rolled back -- rather than the numerous others that had such a problem -- is because it affected a lot of wealthy insiders.
A platform created to resist elite corruption of the contract law, has its elite corrupt its contract law.
You guys are hilarious. I don’t know why I bother commenting here anymore. It’s basically Reddit now. Facts just countered with incoherent nonsense.
The parent is not right, because by definition it is not a 51% attack. Plain and simple, that’s something entirely different.
The blockchain is a democracy. It’s consensus. If you want to fix something you convince the community it’s worth it. It has nothing to do with wealth insiders etc etc. lol. Even with ETC which was a minority, if it was done for sound reasons it would have succeeded. But it wasn’t, it was just a cash grab using excuses to seem legitimate.
Here’s finally a financial solution where people have open insight and can openly participate... a lot less insider than any other banking system.
Go have fun with your GameStop stock lol... I’ll have fun with being financial successful why you all complain... and keep shorting you with options and making a killing.
It’s called being smart, nothing wealth, conspiracy, insider to it.
It wasn't technically rolled back, a hard fork moved funds out of contract.
There was a big push to make another recovery via a hardfork in 2018 (Parity multisig hack) and it failed, so most likely no hack is ever going to be big enough again
You’re clearly shilling for something here or just like to be contrarian. And who “forced” whom?? I’m pretty sure I chose to upgrade the software because it made more sense to me.. just like everyone that upgraded.
There’s no such thing as the “original chain”. ETC has itself had multiple hard forks (ie Agharta and Atlantis) Every time the software is updated in a way that requires clients to upgrade, you get a hard fork. It’s simply that in most cases, no one keeps the old software, so you don’t have a second blockchain fork that lives on.
So what’s the “original”. If you mean Ethereum as it was prior to the DAO fix, then literally no one is running that chain.
I’ll go run some mining clients pre ETC Agharta and call it “Ethereum Classic Classic” and then post stupid comments all over forums how it’s the “original”
Edit: Ahhh... you’re shilling. You’ve got ADA and Tezos... I’m guessing ETC as well. I read back through your history.
For those reading, just goes to show you kiddies, don’t believe everything you read online. Do you’re own research, and a lot of it. And research doesn’t mean what people post on forums, it means original sources, code, technical papers, etc. When people have vested interests like with investment stuff, there’s lots of FUD.
I’ve got tokens in ADA, DOT, ETC, ETH, BTC, etc etc etc. I am interested in discussing the facts and technology of blockchains, not in pumping some single coin I have.
I'm not pumping anything. I haven't shilled for anything. I've never told you to buy anything.
But if you believe ETH is the original chain, you're simply wrong -- and technically you are actually the one shilling ETH.
Yes, I have ADA and XTZ, both of which are far superior in technology to ETH. I have a bunch of others as well (not ETC or ETH). I'm not telling anyone to buy anything, certainly not on my word. In fact I generally tell people NOT to get involved if they're asking questions because they're just going to lose money. Everybody jumping into ADA at 1.25 going "it must go up since it went on coinbase yesterday!!" might just get destroyed. Or they might not, who knows. I'm not in it for the money, I'm in it for the technology. Always have been.
> Yes, I have ADA and XTZ, both of which are far superior in technology to ETH. I have a bunch of others as well (not ETC or ETH). I'm not telling anyone to buy anything, certainly not on my word.
Yes, it’s easier to deny. That’s how marketing works. You don’t say buy this instead of this. You just sow doubt. And if you’re using facts, then at least you can say your adding to the discussion. But you lack facts, and instead use weasel worlds like “original”, “forced”, “superior” which are not backed up by fact.
By calling it “original” you are trying to convey some sense of legitimacy where there is none. You’re playing with words, what I call FUD.
FUD: “ Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.”
Explain in technical details how I’m wrong. I’ll wait.
I just explained it in detail, that there is no “original chain”. You haven’t supplied any facts.
How by any definition of “original” can ETC be, if it, itself has hard forked. If those hard forks have also included updates to increase interoperability with ETH.
Again, if I kept mining on software prior to the ETC Agharta, does that mean I am on the “original”?
By your definition, in the course of upgrading the blockchain technology, anyone who refuses to upgrade at any fork is the “original”. That definition then becomes pointless.
If you’re in it for the technology, then, just be honest with your wording, and neutral with your point of view. I am. I talk about facts. ETH and ETC are hard forks. Both have blockchains that are based off the first ETH chain that launched, both have had various levels of fork upgrades. ETC was created when some miners decided they didn’t want to return funds from the hacked DAO contract by implementing an upgrade. They then decided to name themselves Ethereum Classic to differentiate. (I could play name games and say that since it’s ETC tokens and not ETH tokens it’s not original, whereas my ETH tokens maintained their value, and where still the same exact tokens on the trading platforms when the fork occurred, but that’s playing word games)
Going on here and saying things are “original” doesn’t educate anyone. You can be annoyed or against the upgrade because you honestly don’t believe the DOA tokens should have been transferred back. That’s fine. But don’t add to the misinformation by posting confusing FUD. That’s not about the technology. Being about the technology is explaining how blockchain means “original” or single truth has no meaning. It’s a distributed consensus.
Which chains got left behind when agharta was created?
You're deliberately conflating a tech insertion where the coin was "forked" with no remaining chain with a hard fork to rollback the chain and payoff a bunch of wealthy whales who made a technological fuckup. You're doing that in order to shill your coin and pretend it isn't what it is, which is a scam coin that is essentially centrally controlled by a small group of whales who are trying to increase their control by pushing it to POS where they will be able to cut the miners completely out of the process and do anything they want to it.
Again, I'm not shilling anything. You do your own research. ETH destroyed any concept of "distributed consensus" when they rolled back the DAO. Playing name games doesn't fix the problem, it's just playing games.
> Which chains got left behind when agharta was created?
Anyone running the original mining clients got left behind. Thats how it works.
> bunch of wealthy whales who made a technological fuckup. You're doing that in order to shill your coin and pretend it isn't what it is, which is a scam coin that is essentially centrally controlled by a small group of whales who are trying to increase their control by pushing
I'll let your words speak for themselves. "scam coin" "whales" "centrally controlled"
No facts to support any of this. None, because you have none.
