The article tries to imply that the hacker had a change of heart after a public plea to return the funds.
In reality, parts of the crypto community moved quickly to block transactions involving the funds and some security researchers claimed they had solid leads on tracking down the hacker’s identity. I think the hacker realized that if their identity was compromised then the legal system wouldn’t look kindly on someone stealing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Returning the funds and trying to portray the hack as a noble operation to identify flaws in the system is one way to try to re-spin the events as a positive. It appears they’re hoping to collect donations or some sort of reward as a sort of clean money takeaway.
It must have been a wild emotional roller coaster to go from securing $600 million dollars for yourself to realizing that you made a mistake that tied your real identity to the heist.
I love how the crypto community encourages circumventing laws, UNTIL someone steals from them using their own “smart” contract then calls on authorities for help.
There are two distinct pieces. One piece is the technology and white paper behind Bitcoin. Most engineers on HN think that is very impressive and a legitimate technological achievement.
The other piece is a reaction to the pro crypto crowd who are making claims about how amazing crypto is and why it is the future. Most of these people have a large financial interest in moving the price of various coins up. The use cases so far 10 years into this are buying drugs and ransomware and the price going up.
Another example "Smart Contracts" are supposed to be this amazing technology for changing the world, but as you see here they have some significant downsides that the pro crypto people seem to either ignore or not understand.
There are many here who have seen crypto to overpromise and underdeliver for over 10 years.
PS Mined some BTC in 2011 and some LTC in 2012-2013.
The original promise (per Satoshi) was that it could be used as electronic money. That goalpost was moved onto other currencies and sidechains and regular public acceptance has been low.
Most of crypto activity is related to other crypto(see Ethereum, see DeFi). All of the "cool" stuff happening in crypto seems to be dealing with other crypto...
It is useless to non-crypto people.
The only somewhat useful moral use case are remittances to unstable countries.
The rest of crypto is just bad bad stuff: scams, ransomware, large scale capital transfers by bad actors(tax evaders being the least evil).
I am in a business(high rate of CC fraud) where I would really benefit from an easy onramp for non crypto users.
PSS Last not least, POW and the horrible incentives going along with it is a serious issue as well. POS remains unproven in the field.
It’s not that HN is anti crypto, it’s that most (if not all) smart people are. The only smart people that are pro crypto are ones trying to sell shovels in the gold rush (like Elon or Dorsey).
It’s ironic you’re asking this question in a thread about news proving how stupid crypto is to begin with.
quite a bold assumption most are smart here. most people here are experts on a subject matter or two but we should still take their stances on crypto (and other industries) with caution.
maybe they dont just understand it at all, too. and its a lot, wrapping your head around all the defi fiasco alone is mentally challenging as hell, haha.
It used to be very strange to me, but honestly think the answer is that a large number of HN community members are - somewhat ironically - very closed minded. Once you start to think in that framework you see it everywhere, and it goes all the way back to the original DropBox thread where some guy said "this is stupid you could just combine FTP with SVN".
Of course that doesn't apply to everyone, and perhaps not even them majority, but certainly at least the majority that shows up in crypto threads. HN members tend to be very smart, very technical, and very confident, all of which combine into this ugly blind spot to creative/unusual forms of technical innovation. Crypto in particular is good at sitting right in the center of that blind spot.
This explanation has made more sense to me than anything else I've seen, you'll have to decide for yourself if you agree with it.
Crypto has been around for quite a few years already. How is everyone still close minded? Maybe the issue is that crypto has several problems that are consistently ignored by the community and crypto products keep on underdelivering on their promises.
In the end, it all boils down to one fact: the differentiating feature of blockchain is decentralization. That's mainly it. However, the crypto community keeps on promising changes and improvements in areas that don't have anything to do with decentralization without any actual arguments, ignoring what is the reality of those issues.
> a large number of HN community members are - somewhat ironically - very closed minded
The other side of that coin – excessive open-mindedness – however, leads to being susceptible to cults, snake oil salesmen, and hyped up technologies. Crypto currencies, in particular, frequently tick all three boxes. Skepticism is generally a good thing, and so far crypto currency proponents have failed to refute the arguments of sceptics.
