[HN Gopher] ETH: $23M transaction fee sent to a miner
___________________________________________________________________
ETH: $23M transaction fee sent to a miner
Author : BryanBeshore
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-09-27 20:25 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (etherscan.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (etherscan.io)
| tschwimmer wrote:
| Details are scarce at this point but this is just another data
| point suggesting that DeFi doesn't solve a real problem. Yes, the
| existing financial infrastructure is slow and costly but in a
| pretty good local maximum. Touted features of DeFi that are
| arguably worse than what they're replacing:
|
| 1. "Your contract is executed exactly as it is written! No
| loopholes, no shenanigans!" Clearly this is a double edged sword.
| Since code is a lot more complex than written human language,
| expressing intent can be very difficult. In a regular contract,
| if your counterparty figures out a clever way to cheat you out of
| your money, you can sue them in court and the judge will very
| likely tell them to give the money back and slap them with
| damages too. Apparently in Ethereum Smart Contracts, you can
| accidentally/inadvertently allow for a gas fee that 230x the
| transaction value and there's literally nothing anyone can do for
| you. 2. "No need for expensive lawyers/bankers!" True! But you
| now need to pay expensive computer scientists to write/review
| your contracts, who are probably at least twice as expensive as
| the bankers. Oops. 3. "Not centralized! Don't be chained by
| unjust government regulation!" True, but also probably not
| optimal for 99.5% of people. Anyone who has been banned from
| Venmo for making a North Korea joke knows how annoying AML/KYC
| is, but by and large the regs (in the US at least) are written in
| a way that protect the average joe and society as a whole.
| herval wrote:
| > Since code is a lot more complex than written human language,
| expressing intent can be very difficult.
|
| Isn't that the other way around? Natural language remains an
| unsolved problem, and formal verification of software is pretty
| much a requirement for compilers. Your example is evidence of
| that: intent in natural language is easy to distort and hard to
| prove, thus making it much more complex
| Traster wrote:
| Well let's put it this way - in natural language, we say
| stuff and implicitly assume we've done our best to express
| intent, but it may not be perfect (hence lawyers). In smart
| contracts you express your intent into a contract and then we
| pretend there was no intent. There is only the contract. And
| that's a massive floor.
| asciimike wrote:
| James Mickens' "Blockchains are a bad idea" talk [1] is a great
| explanation that discusses exactly that.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI
| followLink wrote:
| Hard to say if this satirical or not ("Etherium") but will
| respond in good faith. 1. Same argument can be used in the
| opposite way, you can verify the counter party will act as
| expect, there is no need for costly litigation as backstop. 2.
| An engineer reviewing a contract once will not be more
| expensive than hiring a full time banker to review each
| transaction or a lawyer to pursue a legal battle. 3.
| Decentralization and regulation are not mutually exclusive.
| jrm4 wrote:
| 100%. I keep harping on the point that "smart contract" is such
| a bad name for these things. A real-life contract is _not_ the
| execution of the task(s) itself, it 's the legal recording and
| reinforcement of the promise(s) made by the parties if/when
| things go wrong.
|
| Smart executor does sound pretty grimy though :)
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| In normal contracting the paper is the source code and you
| need to find some real live people to be the compiler.
| Sometimes it's everyday people, sometimes operations
| professionals, developers, finance or legal personnel.
| Ultimately you always can fall back on the court or
| arbitrator as the ultimate compiler and interpreter. So,
| different compilers maybe for smart contracts? ....
| jrm4 wrote:
| I'm trying to roll with you on this idea, but I can't help
| but think that this is just a square-peg round-hole thing.
| I am a (mostly non-practicing) lawyer; but I teach IT full
| time.
|
| Like "A.I," a lot of people dream about the idea of
| revolutionizing or strongly improving on law via code, and
| _I don 't see it happening, ever._ It's this well meaning
| and seductive idea that we can leverage the superior power
| of computery thought and ideas to "correct" the foibles of
| humans -- but I think "human disputes" are too slippery to
| be bound by code, and the beauty and triumph of "law" as a
| system is that it too is slippery enough to manage it
| reasonably.
|
| To me it's strongly related to the complete layman fantasy
| of "well, they should have just written the law more
| clearly and everything would be fine."
