I actually lost about $5k on cheapETH running servers. Nobody was "defrauded", I think these people don't understand how forks work. It's a precursor to the modern L2 stuff, I did this while writing the first version of Optimism's fraud prover. https://github.com/ethereum-optimism/cannon
I suspect most of the people who bring this up don't like me for other reasons, but with this they think they have something to latch on to. Doesn't matter that it isn't true and there wasn't a scam, they aren't going to look into it since it agrees with their narrative.
The question isn't who gets their money back, the question is who has to pay and/or take on the risk. In 2008, the banks were largely bailed out by taxpayers. In this case the hacker 'paid' because what they held was no longer recognized as ETH.
Even then, the hacker didn't lose anything. He might have a legal argument that he has been unjustly deprived of his wealth, but the legal system isn't generally available to criminals. Also, there's an alternative timeline where ETH fails because of this breach of trust, ETC takes off, and the hacker gets rich. But since the value creating developers supported to forked chain, that's where the value went.
IMO the title is a bit misleading since the bug was in the mev-boost library which isn't part of the ethereum protocol nor is it needed to validate blocks. As I understand, the "victims" were arbitrage bots that one could argue simply had their risk realized. I wonder if the brothers could have gotten away with it by just paying taxes.
They were a DeFi ponzi chain which was obviously going to fail to anyone who spent time looking into it. They were printing a stablecoin backed by nothing.
Far different from the blue chip DeFi apps on Ethereum that the OP listed, which process billions of dollars per day without issue.
DeFi makes things more transparent, but it doesn't make them risk free.
I personally profited off the collapse because of the transparency. Couldn't do the same with Celsius or traditional finance.
The way I recall it, they didn’t void past transactions; they added “irregular state changes” that would “return” the “stolen” funds to their “legitimate“ owners. Nor were they forced to fork; it was a voluntary decision of a group of people with enough social power over the platform.
Now this is more a matter of dispute, but I wouldn’t say the hacker stole the funds. They simply followed the DAO contract (not the “smart-contract”, mind you, but the one put forward by the Slock.it team on their page), according to which everything that went on the blockchain according to the DAO code was legitimate.
You seem like a very smart and highly technical person so I find it incredibly hard to believe you would have left vast sums of crypto on an unregulated exchange.
You're either being dishonest here or you consider yourself extremely naive.
Piecing together the comments up thread: there was apparently a unique twist to the infamous DAO hard-fork which allowed someone to steal the funds but not withdraw them (ie, transfer them to an exchange and get dollars out), so they were able to undo the transaction.
There was no such twist this time around which means the funds could already have been transferred to an exchange and withdrawn as dollars or BTC. You can only undo the ETH part of the transaction, which would take money away from the exchange (or from people who have since bought the stolen coins from the exchange unknowningly) and give it back to the victim. That's a lot less palatable than taking the money from the thief, so it's unlikely to happen.
It's scary that with crypto such things can make it so hard to get your money back. I know there was talk of fixing it with a fork to the Ethereum chain one day. Not sure what happened there.
3- Decided to cash out having no prior experience of how stock/ForEx/crypto exchanges work, i.e. they were ignorant of the consequences of dumping that much ETH on one exchange in one go
4- Which then triggered a cascade of stop losses and margin calls.
I recall that a second large theft [1] did not get a hard-fork resolution.
Whether it's due to bias from the core team or a wish to stay away from being a final arbitration after the first event, I'm not in a position to judge.
I suspect most of the people who bring this up don't like me for other reasons, but with this they think they have something to latch on to. Doesn't matter that it isn't true and there wasn't a scam, they aren't going to look into it since it agrees with their narrative.
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