I realize previous comments got flagged because I made fun of you... perhaps I should have been more civil. But its tiring countering falsehoods, and FUD, lack of facts with lies, prejudice etc. It's just tiring.
HN is where Slashdot was when it tumbled. It's sad but true. Congrats on being part of ruining what used to be a place for the smartest and best in our industry coming together, sharing facts, and taking technology to the next level. RIP.
I’ve provided clear details. You’ve not once explained how ETC can be original from a technical perspective.
So again, for clarity, here’s the technical explanation. When an upgrade happens, it’s a hard fork. The hard fork means that two chains immediately begin to propagate across the network.
Any clients running the previous version continue to add transactions to their chain.
Any clients running the new version add transactions to their chain.
Both chains retain all the previous transactions prior to the fork. After the fork they disagree on new transactions.
So there’s no “original” at that point.
Again, every single hard fork upgrade this happens. Not all miners upgrade immediately, so there’s typically two chains running for a short time.
Once consensus is reached upon which chain most people want to follow, then that tends to take all the miners.
In some select situations as with the DAO fix, and probably the upcoming 2.0 upgrade, a significant proportion of miners will choose not to upgrade. Then you have another long lived chain.
So again, nothing says original there. One could easily argue that the majority consensus in all cases is the “original” since it is treated as the same token by all infrastructure, including payment processors and exchanges.
So if you can somehow explain how ETC is original from a technical level, please do.
And you’re correct about the personal attacks, but it sure is frustrating when people post what is clearly misinformation and falsehoods as you have. On top of which you continue to post falsehoods in multiple responses across multiple threads.
You are actively doing damage to the community at that point.
Now if instead you want to respond with a clear, neutral, non point of view explanation on why ETC is “original” then please do.
However, given most of your comments, where you talk about forced forks, whales, centrally controlled, I simply can’t see your input as anything other than horribly misinformed, or purposefully deceitful.
And yet you still keep calling me a liar, while you lament the level of discussion you've created here.
ETC is the original chain, and continues to this day. ETH was established in order to roll back and rewrite the chain. It's the imposter chain. That's fact. You don't have to like it, but that doesn't change the fact.
I'm not going to entertain you anymore, as you are by your own admission arguing in bad faith while accusing me of what you are doing. good day.
Again... no technical details or information to back up your assertions. Just you stating it’s an “imposter chain” as a fact. At least I’ve proved that no one should listen to what you say on this subject.
Technically, ETC carried on the existing chain leaving the DAO child hacker's coins intact, and ETH hard forked to restore them. It's an important distinction as it shows only bitcoin is (probably? hopefully?) immutable.
It was a tumultuous and amazingly interesting time, with the hacker claiming the child dao function was used legally and threatening legal action if ETH forked. Of course the thief never stepped into the light, the (explicative) coward, as he would've definitely been litigated back to the stone ages, and probably jailed. Worth reading up on...
>People are free to play the game (and metagame) with virtually no cost of entry besides time.
Fees make using small amounts of money prohibitively expensive. When I casually looked into yield farming, for instance, I saw a lot of 'small' players struggling not to lose a significant portion of it just from setting things up.
An on-ramp meaning an exchange that sells stablecoins to be used on a defi chain. There are several PoS defi chains with orders of magnitude lower fees, which exclude US citizens from the onramps. Some of them actually offer some degree of consumer protection from predatory contracts and exploits, as well as promoting fair-launch projects with low fees.
>The premise of the Salmonella contract is very simple. It’s a regular ERC20 token, which behaves exactly like any other ERC20 token in normal use-cases. However, it has some special logic to detect when anyone other than the specified owner is transacting it, and in these situations it only returns 10% of the specified amount - despite emitting event logs which match a trade of the full amount.
Does the ERC20 spec allow such a transfer function to let token creators implement transfer fees?
And I guess uniswap doesn't care (or maybe even know) how high these fees are?
Good question. The ERC20 spec defines only what methods a contract should implement. It does not specify how those methods should be implemented. To have a transfer function that doesn't actually transfer any balance is perfectly valid (and as a user you should be sure that the contract you are calling actually does what you expect). The spec does require that a Transfer event is created however.
This is a weakness in many AMM implementations. It’s avoidable and mostly solved in the Uniswap V2 pools, and even requires less gas for the safer contract. Side note: there is a huge problem with contract standards in Ethereum. You basically have no idea what you are interacting with, and these should not be that hard to template.
EDIT ON RE-READ:
I’m going to call foul on this guy. His token is designed to deceive and exploit anybody but himself. Not just sandwich traders. You buy 10, it gives you 1. This would be clearly criminal in the offline world. Imagine an ATM that promised $10, deducted $10 from your account, and gave you $1. In fact, it’s even worse than that. It divides by 10 every time you send it, but not him.
But this contract is worse. He actually has no idea whose eth he is stealing. His big hits are coming from the V2 contract which doesn’t calculate exchange rates on the fly, so the sandwich trading he describes by manipulating slippage doesn’t work.
>This would be clearly criminal in the offline world. Imagine an ATM that promised $10, deducted $10 rom your account, and gave you $1. In fact, it’s even worse than that. It divides by 10 every time you send it, but not him.
But the smart contract isn't promising anything. You can even inspect it to see how it works. What's happening is closer to an ATM that charges a $5 service fee if you're out of network, and makes that known to you when you're using it.
Yes, it is an indictment of ethereum. The ERC-20 standard doesn't specify anything more than function interfaces. Those functions could do anything, including stealing all of your approved tokens. Or the contract could be changed without holder consent. That's a disastrous result for users, and not at all what people think is implied by cryptographic ownership of a token.
Then that's more of an indictment of ERC20, not all of Ethereum. Alternative token standards can come along and be adopted (e.g. ERC777 [0], but idk if that one in particular
helps in this case).
Good point. I wonder if there is a way to guarantee behavior. Otherwise you'd just have to read the backing contract yourself (or, more realistically, trust auditors).
I agree that his contract is predatory, but the exploit is so puzzling simply that I don't understand why it wasn't caught by the bots.