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Yes, and the reverse also is an interesting thought
| exercise-- if this paper contract really _was_ a piece of
| software, what would folks do to QA it, write it,
| interpret it. I mean, paper contracts are written using
| hopelessly buggy and ambiguous human languages
| theoretically capable of so many non-harmonious
| interpretations. The solution really is about friendly,
| trusted compilers approaching the contracts from a
| fundamentally cooperative direction. You write a contract
| with your trusted partner on a napkin at dinner. And when
| trust fails, courts interpret in an explicitly prosocial
| way.
| Beldin wrote:
| Don't discount the capriciousness of the law's execution.
| In many cases, being the right skin color and wealthy
| comes across like a superpower compared to Joe Average.
| I'd hazard a guess that many "use code for law" types
| basically want to put Lady Justice's blindfold back.
|
| That doesn't mean it's a good idea, nor that is bad. It
| comes from good intentions, is all.
|
| (Very aware that those can be used for paving certain
| roads)
| leppr wrote:
| This accident actually proves the exact contrary. Despite these
| obvious flaws, people are still using DeFi.
|
| There must be something of value in there that you're missing.
| And it's not speculation, as there are way better ways to
| speculate in crypto than by using DeFi (shittokens, NFTs, ...).
| tschwimmer wrote:
| People inject heroin, drink liters of soda and gamble their
| life savings away too, but none of that is evidence that
| these are healthy or socially valuable activities.
|
| My explanation of the prevalence of DeFi is that it's
| currently at or near the peak of the hype cycle and there's a
| ton of money to be made either by trying to legitimatize the
| ecosystem or else via run of the mill pump and dumps.
| roca wrote:
| "There must be something of value in these tulip bulbs
| because everyone is investing in them."
| leppr wrote:
| Investing != using.
|
| https://cryptofees.info/
|
| People pay tens of millions of dollars everyday to use
| these on-chain platforms. They could avoid all those fees
| if they just wanted to speculate on token prices by using
| centralized exchanges, of which many have very lax KYC
| requirements.
| roca wrote:
| I don't have a breakdown of what people are using
| Ethereum for, but certainly a lot of those uses are stuff
| like NFTs, i.e. implementing other purely speculative
| assets. And there are lots of crypto startups using
| Ethereum, whose money is sourced from a different kind of
| speculation (er, "investment"). So again, it's not enough
| to just point at activity and say "look, real value!"
| leppr wrote:
| I don't disagree that the vast majority of the activity
| derives more or less indirectly from price speculation of
| some sort. But the thing to note is that so much of it is
| done on-chain instead of on centralized exchanges which
| have comparatively negligible fees. At the very least
| this proves the technologies themselves as suitable
| platforms for speculation (vs simply being the _target_
| of speculation). That 's already a big, legitimate and
| very popular use case.
| Lazare wrote:
| Lottery tickets aren't a good investment, but people still
| buy them.
|
| It's certainly true that there is activity in the DeFi space,
| and it's certainly _possible_ that this activity is because
| DeFi is just so gosh darn amazing at solving people 's need
| for basic financial products.
|
| ...at least in theory. But if you're going to make that
| rather extraordinary claim, I think you need to provide some
| extraordinary evidence.
| leppr wrote:
| I'm disputing the logical conclusion from the facts at hand
| that no real problem is solved, not providing a value
| judgment about DeFi.
|
| It's not an extraordinary claim but common knowledge in the
| start-up investment land that when you see an ugly, flawed
| product get an unexplained amount of engagement, you become
| interested.
|
| _> Lottery tickets aren 't a good investment, but people
| still buy them._
|
| Lottery tickets solve the real problem of hopelessness
| about improving one's financial situation through work. It
| might not be a worthwhile investment in financial terms,
| but it has its use just like entertainment media or
| alcohol.
| j_walter wrote:
| Not just 23x...but 230x transaction value ($23M to send $100K).
| Not to mention it was 7,700,000x the going rate for the other
| transaction in that same block.
| dilap wrote:
| This might be a very naive question, but would it not be the
| case that many contracts would be essentially similar in
| nature? So while weird loopholes would exist at first, over
| time there could be a large library of tried-and-true contracts
| which could be applied to the situation at hand?