The Internet also failed to refute the arguments of skeptics until one day it didn't fail and now several of the largest companies in the world are entirely Internet based and providing indisputable value.
Cryptocurrency offers new primitives that are unavailable in any other system known to man. It takes time to build up a backbone of technology that can take these new primitives and get them to the point where they can compete with established trillion dollar industries, but it is happening, and it's starting to happen very rapidly.
It's certainly true that crypto is full of snake oil salesmen, overhyped technologies, and culty communities. But the presence of those things doesn't change the fact that the technology is real, and that it can do things at a fundamental level that no other technology can do.
The most popular internet skeptic quoted was one who (correctly) pointed out that they are going to have trouble trusting Amazon not to send them junk, and that Amazon has to fight an uphill battle to earn it. Which they did, and then started squandering away.
It is wasteful, it is often pitched as solutions to problems that it is poorly suited to solve, it is often defended by people with a vested financial interest in seeing it go up, it is often defended by people who seem pretty darn paranoid and insane by common standards in regards to anarchist beliefs or some variant, it's often poorly defined or vaporware on top of a non crypto solution, it's increasingly reinventing existing systems but worse, it's often debated by people who don't understand it, and in general its constantly showing weaknesses like this article where you get splits of "Working as intended as that's bad", "Working as intended and that's good", "Not working as intended and unsolveable", and "Not working as intended but solveable with x framework."
> Can someone explain to me why HN is so anti-crypto?
Short answer: Crypto has been touted as a primarily technological advancement (blockchain!) while the primary use case for most crypto proponents is simply getting rich (flipping coins or spreading "HODL" encouragement).
Imagine if Venmo had launched with the requirement that all Venmo transactions had to be performed with VENMOCOIN instead of dollars. To transact on the Venmo platform, you had to buy some of this VENMOCOIN from the founders or early adopters, funneling your real money to them in exchange for tokens you could use on the Venmo platform. The VENMOCOIN early adopters really, really want you to use Venmo so the price of their VENMOCOIN goes up, so every online discussion gets filled with people talking about how amazing Venmo is and how it's the way of the future and everyone should buy as much VENMOCOIN as possible.
Sound ridiculous, right? That's more or less what the crypto discussions have become: People pretend to talk about technology but it's really about getting rich by flipping coins and pumping their value.
Skepticism is maybe the definitive cultural trait of this site. And I think a lot of folks see gaps and hype in the cryptocurrency narrative. There is much to be skeptical of at every level of engagement.
Personally I see it as trying to recreate the banking and financial systems without all the lessons learned from hundreds of years.
Not to to mention anything dealing with money that isn’t reversible or doesn’t have a clear method for recourse is not something I want to put my money into.
Most HN users are wealthy devs or they want to be wealthy devs or startup founders. They have no need for crypto and it threatens where their money is stored- equities and the traditional banking system. The “hackers” traded their soul for money.
It’s really no different than a wealthy old man hating crypto. He has no need for it, he doesn’t want others to use it to get past him. He sees no problem with the current wealth inequality because he is at the top.
Crypto inequality is FAR worse than the traditional finance system, both in power and capital. A very small number of people control the protocols, network nodes, and hold the tokens themselves.
The 100 richest ETH wallets own 25% of mined ETH. Many of those wallets are probably owned by the same person/organization. Switching to PoS will make inequality even worse.
Some critics are definitely jelly about not hitting the crypto-lottery...but crypto is not a solution for wealth inequality.
Anyone that thinks that crypto is somehow going to help fix inequality is delusional. If crypto isn’t a complete dud, which I think is likely, it will increase inequality.
I think it's simply because lots of people on HN didn't buy any and now they think that they've missed the boat. They're angry because "stupid" people got rich on it. HNers like to think that they're smarter than everyone else and missing the boat hurts their ego. Although that isn't true and it's never too late to buy bitcoin.
Another reason is that most people on HN don't realize that there are roughly two sets of people in crypto. There are bitcoiners and then there are all the shitcoiners and scammers (who talk about use cases, ICOs, NFTs etc.). It's ok to hate all the scammers, but bitcoiners should be left out of it, because they're totally different set of people.