It should be trivially obvious to calculate the outcome of these contracts before throwing $100K USD at them, but apparently someone was running bots that didn't check before executing trades? They just executed contracts and assumed that they were written fairly?
> It should be trivially obvious to calculate the outcome of these contracts
I don't know of any wallet implementations that do this. Seems like a basic user need. I think you'd have to run a full node to get geth to do it, but I'm not sure. Of course, ethermine is certainly running a full node, so maybe they should have thought about that, but I think normal users should have this protection too.
Speculation, profits and the promise of someone they follow on the internet via a Telegram group, specific imageboards or forums such as this one.
We're just lucky we're on the other side of the looking glass with an interest to learn, understand and expose then just trusting a magic money machine which, many, many, crypto groups prey on.
You may be severely underestimating what it takes to ‘understand’ a token. It’s like blaming website visitors for JavaScript privileged execution exploits.
Maybe we could reach out to the sandwich dealers and ask them what they thought the token did when they decided to trade it. I think that would help us reach a fuller understanding of the situation.
Ethermine is still at it, and still screwing everybody over. I don't like malicious contracts, but, I'm not sure I totally disagree with vigilante justice when nothing else will stop them. I wouldn't touch those Eth in the pool though.
One thing I didn't know was that the UniSwapV2 Router is still vulnerable to this because they have functions like this:
The problem here is that the swap amounts are determined at execution time versus entry time. The pools themselves are entry-time trades, and so front-running would just cancel their trade.
It's quite surprising to me that the router allows this, and the interface uses the unsafe function, when the safer swap() function is available on the pool, and the math is already done in the browser. Seems like a huge waste of gas too.
And lastly, I don't expect this trade re-ordering problem to go away with Eth2. It could get a lot worse because there is no need to coordinate across a huge number of independent worker nodes in the pool.
it does work though, because the sandwhichers will just take the delta between the accepted amount out, and the actual expected amount out, front run that, then back run the bulk of the trade with selling that delta on top of the bulk of the trade and benefiting from the price impact that the sandwhiched trade created
My poor understanding of Libertarian theory suggests that this is anarchy working well - there was someone doing dodgy front running and exploiting people, and someone has made that too expensive to continue.
But I cannot get away from the feeling that I would prefer if there was a centralised gov that took the 250K as taxes, and still prevented the front running.
Edit: I may have been wrong - it seems it did not prevent future front running, just meant the front runners had to adjust their approach. It does seem like "if you rob people in the street, be careful as someone might rob you afterwards" as opposed to "all robbery is prevented"
This method is desirable in that it is a generalizable and automatic correction mechanism.
There is no need for a group of people to come together and decide to prevent it, figure out how to prevent it, and then stand up the infrastructure for detection, intervention, and enforcement. All of those things are cost centers in a non-free market, and will be judged as such.
In the free market, somebody will turn that cost center into a profit center and achieve the same end goal.
Of course, it doesn’t work in all cases. There are types of attacks that can’t be inverted into a profitable counter attack. For those things, libertarianism may well fall short and a dogmatic ideal.
No, this is anomie (see Wikipedia). Anarchy is the absence of domination/authority, not lawlessness and rule of the strongest.
Also, as an anarchist, it makes me laugh to read people claiming crypto-coins are supposedly anarchist. Who controls the code? Who controls the network? Power is not as distributed as it appears. Moreover, one could argue the entire concept of money is antithetic to anarchism.
While I agree on you that crypto isn't Anarchy, I feel that Proudhons labor vouchers aren't much different from money. Money is just tokens of debt, be it if gratitude or other, if a group uses them to keep track of that debt it's not inherently evil
It sounds like this only applies to decentralized exchanges, eg where exchanges exist on the blockchain and require smart contract execution for trades to take place - ergo this should quite obviously create the opportunity for these front runners to exist and make money. It's confusing because this isn't really specified - it's not possible to do this on Binance or other centralised exchanges as I understand.
Distributed finance is one big distributed CTF game. You can exploit other people's software for real money, and you get to keep it because law enforcement doesn't understand any of this and the tokens are fairly pseudonymous.
Of course, that makes it a very perilous place to build a business.
This reminds me of an old scam on Runescape, which was to have two users, one purporting to buy an item for a very high price, and one purporting to sell an item for a moderately high price.
Wannabe entrepreneurs would see an arbitrage opportunity and bite the moderately high price expecting a profit. After that transaction the supposed buyer would no longer be interested.
As an EVE Online player for a while, absolutely agreed.
But I'll admit there is a "fairness gauge" regarding feature support (relevant here as well).
Code systems are non-comprehensive. They support only those functions / features they implement.
Thereby opening the possibility of creating a system that makes confidence heists possible, but mitigations against them overly difficult / impossible.
This was rampant in Eve Online back in the day. A regular industry. Might still be, but I suspect the people still playing now are a lot less naive out of necessity.
After a skim of Etherium's website's collection of uses for Etherium and finding what looked like money laundering through artwork (then reading about NFTs), I figured from the title this was about speculative trading of sandwiches in cryptocurrency.
What I'd love to see, and don't ever, is a real world use of Ethereum which isn't just about arbitraging meaningless tokens.
I'm sure there are lots of theoretical ways smart contracts could change the world. Is there any way in which Ethereum, right now, is adding value to the real economy? I'm talking about being used in a real product to provide a good or service.
I think that's a legitimate stance, but one way to put a silver lining on this writhing cesspool of dog-eat-dog bot-fuckery is to think of it as early-access alpha testing; ironing out exploits in the wild west before it's stable enough for the not-as-extremely-online to run something useful on.
The financial system did that already, hundreds of years ago. And it turned out that the most efficient way to iron out these bugs was through trust and regulation.
To an outsider, the entire crypocurrency world just looks like a giant exhorbitantly expensive not-invented-here syndrome recapitulating the entire early history of finance.