| j_walter wrote:
| You are correct and there is already a bunch of off the shelf
| contracts that are basically plug and play...however it takes
| little knowledge to actually publish said contract and a
| small typo can either make the contact never accessible or
| easily exploitable.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Imagine a scenario where a popular contract is discovered to
| have a serious flaw years down the line, and they can't be
| patched.
| ljm wrote:
| That is arguably tending towards centralisation, as there
| will then be a market of brokers that know which contracts to
| suggest, and then there will be other places that will only
| accept contracts from a known broker.
|
| There will, of course, be the more expensive brokers that can
| exploit loopholes, but even as a stretch this isn't vastly
| different to a bank account in the Caymans.
|
| Of course, you don't have to participate - you can hold the
| 'cash' equivalent or concoct your own scheme, but you're not
| as protected from loss as you otherwise might be (provided
| there's an insurance package of sorts, in the absence of
| regulation).
| leppr wrote:
| Smart contract code is open-source[1], so the
| centralization you're talking about shouldn't be confused
| with the (de)centralization of power people talk about when
| they talk about the decentralized web or decentralized
| finance. Circling around a small set of trusted open-source
| technologies doesn't cause centralization of power, as we
| can see with GNU/Linux, HTML/JS, ...
|
| [1]: On many platforms smart contracts are stored in the
| form of high-level interpreted languages. On Ethereum, the
| blockchain stores EVM code (assembly), but contracts that
| haven't "verified" their source, typically by uploading the
| high-level code to etherscan.org, are seldom used (with
| some notable exceptions).
| ljm wrote:
| I contend that it doesn't cause centralisation of _power_
| , but centralisation and power are inevitable should the
| project hit the mainstream, proper:
|
| - GNU/Linux - GNU/Linux is open source but centralised.
| The userspace is the part that is distributed, via
| operating systems, and the source control is distributed,
| via git. But it's all for one Linux kernel. You can also
| build your own kernel, but that doesn't really make linux
| 'decentralized'. Similarly, Linux for a lot of people
| means 'Ubuntu'.
|
| - HTML/JS - this is centralised under WhatWG/W3C, etc.
| Arguably, these days, it's actually centralised under
| Chrome, because what Chrome does eventually becomes the
| spec. You can freely build your own implementations of
| HTML and JS/Ecmascript but most likely, you are using the
| centralised implementation via webkit, blink, or gecko.
|
| So, the fact that smart contract is open-source doesn't
| really mean anything. It'll grow big, then as a matter of
| convenience it will start to consolidate. git, for
| example, is decentralised, but git forges (github,
| gitlab, etc.) provide centralisation as a convenience.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| The key difference (which is categorical) is that if there is
| a latent bug in one of these contracts that goes unnoticed
| and then gets exploited later, you're still out the money.
| Intent doesn't matter.
|
| There is essentially a 0% chance of such an outcome with a
| regular contract (at least in US contract law). Intent is a
| cornerstone of contracts in the real world. Just because
| someone came up with a clever "exploit" doesn't entitle them
| to rip you off. This is a very good thing.
| cr15 wrote:
| To those claiming that this is an example of crypto being a scam
| / useless / unsafe:
|
| I'd point out that if this is a case of incorrect data entry,
| similar cases happen in traditional finance with some regularity,
| and in the majority of those cases (e.g. someone sends a large
| amount to the incorrect bank account), there is no legal recourse
| to recover those funds and companies resort to asking nicely for
| the money back (usually it works).
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > there is no legal recourse to recover those funds and
| companies resort to asking nicely for the money back
|
| Yes there is, there are courts. There's a long history of error
| corrections being forced. That is if it's clearly an error.
|
| https://www.ncconsumer.org/news-articles-eg/using-money-mist...
| Smashure wrote:
| Crypto is international. Courts are terrible with that
| scenario.
|
| Pretty hard for US courts to make a random person across the
| globe give up their wallets.
|
| Also, banks can be court ordered to hold funds. Crypto
| doesn't have that.
| handmodel wrote:
| One important thing to note is that in traditional finance if
| the money gets sent to person B, because person B hacked my
| e-mail, there is an enforcement mechanism to get the money
| back.
