This part puzzles me to - immediately agreeing to plug the $320Million hole really makes you wonder how there is that much money freely available to just pay people back so easily.
I mean I get your point and it kinda stands, but the latest batch of crypo fueled wealthy people are less the pioneer/early movers and more the "I'll create a crypto product nobody understands and, boom it has a market cap of a couple hundred billion!". And since you can trade whatever crypto you want for eth, all you have to do is convince people your coin is worth something and you can do exactly the above thing.
I think you are falling prey to selection bias. Yes there are many scammy projects that made a few people rich, and a handful of non scammy projects, but the vast majority do not work.
The recipe for creating fake dollars in crypto is pretty well established at this point
> they need “$320 million” in crypto which is easy enough to create out of thin air
Second, this is an illustration of basically what you've just articulated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149241
Not a perfect analysis but there's about $114B circulating in crypto: https://tomtunguz.com/how-much-money-flowing-into-crypto/
[citation needed]
This absolute reeks of the type of baseless claim that someone living in a bubble surrounded by NFT fanatics would claim. Be careful not to think that the trends within your social network are indicative of the population as a whole.
Jump acquired certus one, who developed the wormhole. Jump has invested quite heavily in the solana ecosystem, so while $300mm is a lot of money, it's a small price to pay for a firm of their size.
They're a top trading firm, whose competitors have spent $300mm to run hundreds of miles of cables to save microseconds in latency.
It's microwave towers, and it's to save milliseconds. You're not dealing in mics until you're in the colo.
But those are investments, which will generate huge returns. Throwing $300m to paper over a hack isn't remotely the same.
That's probably NOT what's going to happen.
It's most likely going to be 320 million USDT (Tether) or an equivalent amount of ETH (which was most probably purchased with Tether).
https://twitter.com/iamnomad/status/1489245139763703812?s=21
Trust is the most important thing in crypto, exchanges are making billions in profit, not covering a $320m loss could generate billions in damage by crypto prices plunging, so it makes a lot of economic sense to avoid that.
There are investors holding billions in Solana crypto, so it's in their interest to avoid a Solana loss of trust.
That’s not what the crypto shills have been saying for years. It’s supposed to solve everything because it’s trustless.
Validity of execution and order of execution.
Without considering smart contracts that's basically enough. With smart contracts there are many valid states that are very undesirable (e.g. pegs breaking, manipulation of prices to liquidate positions) this one would be a peg breaking that subsequently would trigger a cascade of liquidations, at the current state of solana that would also flood the network in people racing to try and grab the liquidation fees[1]
[1]: (a quirk of all of the smart contract platforms I know is that there is no way to ensure that X happens under Y conditions, so instead what people do is set up there systems such that if Y there exists riskless profit for anyone who can make X happen. So once collateralized positions become undercollateralized (e.g. backed by 1.1x) anyone that can return the lended assets (which need to be liquid & fungible) gets the collateral)
Who happens to be just one actor in the whole thing.
> Maybe if you spent an hour learning about cryptocurrency and it’s culture instead of calling people shills,
You mean like this culture?
https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/search?q=trustless&r...
> as an aside: hacker news comments become a dumpster on cryptocurrency
And replies like this make it no better. Comments like this
> the whole thread isn’t calling anyone who works for Google “shills” but that decorum is totally acceptable on these threads
are basically not true. This whole thread isn't saying everyone is a shill, there is ONE comment that said that.
Crypto is full of scams, just like traditional banking. Yes there are people who absolutely shit on crypto here, but there's also crypto enthusiasts who can't take ANY constructive criticism. Both extremes aren't warranted. Stop pretending that crypto advocates are being victimized here...they aren't.
No it is not and neither should it be. Blockchains are 'supposed' to be trustless with no need to trust a particular group or some group of keyholders. Otherwise, what is the point?
There is no point in promoting decentralization when the whole chain was reversed due to a hack (The DAO hack) or users still resorting to using centralized exchanges rather than 'decentralised' ones or even running most of the nodes on a centralized server.
I hope you have not proven that you have misunderstood the point of their decentralization claims. It makes it very easy for them to dismiss your comment.
Is this realized profit in real cash, or book profit based on valuations?
Who puts real money into crypto by billions? I somehow doubt that enough actual physical people come to buy crypto. Is this money "invested" by funds?
This whole ethereum thing sounds like the old joke "we exchanged a dog worth 1 million for 2 cats worth 0,5 million each".. yet now they try to find someone who will buy this stuff at those bullshit valuations - to be the one left holding the bag.
Also if so much real money is generated then where are the billionaires? Actual ones who divested from crypto (to lower risk) and bought unsexy real world stuff. I understand that in theory crypto is always growing, but who is coming to buy that 1 BTC for 36k usd? To get billions it would have to be a lot of people.
> Binance generated at least $20 billion of revenue last year, according to a Bloomberg analysis of its trading volume and fees.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-01-09/binance-c...
> Also if so much real money is generated then where are the billionaires
Same article:
> With $96 billion, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is closing in on tech titans including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
What? I thought the whole point was to be trustless?
It does create a morale hazard if that was indeed what happened - at this point just speculation.
Why hello J.P. Morgan.
So can we stop pretending that cryptocurrency is anything but an attempt to recreate the financial system in a way that facilitates ignoring banking regulations?
I wonder if network insiders had been prepared for the eventuality of something like this happening, and were just executing a playbook.
Contract code if anybody is curious. It's less than 100 lines of Solidity, easy to read even if unfamiliar with the language: https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...
So he stops at the nearby ATM and withdraws another $320. Then walks down the same street with even more thugs waiting.
https://etherscan.io/address/0xe4f6df25710e75a08cb967e831ea5...
And it's not the hack itself. Crypto projects get hacked every week. Multichain bridges are the target of the month, with eye-watering amounts and complex code running on different blockchains, and off blockchain. And a Solana bug like this one is to be expected.
What is surprising is to see a project promise to fully repay everyone, within two hours of the attack occurring. That size of cash for a "we'll fund it back up", and that kind of speed is really unusual.
In the immediate aftermath of the hack, people were commenting that the now unbacked Solana side eth was still trading near its normal prices, and it stayed that way until the announcement. This leads me to guess that insiders must have known that there would be a chunk of money coming to refill the coffers after the hack, which in turn means that the decision to send the project hundreds of millions of dollars must have been made at or before minutes had elapsed from the hack.