Did they, though? If I were to describe the finance industry, "trustworthy" and "well-regulated" would probably not be the first words I'd reach for. (EDIT: To be fair, I'm a pretty typical layman, and I might just be throwing stones at a strawman. Maybe EVIL GREEDY BANKERS are a rarity in an otherwise idyllic system, but that's not what's in the zeitgeist)
To be clear, I don't strictly disagree with your outsider interpretation, but...if it's recapitulating the history of finance at 100x speed, at a thousandth of the cost, with the end result of removing an aspect (centralization) that could plausibly considered an irreconcilable technical debt, then...I mean, I'm personally not in that world at all, but I think that smart contracts have a lot of potential, in the abstract, and I'm all for early adopters who aren't me volunteering as guinea pigs.
I genuinely think there's something novel here; I just don't know what form it will take, or how many millions of dollars we'll burn on shitcoins finding it. Like the first internet bubble--we'll have to shovel through a lot of pets.coms to find our proverbial Amazons.
[Tangentially, I'm reminded of something I read yesterday about the nonexistent technological breakthrough, Write-Only Memory:
"write-only memory: A form of computer memory into which information can be stored but never, ever retrieved, developed under government contract in 1975 by Professor Homberg T. Farnsfarfle. Farnsfarfle's original prototype, approximately one inch on each side, has so far been used to store more than 100 trillion words of surplus federal information. Farnsfarfle's critics have denounced his project as a six-million-dollar boondoggle, but his defenders point out that this excess information would have cost more than 250 billion dollars to store in conventional media."]
>> The financial system did that already, hundreds of years ago. And it turned out that the most efficient way to iron out these bugs was through trust and regulation.
>> To an outsider, the entire crypocurrency world just looks like a giant exhorbitantly expensive not-invented-here syndrome recapitulating the entire early history of finance.
> Did they, though? If I were to describe the finance industry, "trustworthy" and "well-regulated" would probably not be the first words I'd reach for. (EDIT: To be fair, I'm a pretty typical layman, and I might just be throwing stones at a strawman. Maybe EVIL GREEDY BANKERS are a rarity in an otherwise idyllic system, but that's not what's in the zeitgeist)
The GP isn't claiming that the finance industry is "trustworthy" and "well-regulated" in an absolute sense, just that the cryptocurrency world is repeating a lot of old mistakes for no good reason (making it relatively less trustworthy and well-regulated in comparison).
I'm with you. Every time I see articles like this, it gives me the impression that Ethereum is just a giant distributed poker game where players are just trying to get as many chips from their opponent as they can without producing any meaningful value to the world outside of the table.
Maybe it has value as a honeypot to keep these amoral win-maximizers out of industries where they could do greater harm by targeting opponents that are not like themselves.
This is cynical and yet at the same time reassuring, since the entire crypto world is mysterious to me. I’ve never bothered to understand it, and it can be frightening to think that it might be the future, as inscrutable as it is.
It feels like throwing money down the virtual toilet has become a new international sport for rich people. Ethereum is like giant garbage can for throwing away money; it lets you waste it all on ridiculous DeFi fees or on some useless NFTs, or you can waste it on completely ridiculous trading schemes that are only possible because of major flaws in the design of the garbage can... Um, I mean Ethereum...
Rich people these days don't seem to bat an eyelash when it comes to throwing away huge sums of money on some obvious scams but they will not risk to invest even small amounts in new promising projects.
Is there some kind of secret club for all rich people where one of the rules is that you should only invest your money in scams? That's the most rational explanation I can come up with.
I'm not surprised that so many people believe in conspiracy theories nowadays. It's really difficult to explain how else rich people can be so dumb... It's almost like the invisible hand of fortune is selecting them explicitly because of their stupidity.
>Is there some kind of secret club for all rich people where one of the rules is that you should only invest your money in scams? That's the most rational explanation I can come up with.
It's because when you have an absurd amount of money, you can afford to speculate on every stupid idea imaginable on the slight chance of turning their (to them) small investment into ridiculous money.
Why else is Tesla stock up 1400% in a year? It's rampant speculation. The stupidest outcome is probably the most likely outcome when it comes to finance.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadThis made me laugh. Interesting overall, adding it (b/c of what was exploited, not the exploit, kudos to that) to my reason list to not build on the blockchain. Thanks for the share
Also, the stock market is not trying inject itself into every digital process (or possibly digitized process).
Wouldn't be surprised if this comes under the definition of fraud.
The Ethereum world (and potentially other cryptos) seem awash with this kind of thing.
That said, crypto is intentionally the wild west, because the Big Banks are bad. Libertarian economics, no oversight, no fraud protection, but freedom. Whether you want that is another matter. Personally I think it's a really really bad idea, and billions of monies have been lost, generated, stolen, etc because of it.
A famous example would be the Toy Yoda/Toyota fraud:
https://apnews.com/article/6f88d96871f3292f506e2679cf012597
https://www.morelaw.com/verdicts/case.asp?s=FL&d=19243
Put another way: I can't claim fraud just because I didn't understand/read/validate the contract language.
If you create a contract with intent to mislead people and having them sign it with the expectation that they won't understand/read/validate the contract language, then the other party definitely can claim fraud afterwards and (depending on the circumstances and evidence) may win such a claim. Contract law is about intent above all, the actual contract language clarifies and documents that intent, but in circumstances where the contract language and intent clearly diverge, any adjudication must and will take intent into account.
To be specific, "intent to deceive" is a key part of the limitations in contract law in pretty much every jurisdiction. Fraudulent misrepresentation, which explicitly includes withholding information as well, can invalidate the whole contract if you (for example) tricked someone into signing it i.e. 'fraud in inducement' and in such cases the harmed party definitely can claim fraud even if the contract language explicitly said that they will lose their money, if the other party mislead them into thinking otherwise.
The guy didn't intend to mislead. He didn't even advertise the thing besides publishing it on the blockchain. People bought it from him without auditing it. I sincerely hope this would be a difficult fraud case to make.
The part of contract law you're citing is used to prevent e.g. predatory lending. I understand that it exists and what the precedent means, and I disagree that this is the same thing.
But I'm not a lawyer, so I'd be interested on informed takes on that.
That shouldn't really matter though. The contract was not advertised to the public, he could argue it was a private contract that could only be used by whitelisted addresses. Sandwich bots made the mistake of trying to interact with a random contract and assuming that it follows a particular kind of behaviour.