|
| However, this is not as true for crypto. If I steal 5M from
| your account and put it into mine then you can't get the money
| back if I don't give up the key. And, while the state will
| personally arrest you, they are going to be a lot less
| likely/able to recoup any crypto.
| mikeryan wrote:
| There's an interesting court case on this going on now.
|
| https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/08/man-robbed-
| of-16-bitcoin...
| p4bl0 wrote:
| So, how do you cancel a transaction with such an obvious mistake
| when it is recorded on a blockchain?
|
| (This is a rhetorical question.)
|
| EDIT: Why the downvotes? It's not okay to discuss the fact that
| in the possibility of human error (assuming this is one, and not
| a very wild --yet successful-- bet on a laundering attempt), the
| incapacity to cancel transaction may be a problem?
| brockwhittaker wrote:
| You're getting downvoted because it's a longtime well-known
| problem of the blockchain. The answer to your question is that
| nobody can reverse the transaction or undo it. That's kind of
| the point, for better or or for $23m worse.
| _3u10 wrote:
| You're pointing out an obvious major flaw with blockchain that
| is a consequence of what many in the crypto community believe
| to be an advantage, namely that your assets cannot be seized
| without your private key.
|
| Your post is basically this, but less humorous so people are
| upset. https://xkcd.com/538/
|
| So to answer your question, how you revert this transaction is
| to buy $5 wrench and go have a conversation with the miner.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| It's pretty easy to revert it: you fork the protocol. The ETH
| guys already did this once, hence Ethereum Classic.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The idea that the code maintainers get to decide which
| transactions are valid or not is insane. Almost as insane as
| saying an 'easy' fix is to arbitrarily fork the chain
| undermining it's whole purpose.
| ac29 wrote:
| The new kingmakers are the stablecoins. Whichever chain
| they decide to honor has a huge amount of economic weight
| behind it.
|
| How much of this economic weight is real, at least in the
| case of Tether, is another story. I suspect we'll find out
| in the next few years as regulation ramps up.
| sgarman wrote:
| I'm not defending anything here but adding context. It
| wasn't JUST the "code maintainers." They made a proposal
| and all of the nodes "voted" by opting in or out. A lot of
| them opted out (Eth Classic) but majority usually wins in
| these situations. Did certain entities have more influence
| or power in this situation, yes 100%. Is that better or
| worse then how it would play out in standard US finance
| system? I'm not sure, you decide.
| twa999 wrote:
| if it's mined the only possible way would be to bribe the
| miners to revert the blocks by paying even more (like time
| bandit attack) or renting soooo much hashpower to create your
| own fork.
|
| If it's not included yet you need to send another transaction
| with the same nonce that sends yourself 0 ether but with a
| higher gas price asap, this is not a guarantee however because
| the miner would probably still go with the transaction that is
| more profitable for them and because the fee was so high it got
| included in under 1 minute.
|
| So once this transaction landed in the (public?) mempool it was
| gg.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You can ask Buterik to roll it back for you. He did it once for
| the DAO guys, so worth a try.
|
| (Of course, that rollback also demonstrated that Ethereum is a
| centralised coin with a controlling entity, and that 'code is
| law' is just a lie, but that's another story)
| cwkoss wrote:
| Once it's recorded on the blockchain, there is no way to cancel
| it.
|
| If they are lucky, they may be able to reach out to the miner
| and get a portion returned. Probably just tough luck though.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Unless you just get the devs to write it out of existence and
| fork the chain.
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| I'm guessing you're also getting downvoted because sarcasm and
| rhetorical questions and not great ways of starting meaningful
| discussions.
| system2 wrote:
| Can't anyone ask question to HN Gods without fear of being
| ridiculed? I am also curious about this myself.
| Geee wrote:
| You negotiate with the recipient of the transaction to return
| the money.
| andruby wrote:
| The fee went to the miner, not the recipient of the
| transaction. So probably an anonymous mining setup that has
| little incentive to return $23M
| exporectomy wrote:
| Reversing transactions is massive problem in finance in
| general. It causes losses for merchants in both physical shops
| and online sellers because there's no objective measure of
| whether a transaction was a mistake or not so it's begging to
| be abused for fraud. Even if a court decides, somebody still
| loses when both parties had different expectations. People have
| overpaid wages or social welfare payments taken back from them
| after they already assumed it was correct and spent it, and are
| now in a big debt. People accidentally sign contracts that
| require them to pay more than they expected. There's fraud
| where people buy an item online, then claim they never received
| it and get their payment refunded while keeping the item.