Despite the relatively high level of education here, collectively the community can be extremely doctrinal or knee-jerky on a number of subjects. Most articles that mention crypto bring a cohort of « Ponzi scheme » and « destructive mining » posts, when you'd expect somebody writing a lengthy post on the economics of energy were it to follow the established conventions of the site.
I think the overly trashy environment of the crypto space made it an acceptable target for behaviour that's otherwise seen as childish and unacceptable when it comes to other subjects.
As a very long-term crypto-sceptic, I remember thinking this place was absurdly naive and pro-crypto early on. However, after a decade of, largely, pointlessness, it's not surprising that attitudes have changed.
My impression is that most of the pro-crypto communities are rather new; most people involved just haven't been disillusioned yet.
IMO, impatience/bitterness. A lot of people got sold on the idea that big change was coming, then it didn't. Now crypto is in a gross stage, and while it clearly has some future, many people would rather point out how far away that future may still be. Some with far more certainty of it never happening than others.
I was thinking about this a lot. I used to think that most HN users are very smart, but the crypto discussions here are extremely dumb full of misconceptions and hatred. For example yesterday there was an article upvoted and vehemently discussed here, but anyone having a basic understanding of crypto would know that the article was total garbage (and full of hatred). It was like someone with primary-school mathematics knowledge hating on mathematicians and wanting to reform modern mathematics with his 'idea'.
I think it has to do with a misconception about how much effort you have to put in to have a good understanding on crypto. If we are speaking about topics like high mathematics, most people realise that their knowledge is not enough to have a meaningful opinion on the cutting-edge. For some reason people on HN treat crypto like politics: almost everyone has a strong opinion without much knowledge. Crypto is a much deeper subject than how it is treated on HN. You need to have not just technical knowledge (like understanding why a proof-of-stake algorithm has no vulnerability is VERY hard), but also very deep knowledge of the philosophy of value/money/trust. For example any substantial interview with Vitalik Buterin discusses the topics in a much deeper way than it is treated on HN.
TL;DR: People are reasonably smart here but extremely uneducated on crypto, and for some reason they think that they are informed enough to have a strong opinion.
It's also possible that some people understand all of this and still don't think that crypto is a good idea, or that it has worked out well in practice, or that it does anything meaningful.
Ok. In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far. Why isn't it meaningful to further research this technology in your opinion? (While mathematicians are researching all kinds of esoteric topics?) In my opinion proof-of-stake research is one of the most-important research topics today.
> an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology
As the other commenter said, "censor resistant" is impossible to achieve. It's society the one that gives value to things, and society can decide to censor you and stop you from storing/getting value from that network. Not to mention that most blockchains are traceable, so it's not that difficult to know how money is flowing.
> potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far
Why? This always happens in crypto: somehow it's going to fix a lot of issues even if the features that differentiate it from existing solutions don't have anything to do with those issues.
Are you a gold investor? I am. There are lots of problems with gold: 2-3% inflation, hard to store, hard to transfer, hard to divide, hard to examine whether it is really gold. BTC has some advantages (and some disadvantages). Proof of stake ETH have even more advantages (but also some more disadvantages). It is meaningful to research this, experiment with this, and not treat it as complete bullshit.
Most people don't deal with those problems because they use banks and official currency. If the target of the blockchain is to replace gold, then I don't know why people insist on regular people using it.
> It is meaningful to research this, experiment with this, and not treat it as complete bullshit.
Of course it is. But it's also meaningful to not treat it as the revolution as the crypto community does, or say that the people who don't think crypto is great is just uneducated.
If you find it a good store of value for yourself that is fine, but you need to understand that value is defined by social norms not by technical features. Picasso paintings are currently a very good store of value. Gold has been a decent store of value for thousands of years. People bought beanie babies in 1998 because they thought the price would go up and stay up for a long time. Obviously they were wrong, but the same thing could happen to GOLD, BTC, or even Picasso paintings. It totally depends on what society values in the future.