To profit from this exploitive behavior, he created a token that would trick sandwich traders into thinking a large trade was coming, but would keep their money when they tried to exit their position after the front run.
This is quite interesting. I need to read up more!
Somehow the real details of the transaction must be machine readable and parseable if they bother.
I suppose simulating what the call would do using a trial run would also work?
If so, then yeah, sometimes judges do throw out deceptive contracts based on "gotcha" clauses with non-obvious implications the counterparty couldn't have reasonably expected. But here, it would be like if the signer had continuous access to a resource that would instantly answer any implication about any scenario they had in mind, and the signer refused to test it for even one scenario they were planning to use the contract for. I image judges being a lot less sympathetic to that kind of mistake.
The token doesn’t do anything intelligent like this. It just divides the send amount by 10 for anybody but him.
I understand it works like this:
V = victim/sandwich bot, S = Salmonella guy, X = asset (Salmonella token?).
S -- purchase intent -> X ($5)
V detects the intent, purchases X for $5, X price increases to $6
Now it was expected that S would still buy X at $6 (would have this normally be done automatically without confirming the increased price?). But S never pays money for X, so the ETH is now in the hands of the original Salmonella token owner (S) and the attacker is stuck with a worthless token?
I know blockchains get a lot of hate, but the things you can do with smart contracts should excite any techy.
Edit: There are a few differences though, mainly a lot more female representation.
This sounds familiar. Isn't this a tactic used on the stock market as well? Something something microtransactions.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-05/robinh...
Retail traders benefit from this, and on Schwab, for example, they show you the dollars of price improvement the got you.
order stacking == placing bids(or asks), lots of them, that I have no intention of letting them fill. The reason I would place them is to falsely give the impression to retail traders that there are tons of buyers just waiting to snap something up...if you don't buy it first. The moment you buy it, I cancel them, and re-create them as asks. This tanks the price on the contract you just bought.
wash trading == lots of transactions with yourself(or your partners), to give the impression of high levels of activity. This can lure other traders to place a trade they wouldn't otherwise place.
front running == illegal with futures, I don't know about stocks. But the idea is this... I [as a broker or market maker] receive your orders to buy. I buy for myself before I execute your orders - your buy orders increase the price, which is good for my own position I opened initially.
"Front running" is only illegal if you're trading on private information. The classic example is a broker receives a large order from a client and before executing it they buy some of the same asset, assuming the clients larger order will drive the price up.
If the information is public though it's not illegal. For example, index funds publicly disclose their balances, and if there is a large market event that means they need to rebalance other traders may rush orders in because they know the index fund is going to buy/sell certain instruments in large volumes. This is legal because all the information is public.
Yes, that's what it means.
Democratizing information that at the moment, only a few big players know/can use to their advantage in the traditional market.
> TD Ameritrade offers Level II quotes free of charge to both professional and non-professional traders. This is a very generous policy. Not all brokers offer Level II quotes at no cost. For example, TradeStation charges $10 per month for Level II quotes for non-professionals, while professional traders must pay a very steep $110 per month for the same data.
Nice! competition is great.
Or do providers just charge because they can, as with commissions?
(Turns out in a post Robin-Hood world, transactions could be zero-commission, but the commission charging providers just chose to continue despite other revenue available to cover the cost).
Is the actual cost a drop in the bucket so they just eat the cost or?
Where can I get free depth of market for futures? eg for CME/CBOT L2, I pay roughly $50/mo as a retailer, or approx $500 for professional. It's not high enough that I would consider changing brokers, but I didn't know it was legal to redistribute Rithmic/CQG L2 streams(they are the only games in town last I checked, and everyone resells them).
edit to add: To be clear, my L2 is 10-levels deep from both bid/ask. I know you can get infinite depth from Rithmic for absurd quantities of money, but don't see the value in it(for me).
The premise of this whole reverse-exploit is that there are people who are extracting value by getting preferential treatment with their transaction execution by doing deals outside of the blockchain itself (which are hidden and not public by default).
Flash LOANS in ONE transaction actually work because unsharded blockchains suck and do one transaction at a time. You can be sure nothing else is executing, so you can safely rollback if you don’t like the result.
On the other hand, if your transaction completes and you try the same with multiple transactions, you don’t have any ACID guarantees.
Blockchain really levels the playing field. People are free to play the game (and metagame) with virtually no cost of entry besides time.
Granted this may change as the meta evolves. Bigger players with more resources may be able to find new "exploits". However the risk increases as well and there has never been this much financial leverage introduced as with blockchain.
Perhaps you meant ETC?
https://our.status.im/vitalik-escalates-eth-2-0-merge-as-min...
Any group of miners (less than 51% in the case of ETC) are free to update or not update their clients as they choose. When any set of groups begin to diverge, then you have a hard fork.
The difference being with a 51% attack there’s one chain everyone agrees on, however, someone’s been able to get everyone to agree on fraudulent transactions. A hard fork creates 2 chains that those two groups then maintain totally separate transaction histories on.
That couldn’t be the first or last contract bug like this.
If I come across a bug, will it only be fixed if I only exploit it to a large degree? What’s the limit to “sorry for your loss”?
The ETC fork occurred because ETH was in its infancy and it was deemed by that majority that there was a legitimate bug that wasn’t in the interest of anyone to allow to go unfixed.
Anyone is free to disagree. The value in the blockchain is in its democracy. As soon as you fork, if you have enough people you still maintain value in both forks, so it’s no loss to anyone.
A rollback has occurred and there’s no policy on when/why they’d encourage it again.
There’s not “code roll back”. That’s not a thing, that doesn’t exists. A hard fork is possible, which is very different; it requires the consensus of millions of miners. The contract and transactions and history still all exist.
And why would your little contract get changed? Why would that happen? It wouldn’t.
Again, it’s public, it’s consensus driven.
These are just uneducated straw man fallacy fud stuff that gets passed around.
If you don’t understand how the blockchain works on a fundamental level then please spare us all from political comments. Let’s talk about facts and technology.
Educate yourself before you comment. Read something other than Twitter and Reddit.
I give up.
“Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?” —- Ripley
Look:
Which is the “original” the top or bottom.I feel like I’m arguing with a 6 year old.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Is there anything being done by HN to curb misinformation? Or is it left up to users to downvote purposeful misinformation campaigns by users?
Unfortunately HN is becoming less useful as the same types of tactics which are occurring on Facebook and other social media platform begin to manifest here.
Twitter at least now tags for posts with misleading claims.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/updating-...
I do appreciate all the work you do, I’m sure it’s a constant battle. And I definitely regret getting personal.
But please also have some compassion for users that want this to be a place of facts and elevated discussion. When threads are flooded with these comments it gets super frustrating.
I attempt to combat actively misleading information with facts, data, and neutral discussion, and am met with more of the same falsehoods, prejudice without any data or facts to support their assertions. And then I find that some users get swayed by the falsehoods.
In addition there are clearly vote rings, since my most balanced positive contributes with facts that counter false assertions are heavily downvoted, while thin comments posting blatant misleading information often get upvoted.
So I have gotten angry with those posts, and I do regret that.
But please... HN is drastically in need of a better moderation system. It can’t rely on the positive nature of a limited crowd of users any more as it gets more popular.
Again, thanks for all you do. I hope HN rises to the occasion.
You simply don't have any moral high ground here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to warn you about this kind of thing repeatedly in the past, and unfortunately it seems that your recent comments have been breaking the site guidelines frequently, and even egregiously. That will get you banned here. I don't want to ban you, so would you please review the rules and stick to them?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26525566
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26527596
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26532083
(and so on) broke the site guidelines, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html until you do; that page is written to make that obvious.
Look:
Which is the “original” the top or bottom.The problem is, that is not at all how it worked, or how the block chain works.
If what I think you are trying to show happened, then all the transactions for all the other users that happened around the same time of the DAO hack would have also been rolled back. That most definitely did not happen.
And the only reason this transaction got rolled back -- rather than the numerous others that had such a problem -- is because it affected a lot of wealthy insiders.
A platform created to resist elite corruption of the contract law, has its elite corrupt its contract law.
The parent is not right, because by definition it is not a 51% attack. Plain and simple, that’s something entirely different.
The blockchain is a democracy. It’s consensus. If you want to fix something you convince the community it’s worth it. It has nothing to do with wealth insiders etc etc. lol. Even with ETC which was a minority, if it was done for sound reasons it would have succeeded. But it wasn’t, it was just a cash grab using excuses to seem legitimate. Here’s finally a financial solution where people have open insight and can openly participate... a lot less insider than any other banking system.
Go have fun with your GameStop stock lol... I’ll have fun with being financial successful why you all complain... and keep shorting you with options and making a killing.
It’s called being smart, nothing wealth, conspiracy, insider to it.
Once you start rewriting the past, it’s no longer append-only and you’ve thrown away the basic fundamental of a blockchain.
I disagree. Every once in a while I stumble upon a post on r/walstreetbets which is deeper than anything that I've seen on HN.
There’s no such thing as the “original chain”. ETC has itself had multiple hard forks (ie Agharta and Atlantis) Every time the software is updated in a way that requires clients to upgrade, you get a hard fork. It’s simply that in most cases, no one keeps the old software, so you don’t have a second blockchain fork that lives on.
So what’s the “original”. If you mean Ethereum as it was prior to the DAO fix, then literally no one is running that chain.
I’ll go run some mining clients pre ETC Agharta and call it “Ethereum Classic Classic” and then post stupid comments all over forums how it’s the “original”
Edit: Ahhh... you’re shilling. You’ve got ADA and Tezos... I’m guessing ETC as well. I read back through your history.
For those reading, just goes to show you kiddies, don’t believe everything you read online. Do you’re own research, and a lot of it. And research doesn’t mean what people post on forums, it means original sources, code, technical papers, etc. When people have vested interests like with investment stuff, there’s lots of FUD.
I’ve got tokens in ADA, DOT, ETC, ETH, BTC, etc etc etc. I am interested in discussing the facts and technology of blockchains, not in pumping some single coin I have.
But if you believe ETH is the original chain, you're simply wrong -- and technically you are actually the one shilling ETH.
Yes, I have ADA and XTZ, both of which are far superior in technology to ETH. I have a bunch of others as well (not ETC or ETH). I'm not telling anyone to buy anything, certainly not on my word. In fact I generally tell people NOT to get involved if they're asking questions because they're just going to lose money. Everybody jumping into ADA at 1.25 going "it must go up since it went on coinbase yesterday!!" might just get destroyed. Or they might not, who knows. I'm not in it for the money, I'm in it for the technology. Always have been.
Yes, it’s easier to deny. That’s how marketing works. You don’t say buy this instead of this. You just sow doubt. And if you’re using facts, then at least you can say your adding to the discussion. But you lack facts, and instead use weasel worlds like “original”, “forced”, “superior” which are not backed up by fact.
By calling it “original” you are trying to convey some sense of legitimacy where there is none. You’re playing with words, what I call FUD.
FUD: “ Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.”
Explain in technical details how I’m wrong. I’ll wait.
I just explained it in detail, that there is no “original chain”. You haven’t supplied any facts.
How by any definition of “original” can ETC be, if it, itself has hard forked. If those hard forks have also included updates to increase interoperability with ETH.
Again, if I kept mining on software prior to the ETC Agharta, does that mean I am on the “original”?
By your definition, in the course of upgrading the blockchain technology, anyone who refuses to upgrade at any fork is the “original”. That definition then becomes pointless.
If you’re in it for the technology, then, just be honest with your wording, and neutral with your point of view. I am. I talk about facts. ETH and ETC are hard forks. Both have blockchains that are based off the first ETH chain that launched, both have had various levels of fork upgrades. ETC was created when some miners decided they didn’t want to return funds from the hacked DAO contract by implementing an upgrade. They then decided to name themselves Ethereum Classic to differentiate. (I could play name games and say that since it’s ETC tokens and not ETH tokens it’s not original, whereas my ETH tokens maintained their value, and where still the same exact tokens on the trading platforms when the fork occurred, but that’s playing word games)
Going on here and saying things are “original” doesn’t educate anyone. You can be annoyed or against the upgrade because you honestly don’t believe the DOA tokens should have been transferred back. That’s fine. But don’t add to the misinformation by posting confusing FUD. That’s not about the technology. Being about the technology is explaining how blockchain means “original” or single truth has no meaning. It’s a distributed consensus.