|
| Here's an example of traditional finance screwing someone over
| for making an obvious mistake. Where's this ability to reverse
| transactions when you need it?
| https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/a-fascinating-...
|
| You're assuming there's some benevolent God who can arbitrate
| who's right and who's wrong. In reality, people get screwed by
| bad payment reversal decisions all the time and there's no
| objective way to decide in every case.
| midev wrote:
| > You're assuming there's some benevolent God who can
| arbitrate who's right and who's wrong
|
| Literally nobody assumes this. Please don't invent strawmen.
|
| The point is, even with all the failings of the courts,
| different interpretations of language, and every other flaw,
| it's still better than having no recourse at all.
|
| > There's fraud where people buy an item online, then claim
| they never received it and get their payment refunded while
| keeping the item.
|
| And of course, the blockchain solves none of this. It just
| makes rectifying the problem far more difficult.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Not in _every_ case, for sure. But _many_ cases are pretty
| easy to arbitrate. This one for example: when the transaction
| fees 230x greater than the transaction amount, it is fair to
| assume that is was not meant to be that way. If I loose my
| credit card and /or it gets stolen, and someone uses it in
| the time between when I declare I lost it and when it is
| blocked, my bank is required by law to refund me (and I guess
| my bank attempts to get their money back too, but that's not
| really my problem).
|
| Also:
|
| > There's fraud where people buy an item online, then claim
| they never received it and get their payment refunded while
| keeping the item.
|
| A blockchain can't solve that kind of problems. And it never
| will. It is not because something is written on a blockchain
| that it is true, _except_ for cryptocurrencies because that
| is how they _define_ truth. But as soon as you have something
| happen in the real-world (in your example, an item sent in
| exchange for a payment), then a blockchain is useless, or at
| least, it is not any more useful than any type of ledger.
| yyyk wrote:
| >Here's an example of traditional finance screwing someone
| over for making an obvious mistake. Where's this ability to
| reverse transactions when you need it?
|
| It still exists, and note that the case did reach a court. It
| just happens that the beneficieries were also owed that
| money, and that allowed them to win the subsequent lawsuit:
|
| https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2021/02/24/how-the-
| litig...
| roca wrote:
| It's inevitable that transactions made in error cause
| problems for the sender or receiver or both, but it is still
| better to have a human judge scrutinize the case with the
| ability to impose a more reasonable outcome than the status
| quo, than to have no such recourse. The position of defi fans
| that it is _better_ to have no such recourse is ludicrous.
|
| Your example is a good one: that particular case was
| carefully scrutinized by the court and the judge decided that
| the outcome was reasonable, mainly because the creditors who
| received the money were owed the money. If the outcome was
| obviously unreasonable, e.g. Citibank had simply sent $1B to
| some random address, of course the judge would have reversed
| it.
| elif wrote:
| it varies from coin to coin.
|
| in limited cases you can perform another operation which makes
| the preceding operation illegal.
|
| in normal cases, not being able to cancel is the entire point
| of the technology.
| fwip wrote:
| > The transaction was a smart contract interaction with the
| amount of tether sent to one wallet before being passed along to
| Deversifi's wallet. It used the newly implemented EIP-1559 type
| of transaction, which was designed to make Ethereum fees easier
| to predict.
|
| From https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/118753/bitfinex-just-
| spe...
|
| More and more, it is revealed that that majority of actors in
| crypto are either incompetent, scammers, or both.
| etamponi wrote:
| Can someone please explain to me how this is possible and what is
| the miner supposed to do if they don't have all those Ethers?
| rictic wrote:
| The miner received those ETH, nominally in exchange for their
| services validating transactions.
|
| Previous situations like this have been the result of the
| transaction author (or their software) making a mistake.
| kingo55 wrote:
| They probably mixed up their spent output with the fee output.
| It happens from time to time and some miners are happy to send
| the funds back. But it'll be interesting to see what happens in
| this case when it's $23m.