I understand this. While you are right, there are some properties of these assets that can help us predict what could become a store of value: is it durable? is it easy to transfer? is it easy to censor? is it inflationary? also you can examine the network effect related to the asset. By developing new technical features, you can increase the chance of an asset to become a store of value. That's why researching proof-of-stake algorithms is meaningful. Not as important as to find cure for cancer? Maybe. But still meaningful. Lots of people on HN claim that it is totally bullshit, which is a strong opinion imho...
Do you mean proof of stake? If so, yes there is potential for new technologies to come out which could cause crypto to have more real world use cases and then cause the value of crypto to society to be higher. But we have been hearing about how crypto is "the future" for 10+ years. At what point is this future actually going to exist?
> but the same thing could happen to GOLD, BTC, or even Picasso paintings
In fact, it has happened to the first two, at least temporarily. Someone who bought gold in 1980, say, is probably not particularly happy with it as a store of value today (adjusted for inflation, they _may_ just about be breaking even now assuming that they paid no transactional or storage fees); the same goes for someone who bought bitcoin in May. Or, er, an hour ago.
First, I am very crypto skeptical, but I don't have any problem with "research continuing". However, that's not what I am experiencing. If crypto enthusiasts were off in a lab trying to figure out how to make it solve a real problem then great! Instead, I am the "tech expert" for many of my friends and family, and frequently have them reach out to me as they are on the verge of putting a non trivial amount of money into crypto that they can't afford to lose. Most of these people can barely keep their passwords safe, so I have to spend a lot of time talking them out of it because I care about them. A similar thing happens at work. Some random business exec has a great idea to "use blockchain" for some thing that frankly would be better solved with a regular database. I've had to spend a lot of time convincing business people to not use crypto or NFTs yet.
Second, what you're doing, and many crypto people do this, is identify real problems that would be great if we could solve them. And then you go, "and isn't crypto great because it hasn't solved these problems, but maybe it could". Yeah, maybe, but it hasn't yet. Crypto reminds me of the semantic web people in a lot of ways. They said, "wouldn't it be great if semantic information were embeded in data and APIs could be machine understandable". Sounds a lot like smart contracts doesn't it? Yes, it would be great if we solved that problem, but we never did. The most we got from the semantic web was the semi-useful json-ld you seen in HTML headers for SEO optimization. Here's the thing, the vast vast majority of new ideas don't pan out. It's a lot easier to identify legit problems than it is to solve them. Crypto people get super excited because it would be amazing to solve those problems, BUT there's no good reason to believe it's likely that it will. I say this as someone who spent years trying to get teh semantic web to work. It never did.
> In my opinion an algorithmic censor-resistant, deflationary value network is a useful potential technology that can give us potentially the best store-of-value known to mankind so far.
Neither of those things are true about Bitcoin (it will not become deflationary until 2140, and "censor-resistant" requires a lot of extra elaboration). But then what's the economic basis for that being a good store of value?
I'm mostly upset with crypto because it hasn't delivered on any promise, while still causing untold ecological damage, and has tilted the price of computing equipment so already rich industrialists can earn even more. Up until recently that was just GPUs, but the latest invention in the space is they made a cryptocurrency based around using up hard drives. The joy.
I don’t have time to compile a list, but if you listen to crypto proponents you frequently hear advocacy for circumventing democratically enacted laws and institutions like fiat currency, taxation, financial regulation, international regulation, etc.
... No we want more efficient and transparent systems where possible. Avoiding taxes is breaking the law, circumventing fiat currency isn't exactly a democratic institution, did you vote for the monetary policy of the US government?, I'm all better financial regulation. I think you talk to kooks.
Of course every generalization is wrong but a not so little part of the crypto community seems very interested in avoiding taxation, money laundering and buying illegal stuff without detection.
You are using the wrong denominator. You need to compare the percentage of cash transactions (or cash exchanged) for illegal activities compared to crypto.
If you start moving more than $10,000, you will have IRS attention. (I think they like to pick on little guys because it's easier than the guys whom have lawyers, and CPAs?)
Actually, I was flagged over $6000 deposit over the sale of a car.
The IRS gives rewards to bank employees if they report (successful conviction) any suspicious behavior.
I still don't know why I was flaggged. Probally because I had long hair at the time?