You're deliberately conflating a tech insertion where the coin was "forked" with no remaining chain with a hard fork to rollback the chain and payoff a bunch of wealthy whales who made a technological fuckup. You're doing that in order to shill your coin and pretend it isn't what it is, which is a scam coin that is essentially centrally controlled by a small group of whales who are trying to increase their control by pushing it to POS where they will be able to cut the miners completely out of the process and do anything they want to it.
Again, I'm not shilling anything. You do your own research. ETH destroyed any concept of "distributed consensus" when they rolled back the DAO. Playing name games doesn't fix the problem, it's just playing games.
Anyone running the original mining clients got left behind. Thats how it works.
> bunch of wealthy whales who made a technological fuckup. You're doing that in order to shill your coin and pretend it isn't what it is, which is a scam coin that is essentially centrally controlled by a small group of whales who are trying to increase their control by pushing
I'll let your words speak for themselves. "scam coin" "whales" "centrally controlled"
No facts to support any of this. None, because you have none.
I realize previous comments got flagged because I made fun of you... perhaps I should have been more civil. But its tiring countering falsehoods, and FUD, lack of facts with lies, prejudice etc. It's just tiring.
HN is where Slashdot was when it tumbled. It's sad but true. Congrats on being part of ruining what used to be a place for the smartest and best in our industry coming together, sharing facts, and taking technology to the next level. RIP.
You don't want to believe it because you've got a religious belief that those facts don't matter. You're living in a post fact belief system.
And I wasn't the one ruining HN with personal attacks and name calling. Congrats to you.
So again, for clarity, here’s the technical explanation. When an upgrade happens, it’s a hard fork. The hard fork means that two chains immediately begin to propagate across the network.
Any clients running the previous version continue to add transactions to their chain.
Any clients running the new version add transactions to their chain.
Both chains retain all the previous transactions prior to the fork. After the fork they disagree on new transactions.
So there’s no “original” at that point.
Again, every single hard fork upgrade this happens. Not all miners upgrade immediately, so there’s typically two chains running for a short time.
Once consensus is reached upon which chain most people want to follow, then that tends to take all the miners.
In some select situations as with the DAO fix, and probably the upcoming 2.0 upgrade, a significant proportion of miners will choose not to upgrade. Then you have another long lived chain.
So again, nothing says original there. One could easily argue that the majority consensus in all cases is the “original” since it is treated as the same token by all infrastructure, including payment processors and exchanges.
So if you can somehow explain how ETC is original from a technical level, please do.
And you’re correct about the personal attacks, but it sure is frustrating when people post what is clearly misinformation and falsehoods as you have. On top of which you continue to post falsehoods in multiple responses across multiple threads.
You are actively doing damage to the community at that point.
Now if instead you want to respond with a clear, neutral, non point of view explanation on why ETC is “original” then please do.
However, given most of your comments, where you talk about forced forks, whales, centrally controlled, I simply can’t see your input as anything other than horribly misinformed, or purposefully deceitful.
ETC is the original chain, and continues to this day. ETH was established in order to roll back and rewrite the chain. It's the imposter chain. That's fact. You don't have to like it, but that doesn't change the fact.
I'm not going to entertain you anymore, as you are by your own admission arguing in bad faith while accusing me of what you are doing. good day.
It was a tumultuous and amazingly interesting time, with the hacker claiming the child dao function was used legally and threatening legal action if ETH forked. Of course the thief never stepped into the light, the (explicative) coward, as he would've definitely been litigated back to the stone ages, and probably jailed. Worth reading up on...
Fees make using small amounts of money prohibitively expensive. When I casually looked into yield farming, for instance, I saw a lot of 'small' players struggling not to lose a significant portion of it just from setting things up.
Does the ERC20 spec allow such a transfer function to let token creators implement transfer fees?
And I guess uniswap doesn't care (or maybe even know) how high these fees are?
https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-20#methods
Uniswap doesn't care, it just needs to update its reserves before every swap.
EDIT ON RE-READ:
I’m going to call foul on this guy. His token is designed to deceive and exploit anybody but himself. Not just sandwich traders. You buy 10, it gives you 1. This would be clearly criminal in the offline world. Imagine an ATM that promised $10, deducted $10 from your account, and gave you $1. In fact, it’s even worse than that. It divides by 10 every time you send it, but not him.
I agree that ethermine is clearly and openly unethical. Here is their press release about front-running using their mining power: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/ethermine-adds-front-running...
But this contract is worse. He actually has no idea whose eth he is stealing. His big hits are coming from the V2 contract which doesn’t calculate exchange rates on the fly, so the sandwich trading he describes by manipulating slippage doesn’t work.
https://etherscan.io/token/0x610b8B78da143fC1E38b36C4EA0f68F...
But the smart contract isn't promising anything. You can even inspect it to see how it works. What's happening is closer to an ATM that charges a $5 service fee if you're out of network, and makes that known to you when you're using it.
https://oko.palkeo.com/0x610b8B78da143fC1E38b36C4EA0f68F86cc... shows the trapped contract. Search for `def transfer(` on that page.
Owner addresses appear to be:
Interestingly enough, it reports decompile failure with the only code that was modified: I think that means it's just matching bytecode to public source, which I guess is obvious because of variable names etc.I don't understand why anyone buys tokens if they don't read the contract.
[0] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-777
It should be trivially obvious to calculate the outcome of these contracts before throwing $100K USD at them, but apparently someone was running bots that didn't check before executing trades? They just executed contracts and assumed that they were written fairly?
I don't know of any wallet implementations that do this. Seems like a basic user need. I think you'd have to run a full node to get geth to do it, but I'm not sure. Of course, ethermine is certainly running a full node, so maybe they should have thought about that, but I think normal users should have this protection too.
We're just lucky we're on the other side of the looking glass with an interest to learn, understand and expose then just trusting a magic money machine which, many, many, crypto groups prey on.