| csomar wrote:
| That's the case for Bitcoin but ETH doesn't have
| inputs/outputs.
| 0x000000001 wrote:
| Someone submitted a transaction with incorrect parameters
| allowing this to happen and the miner got a $23m tip as a
| result
| threevox wrote:
| Seems more like fraud/money laundering, from what I can tell
| pandemicsyn wrote:
| Ignoring the already public statements that have already
| been made by the Bitfinex and co, and the fact that a large
| transactions like this is guaranteed to trigger folks in
| the community to poke at the transaction, I'm curious what
| leads you to believe that its a money laundering attempt?
| collectedparts wrote:
| Think of ETH fees as more or less an auction. When you submit a
| transaction to the Ethereum network, you're hoping it will be
| mined as soon as possible. Miners select which transactions to
| include based on the miner fee.
|
| The minimum miner fee that is required for a transaction to be
| processed promptly is therefore constantly an open question /
| constantly changing, which gives rise to services like
| https://ethgasstation.info/ which attempt to tell you how much
| you should reasonably expect to pay.
|
| In terms of how today's outcome is possible: when you are
| submitting a transaction, any amount of ETH that you have on
| your account could validly be spent as the fee.
|
| So in this case, either by human error or a software bug,
| someone with a large amount of ETH in their balance essentially
| spent all of it on the transaction fee.
|
| The miner _gets_ all of those ETH. So some lucky miner just got
| a huge spike in profit.
| ivalm wrote:
| $23m transaction fee for $100k transaction?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I assume money laundering
| elif wrote:
| If it were money laundering, they would have not broadcast
| the transaction.
|
| In this case, the transaction was broadcast to the mempool
| before it was mined.
| nprz wrote:
| How would you know which miner would pick up this transaction
| and process it?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| You privately send it to the colluding miner; you don't
| publicly broadcast it.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| That would be visible to those that save the full
| protocol state / interactions but probably invisible to
| almost anyone else.
|
| And you could even broadcast it after you know the miner
| already solved a valid block with it but before they
| publish it.
| hiq wrote:
| You don't have to propagate the transaction to other
| miners.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I don't know, but it's an unlikely mistake to make, and
| they have a lot of know how in the business. I expect them
| to know something we don't about the protocol, and setup
| things in a way that they get the money with plausible
| deniability.
| jraedisch wrote:
| Maybe do not publish the tx and be the only one including
| it in potential blocks until successful.
| brazzy wrote:
| How is anything "laundered" in that scenario as opposed to
| simple sending the money as the transaction content?
| pvarangot wrote:
| It's not. This is like not subtle at all, there's a lot of
| real time monitoring on fees to decide the optimal one for
| your transactions. If this was not a mistake and it's
| really someone trying to hide the 23m transaction, they
| just didn't know what they were doing. A normal transfer
| would have been sneakier.
| zionic wrote:
| This is likely money laundering via inclusion of an offline
| transaction.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I keep seeing people blaming money laundering but I've yet to
| come across anyone even attempting to explain _how_ the money
| laundering would theoretically work? Is there a way to
| manipulate or influence which miners get with transactions?
| [deleted]
| chucknthem wrote:
| Yeah seems like a luck of the draw for the miner to happen to
| find the right hash to mine the block when this transaction
| happened.
|
| Very risky way to launder 23M.
| SXX wrote:
| How much GPU capacity can you rent on GCloud / AWS / Azure
| / Oracle Cloud / IBM at once? You only gonna need it for a
| few minutes since blocks for ETH mined every 15 seconds.
|
| Someone should be able to do the math of how much $ it's
| gonna cost.
| michaelt wrote:
| Miners get to choose what transactions make it into their
| block. Instead of broadcasting the transaction to the
| mempool, the sender could send it directly to the miner who
| could hold onto it and included it only once they'd mined a
| block successfully.
|
| Not sure I think it's likely, though - could have just been a
| user miskeying something.
| klntsky wrote:
| They could have spitted the number between several TXs to
| avoid attention.
| repomies69 wrote:
| Laundering is the process of making dirty looking money
| legit. This isn't particularly good way to do that. When
| the miner sells the $23 million, it isn't hidden to the
| normal income because the amount is so large. They have
| explain it to their financial service providers who will
| request explanations. Their investigative team will easily
| do blockchain analysis and find the transaction. If the
| sending address is in any way connected to the miner, the
| "scheme" will be bust.
