> The loophole was not a bug or an exploit, according to the NFT marketplace, but rather a user interface issue that occurs when a user creates a listing, then transfers the NFT to a different wallet.
lol, what? I don't know anything about OpenSea and this ridiculous NFT generated ape business, but this is a comical quote.
Yeah, it's bad for OpenSea, and another example that the achilles heel of web3 are the (centralized) web interfaces on top of it.
In this specific case, the NFT owners had, at some point in time, listed their assets for sale on OpenSea. The issue was that you could re-list (e.g., at a higher price) and the transition would be stored in OpenSea's off-chain db, but not complete the on-chain cancellation (supposedly because the user didn't want to pay gas fees, and/or the UI was confusing).
OpenSea would show the transaction cancelled/relisted in their UI, but the on-chain contract still had the item for sale using the original price. If you know where to look, you could skip OpenSea's UI and interact with the contract directly, thus yielding a handful of Bored Apes for a fraction of their current price.
Clearly folks exploited a loophole, but at the same time "code is law" and all of that, and clearly OpenSea's fault for not preventing this from happening in the first place, so it doesn't surprise me they are stepping in and covering the costs.
Thanks for the explanation. My guess is there will always be some sort of gap between the centralized and the de-centralized web3 (otherwise there would be no reason for the centralized) and that gap will always be a source of exploits.
The way this works this way now is because of gas costs as ai understand it; is not the dream of these people to get these costs low enough that you can do it all on chain? If not, it seems the basics will be indeed broken forever.
That's the dream. We will see if it ends up being a reality. But for the last decade we've seen a similar pattern as various chains become popular: fee costs rise dramatically.
ETH intends to be a global computer for everybody. Imagine if the number of smart contracts went up by 100x. 1000x. 10,000x. This isn't the sort of thing that you can scale by simply buying more machines in a datacenter. Maybe people will solve the fee problem, but if they don't then this is going to become an even bigger problem as virtually nobody will ever want to transact on chain because of incredibly high fees.
Zero-Knowledge Proof Rollups (ZK Rollups) with Data Availability Committees (or off-chain data availability for lower security situations) actually provide a fantastic balance of high scale+cheap (or free) transactions.
The downside is that code of running machines that can create and validate the ZK Proof, but since these systems can be more centralized without sacrificing anti-censorship properties, it’s more practical than it seems.
For people who aren’t convinced that ZK Proofs will be feasible due to the prover cost, Optimistic Rollups with the same data availability management systems also provide cheap/free transactions with the downside that moving assets off of them takes days to weeks.
Zero-Knowledge proof applications have been accelerated by the blockchain research community and they are, most likely, the solution to the fee problem while maintaining the security of users (which ‘high-scale, cheap blockchains’ just can’t do).
This is the current most promising solution, yes. But it remains a promising solution rather than a proven solution at this point. We've seen a variety of attempts to solve this problem over time and we've largely moved from one to the other without truly landing them. I'm not saying that there won't be a solution. Only that there needs to be a solution.
Slumlord taking notes: “those are not roaches or bugs they’re just a number of small objects with exoskeletons, antenna, an aversion to light and attraction to crumbs.”
I mean, yes, if the only copy of your wallet private key is on an unconnected USB stick or something, and you never trade with it. Then there's theoretically no way to steal it.
That's generally the story with blockchains. All the guarantees and desirable properties vanish in practice when you try to do anything useful at scale.
> “Losing my ape was [a] best blessing in disguise!,” García said. “It really showed the impact the NFT community has when banding together for a cause. When I lost it, I felt alone and didn’t know what to do. [One] tweet and [thousands] of people in [the] NFT community came to help!”
Just reading up on this stuff a bit: those mutant apes are worth 21 ETH now and will soon be, with the current trajectory, around 50 ETH if the crypto market doesn't get a good crash. How crazy are people?
I know a guy who was a waiter from a not well off family in 2013, read about bitcoin and maxxed out his creditcards, borrowed money from all his friends, relatives and went 'all in'. His bet paid off as we know now: last I spoke with him he had close to 100m$, about half of which in real world money and half in crypto. But I can imagine people making the same bets when reading about these monkeys; will they laugh at the rest of us in a few years too?