I had a bunch of sleepless nights over that incident, and a bunch of emails back and forth.
I hope we wouldn't have to go through a bunch of sleepless nights for doing nothing bad. There are semi random checks of "suspicious behaviour" being done in masses. These things can get out of hand sometimes (redefining what suspicious is...), when those elected get a bit crazy
Internet file sharing was/is illegal when it first started. Now its the main form of distribution for music and movie industry. Are you only seeing criminal part of crypto and ignoring the rest to confirm your bias?
> Internet file sharing was/is illegal when it first started.
Internet file sharing is older than you think. Together with remote terminal access (TELNET), file transfer (FTP) is one of the oldest Internet protocols. When file transfer over the Internet first started, that is, when the Internet itself started, it was not "illegal".
So many times across reddit and discord servers have I saw cryptocurrency enthusiasts trading ways to dodge taxes, for example.
I don't think what the government calls "drugs" should be illegal, but, selling and buying drugs with cryptocurrency is an oft advocated for activity that I've seen in these communities.
That is not an accurate generalization. Many in the crypto community do not advocate breaking laws. Instead they look for ways to interact that do not legally require complying with onerous regulatory burdens, like peer-to-peer monetary transfers, that do not as of yet have the same amount of totalitarian restriction placed upon them as monetary transfers that are intermediated by a trusted third party middle-man.
As for the legitimacy of the law itself, and the opinion of the 'crypto community' on it: the distinction you're missing is that some laws prohibit victimless crimes, by infringing upon the freedom of contract, and always in the name of some supposed greater good, whether that's 'limiting systemic risk', 'protecting retail investors' or 'preventing money laundering', while others prohibit genuinely victimful crimes, where one party violates the rights of another. It can be entirely morally consistent to oppose the former while supporting the latter.
When such laws are used to prohibit mutually voluntary interactions between consenting adults, I think it's a human rights violation, and it is an accurate adjective to use, whether it's the CCP doing it to "maintain social harmony and political stability", or the USG doing it to "limit systemic risks to the financial system".
>>In fact, we have already seen what happens when the financial industry is entirely deregulated multiple times worldwide.
That is a revisionist account put out by some of the most powerful special interests in the world, who benefit from rampant gatekeeping/centralization of private financial interaction.
I'm in the financial industry and believe we need way more regulations than we currently have. And we need tougher and more rigorous enforcement of the existing regulations as well.
> He seems to know enough that I don’t believe he’s scared of them finding his identity
I don't know about this but I agree that he doesn't seem to set out wanting to steal $600mio. Sounds like the typical "hacker" mentality where he's prodding around for security holes and just happened to find one.
Well, the hack didn't involve an inter-blockchain transfer. It was internal transfers carried out at the same time on ETH, Polygon and BSC networks, so each of them would require a separate hardfork to repair this.
Well the Bangladesh Bank heist managed to transfer close to US$1B over SWIFT. Of course since this is the traditional banking system we’re talking about, most of the transactions were either quickly blocked or since recovered. According to Wikipedia about $63M remained unrecovered as of 2018.
In that hack, they attempted to transfer out $1B, but only managed about $100m, because the other transfers were blocked. And a portion of that 100m was eventually recovered.
Does returning the funds across a bunch of transactions also make blocking transactions harder? Assuming you don't want to block any "give back"? Maybe they are hoping for enough confusion there results in some of the stolen funds being spendable?
They gave back less than half, they still have > $300M, they are equally "criminal" as before, however much that was. I don't see the benefit they get for returning a portion.
In reality, parts of the crypto community moved quickly to block transactions involving the funds and some security researchers claimed they had solid leads on tracking down the hacker’s identity. I think the hacker realized that if their identity was compromised then the legal system wouldn’t look kindly on someone stealing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Returning the funds and trying to portray the hack as a noble operation to identify flaws in the system is one way to try to re-spin the events as a positive. It appears they’re hoping to collect donations or some sort of reward as a sort of clean money takeaway.
It must have been a wild emotional roller coaster to go from securing $600 million dollars for yourself to realizing that you made a mistake that tied your real identity to the heist.