|
| I don't think there is any money laundering going here. The
| point of money laundering is to raise as little attention
| as you can, and that is not happening here. Weird
| transactions and income makes you just more suspicious.
| leppr wrote:
| It's possible to set this up in a way that gives them
| plausible deniability (by broadcasting the transaction
| publicly after the colluding miner confirmed it has a
| block), so this could have been a way to repay debts with
| funds that aren't legally/technically allowed to be used
| in this way.
|
| I do doubt that explanation though, as $23 millions is
| nothing for Bitfinex and any of their execs could get
| this amount from personal funds if it was really needed.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| The big move covers the small move.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I don't know exactly how ETH works, but it seems like with
| bitcoin there could be a risk like this:
|
| You send your huge-fee transaction secretly to your co-
| conspirator miner. They start trying to include it in their
| blocks, and eventually get one (call this block X). But now
| your transaction is not a secret anymore, and so another
| large miner can decide to keep trying to mine off of block
| X-1, but including your transaction. If they can outpace
| your miner (maybe by spinning up extra compute), they will
| produce a longer chain in which the $23M goes to them
| instead of your intended recipient.
|
| It seems like a very large mining fee would change the
| incentives that are supposed to keep miners all working on
| the same chain.
| csomar wrote:
| Sure. You make the transaction but only send it to your
| friend the miner. When he gets a block, he includes your
| transaction.
| SXX wrote:
| This is not how it work though. When mining is on the way
| your transaction should already be included. What miner can
| do though is to never publish your transaction unless he
| got a block and fairly certain that he'll be the first.
|
| Also if miner has target to get so high fee he can easily
| spend few millions to increase their mining capacity for a
| short burst, etc.
| SXX wrote:
| > Is there a way to manipulate or influence which miners get
| with transactions?
|
| Some cryptocurrency nerds can correct me if I wrong, but
| AFAIK yeah. If miner is your friend you can sent privately to
| him in advance signed transaction that need to be secretely
| included in a block. Then you can only distribute the
| transaction itself over network after that miner already
| started to mine block with said transaction.
|
| TBH I have no idea if it's possible to get block included on
| chain if it's had "secret" transactions in it, but for
| certain it's possible for one miner to start work on block
| with said transaction few seconds earlier than others. There
| is still risk that someone else will mine it though.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Yes you can send private transactions directly to miners,
| they never have to be broadcast at all except in the mined
| block
| bidirectional wrote:
| I feel like we need some common name to refer to the
| persistent phenomenon of basically everything being called
| money laundering in online comment sections.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Or maybe we need to do something about the rampant money
| laundering.
| leppr wrote:
| Putting transactions on a verifiable public ledger might
| be a start.
| [deleted]
| humaniania wrote:
| Is embezzlement a form of money laundering?
| progbits wrote:
| Looks like the miner returned significant portion back.
|
| Here is the block, showing a reward of 7678ETH:
| https://etherscan.io/block/13307440
|
| From that 7676ETH was the fee by Bitfinex (see OP).
|
| And here (around 10 hours later) is a transaction from the miner
| giving back 7385ETH to Bitfinex:
| https://etherscan.io/tx/0x85294effd53126b3bfa9e7f655267e00ac...
|
| Wonder if they talked or just decided to do this as a show of
| good will. Either way, still kept around $800k so not a bad deal.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| How much of this is... "Return it or we break your legs"?
|
| I'd be significantly concerned about coming into $27 mn, even
| if (according to the laws of Medes and Persians and smart
| contacts) it was mine to rights.
|
| There's "I hate you $1,000 much", and "I hate you $1,000,000"
| much. I should be able to manage the first. The second? Not so
| much.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| notJim wrote:
| There's a bit of context on this Bloomberg article
| https://archive.is/dnT51. Claims it was a mistake.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Wait a minute, aren't transactions fees supposed to be "burned"
| after the last hardfork? What am I missing?
|
| Edit: Trying to determine if this is a bug or just a
| misunderstanding on my part.