I can't say I'm envious of a person who risked destroying their own financial life going all in on a ponzi scheme and lucked into being at the top, the same way I'm not envious of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
I equate it to people who spend a lot of money on the lottery and become millionaires. It's not like they know something we don't, they took a financial risk and it paid off.
If you could be sure the Apes are going to rise to 50 ETH, why not invest in it? The reason is because there's an equally likely chance the Apes will fall to half or less their current value, right? The same could have happened with Bitcoin.
Note that this isn't an attempt to be a "respectable and critical" news source, it's an attempt to laugh at fools and their money being soon parted, and so you should assume the tone is suitably mocking. If you are looking for a balanced take or whatever or serious discussion or engagement on the technical side of this technology, that's not the purpose of this site.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 69.9 ms ] threadlol, what? I don't know anything about OpenSea and this ridiculous NFT generated ape business, but this is a comical quote.
In this specific case, the NFT owners had, at some point in time, listed their assets for sale on OpenSea. The issue was that you could re-list (e.g., at a higher price) and the transition would be stored in OpenSea's off-chain db, but not complete the on-chain cancellation (supposedly because the user didn't want to pay gas fees, and/or the UI was confusing).
OpenSea would show the transaction cancelled/relisted in their UI, but the on-chain contract still had the item for sale using the original price. If you know where to look, you could skip OpenSea's UI and interact with the contract directly, thus yielding a handful of Bored Apes for a fraction of their current price.
Clearly folks exploited a loophole, but at the same time "code is law" and all of that, and clearly OpenSea's fault for not preventing this from happening in the first place, so it doesn't surprise me they are stepping in and covering the costs.
This thread has the full details: https://twitter.com/yakirrotem/status/1485559864948629512
…
until it isn’t
between this and the original DAO fork, crypto fans fail on even their own terms
ETH intends to be a global computer for everybody. Imagine if the number of smart contracts went up by 100x. 1000x. 10,000x. This isn't the sort of thing that you can scale by simply buying more machines in a datacenter. Maybe people will solve the fee problem, but if they don't then this is going to become an even bigger problem as virtually nobody will ever want to transact on chain because of incredibly high fees.
The downside is that code of running machines that can create and validate the ZK Proof, but since these systems can be more centralized without sacrificing anti-censorship properties, it’s more practical than it seems.
For people who aren’t convinced that ZK Proofs will be feasible due to the prover cost, Optimistic Rollups with the same data availability management systems also provide cheap/free transactions with the downside that moving assets off of them takes days to weeks.
Zero-Knowledge proof applications have been accelerated by the blockchain research community and they are, most likely, the solution to the fee problem while maintaining the security of users (which ‘high-scale, cheap blockchains’ just can’t do).
That's generally the story with blockchains. All the guarantees and desirable properties vanish in practice when you try to do anything useful at scale.
So I see no issue here.
> “Losing my ape was [a] best blessing in disguise!,” García said. “It really showed the impact the NFT community has when banding together for a cause. When I lost it, I felt alone and didn’t know what to do. [One] tweet and [thousands] of people in [the] NFT community came to help!”
I know a guy who was a waiter from a not well off family in 2013, read about bitcoin and maxxed out his creditcards, borrowed money from all his friends, relatives and went 'all in'. His bet paid off as we know now: last I spoke with him he had close to 100m$, about half of which in real world money and half in crypto. But I can imagine people making the same bets when reading about these monkeys; will they laugh at the rest of us in a few years too?
If you could be sure the Apes are going to rise to 50 ETH, why not invest in it? The reason is because there's an equally likely chance the Apes will fall to half or less their current value, right? The same could have happened with Bitcoin.
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
Very clean presentation, posts rarely.
Note that this isn't an attempt to be a "respectable and critical" news source, it's an attempt to laugh at fools and their money being soon parted, and so you should assume the tone is suitably mocking. If you are looking for a balanced take or whatever or serious discussion or engagement on the technical side of this technology, that's not the purpose of this site.