Presumably they thought that they would receive the exact number of tokens that the Uniswap Router sent to them.
Most of these defi tokens do absolutely nothing except force you to trade them back through a deflationary AMM for whatever token you actually want.
Ethermine is still at it, and still screwing everybody over. I don't like malicious contracts, but, I'm not sure I totally disagree with vigilante justice when nothing else will stop them. I wouldn't touch those Eth in the pool though.
One thing I didn't know was that the UniSwapV2 Router is still vulnerable to this because they have functions like this:
The problem here is that the swap amounts are determined at execution time versus entry time. The pools themselves are entry-time trades, and so front-running would just cancel their trade. It's quite surprising to me that the router allows this, and the interface uses the unsafe function, when the safer swap() function is available on the pool, and the math is already done in the browser. Seems like a huge waste of gas too.And lastly, I don't expect this trade re-ordering problem to go away with Eth2. It could get a lot worse because there is no need to coordinate across a huge number of independent worker nodes in the pool.
But I cannot get away from the feeling that I would prefer if there was a centralised gov that took the 250K as taxes, and still prevented the front running.
Edit: I may have been wrong - it seems it did not prevent future front running, just meant the front runners had to adjust their approach. It does seem like "if you rob people in the street, be careful as someone might rob you afterwards" as opposed to "all robbery is prevented"
There is no need for a group of people to come together and decide to prevent it, figure out how to prevent it, and then stand up the infrastructure for detection, intervention, and enforcement. All of those things are cost centers in a non-free market, and will be judged as such.
In the free market, somebody will turn that cost center into a profit center and achieve the same end goal.
Of course, it doesn’t work in all cases. There are types of attacks that can’t be inverted into a profitable counter attack. For those things, libertarianism may well fall short and a dogmatic ideal.
No, this is anomie (see Wikipedia). Anarchy is the absence of domination/authority, not lawlessness and rule of the strongest.
Also, as an anarchist, it makes me laugh to read people claiming crypto-coins are supposedly anarchist. Who controls the code? Who controls the network? Power is not as distributed as it appears. Moreover, one could argue the entire concept of money is antithetic to anarchism.
Also Proudhon never talked about them, it was someone else In his circle. Proudhon espoused something called mutual credit I believe.
People who voluntarily put their trust and money in it.
Of course, that makes it a very perilous place to build a business.
Copies are widely distributed. That's how it works.
Even if the whole thing blew up somehow, it would be very unlikely for every copy to be lost.
Wannabe entrepreneurs would see an arbitrage opportunity and bite the moderately high price expecting a profit. After that transaction the supposed buyer would no longer be interested.
But I'll admit there is a "fairness gauge" regarding feature support (relevant here as well).
Code systems are non-comprehensive. They support only those functions / features they implement.
Thereby opening the possibility of creating a system that makes confidence heists possible, but mitigations against them overly difficult / impossible.
What I'd love to see, and don't ever, is a real world use of Ethereum which isn't just about arbitraging meaningless tokens.
I'm sure there are lots of theoretical ways smart contracts could change the world. Is there any way in which Ethereum, right now, is adding value to the real economy? I'm talking about being used in a real product to provide a good or service.
To an outsider, the entire crypocurrency world just looks like a giant exhorbitantly expensive not-invented-here syndrome recapitulating the entire early history of finance.
To be clear, I don't strictly disagree with your outsider interpretation, but...if it's recapitulating the history of finance at 100x speed, at a thousandth of the cost, with the end result of removing an aspect (centralization) that could plausibly considered an irreconcilable technical debt, then...I mean, I'm personally not in that world at all, but I think that smart contracts have a lot of potential, in the abstract, and I'm all for early adopters who aren't me volunteering as guinea pigs.
I genuinely think there's something novel here; I just don't know what form it will take, or how many millions of dollars we'll burn on shitcoins finding it. Like the first internet bubble--we'll have to shovel through a lot of pets.coms to find our proverbial Amazons.
[Tangentially, I'm reminded of something I read yesterday about the nonexistent technological breakthrough, Write-Only Memory:
"write-only memory: A form of computer memory into which information can be stored but never, ever retrieved, developed under government contract in 1975 by Professor Homberg T. Farnsfarfle. Farnsfarfle's original prototype, approximately one inch on each side, has so far been used to store more than 100 trillion words of surplus federal information. Farnsfarfle's critics have denounced his project as a six-million-dollar boondoggle, but his defenders point out that this excess information would have cost more than 250 billion dollars to store in conventional media."]
>> To an outsider, the entire crypocurrency world just looks like a giant exhorbitantly expensive not-invented-here syndrome recapitulating the entire early history of finance.
> Did they, though? If I were to describe the finance industry, "trustworthy" and "well-regulated" would probably not be the first words I'd reach for. (EDIT: To be fair, I'm a pretty typical layman, and I might just be throwing stones at a strawman. Maybe EVIL GREEDY BANKERS are a rarity in an otherwise idyllic system, but that's not what's in the zeitgeist)
The GP isn't claiming that the finance industry is "trustworthy" and "well-regulated" in an absolute sense, just that the cryptocurrency world is repeating a lot of old mistakes for no good reason (making it relatively less trustworthy and well-regulated in comparison).
It might still be through trust and regulation, but computers enable new ways of ironing out bugs.
Maybe it has value as a honeypot to keep these amoral win-maximizers out of industries where they could do greater harm by targeting opponents that are not like themselves.
Rich people these days don't seem to bat an eyelash when it comes to throwing away huge sums of money on some obvious scams but they will not risk to invest even small amounts in new promising projects.
Is there some kind of secret club for all rich people where one of the rules is that you should only invest your money in scams? That's the most rational explanation I can come up with.
I'm not surprised that so many people believe in conspiracy theories nowadays. It's really difficult to explain how else rich people can be so dumb... It's almost like the invisible hand of fortune is selecting them explicitly because of their stupidity.
It's because when you have an absurd amount of money, you can afford to speculate on every stupid idea imaginable on the slight chance of turning their (to them) small investment into ridiculous money.
Why else is Tesla stock up 1400% in a year? It's rampant speculation. The stupidest outcome is probably the most likely outcome when it comes to finance.