| skybrian wrote:
| There is a fee that's burned, but I think sending a fee to the
| miner as well is still there.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| What's most incredible to me is that the sender has $1.4B in ETH:
|
| https://etherscan.io/address/0x742d35cc6634c0532925a3b844bc4...
|
| Just a few more zeros, and this could have been a company-ending
| mistake. Bitfinex should probably reduce the size of their hot
| wallets.
| leppr wrote:
| Bitfinex/Tether is probably the single richest entity in
| crypto. A $1.4B loss would not be close to "company-ending" for
| them.
| bob229 wrote:
| Blockchain is trash and useless
| 404mm wrote:
| Sadly, it's not useless.
|
| I wish this whole concept of conversion natural resources into
| virtual currency went to hell.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Worse, it's dangerous and damaging.
| dh4h45b4 wrote:
| Well...you won't see that happen in Bitcoin ever.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| So many people calling this money laundering. The miner sent most
| of it back already
| https://twitter.com/cryptocobain/status/1442611045021913089?...
|
| HN irrationally loves to hate crypto.
| mcnichol wrote:
| This right here. It was one of the few ways in BTC where you
| could launder it and completely break the flow.
|
| Then there was monero and it seemed to scratch the itch a
| little easier
| ortusdux wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28672247
| kevinlst wrote:
| Damn, I'm getting scared of crypto now. Will took some of my
| money lol
| fanzhang wrote:
| Crazy. Was this just the result of a typo? Perhaps not,
| considering:
|
| - The transaction sender set both the max total fee and the max
| priority fee to above 10 million. Most UIs require at least two
| manual setting changes to do this.
|
| - The sender is Bitfinex -- they're pros and not just a mon and
| pop.
|
| Maybe it could just be a transfer from the sender to whoever the
| miner is...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| My guess is Integer VS Float.
|
| Take a typical $23 transaction fee, which comes out to
| ~0.00775756 ETH
|
| Of course, everyone knows you don't want to do math as floating
| point, you want to use an integer representation. 1 ETH can be
| divided into 1e18 "Wei" or 1e9 "GigaWei".
|
| So that 23 USD could be expressed an an integer "7757560", with
| the expectation that the decimal point would get moved 9 points
| <- thataway to become 0.00775756 ETH
|
| If somewhere in your code you do some kind of money formatting
| that turns 7757560 GWEI into 7757.56 ETH, you've got your
| $23,000,000 USD mining fee.
| ajsharp wrote:
| you win HN today, jazzy
| quotemstr wrote:
| My position for ages now has been that it was a mistake to
| make floating point types first-class primitives in most
| programming languages. Integers and rationals should be the
| go-to types for most code most of the time. If you _really_
| need a IEEE float, you should reach into a library to get it.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I think you mixed up the problem. Had they used floats they
| would have got a small rounding error, not a 23 million
| loss.
| kevinpet wrote:
| Well, this isn't very strong support for that position,
| because Ethereum doesn't support floating point, and yet
| here we are.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Ethereum doesn't support floating point
|
| The software that interacts with it does.
| mhh__ wrote:
| So all companies will automatically include the float
| library and thus nothing will change
| klntsky wrote:
| Not everyone uses UIs. It might be a typo in some custom code.
| Can happen with anyone.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| Why is everyone saying this isn't a shady trade when the person
| who got the $23m is a weird person with a pseudonym in thailand
| and fueled Brexit? Is it because that guy seems on the level?
| elif wrote:
| wait who was the miner? that's quite the claim to make
| ethanbond wrote:
| Well this happened in a context where fraud and shadiness are
| essentially the norm, and strict adherence to letter of
| contract (not intent) is somehow seen as a virtue.
| mikeryan wrote:
| It seems in the latest update that the funds were returned via
| another transaction.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Somebody was in a rush to get tx included, I hope they didn't
| wait too long, respect.
| throwdecro wrote:
| I guess the $23M fee was something that the market could bear.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Is it perhaps the only way to make sure the transaction ends up
| in the correct miner's block?
| joshka wrote:
| Replace with actual news, rather than just the source data.
|
| https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/118753/bitfinex-just-spe...
| jldl805 wrote:
| "replace with a secondary source, rather than the primary
| source."
|
| It's fine you share this but you're acting like you're doing
| people a favor by removing them one step from the actual data.
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