[HN Gopher] Beanstalk Farms stablecoin project loses $182M to ex...
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       Beanstalk Farms stablecoin project loses $182M to exploit
        
       Author : _fizz_buzz_
       Score  : 84 points
       Date   : 2022-04-17 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (web3isgoinggreat.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (web3isgoinggreat.com)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | nathanaldensr wrote:
       | Just another day in cryptoland.
        
       | elektor wrote:
       | Another day, another collapse of a cryptocurrency.
        
         | hesdeadjim wrote:
         | You know it's bad when a loss this large isn't surprising or
         | interesting in the slightest.
        
           | Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
           | A loss to some, but a huge win for the ones who took the
           | money. The crypto evangelists should start promoting this
           | aspect of the space: "It isn't really stealing if the code
           | was bad!"
        
           | sparksparkapach wrote:
           | Should be the opposite, this is not even 1/10th of 1 percent
           | of what's stored in defi. This shouldn't even be huge news. I
           | don't even see any links to bug bounties on their site.
        
             | stephencanon wrote:
             | A $182M bug bounty was just claimed.
        
             | himinlomax wrote:
             | A loss of 0.1% of all the money NOT stored in crypto would
             | be huge news.
        
               | cinntaile wrote:
               | This reminds me of the "If my grandma had wheels, she
               | would be a bike." meme.
               | 
               | Yes but that is irrelevant.
               | 
               | It is unfortunate this happened of course, proper
               | security audits of your smart contracts is very important
               | in cases like these.
        
               | cinntaile wrote:
               | I should know better than to comment in crypto threads,
               | the "discussions" are rarely interesting. Here's the
               | meme, you'll understand why it's so fitting. There's
               | probably a more proper name for this type of fallacy but
               | I don't know it. https://youtu.be/A-RfHC91Ewc
        
             | oliwarner wrote:
             | It's news that a life-changing volume of cash can get
             | hacked away from your wallet and just _vanish_.
             | 
             | It's not better that there's actually a planet-changing
             | volume elsewhere in similar jeopardy. We should be howling
             | about the anti-features baked into these things that enable
             | criminal enterprise.
        
             | _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
             | Ha, imagine 0.1% of all USD got stolen in one swoop.
        
               | MR4D wrote:
               | Interesting thought...
               | 
               | Based on current US inflation rates, that's about 4 days
               | worth of inflation. So, you could probably blame the Fed
               | for "stealing" that much in one swoop.
        
       | EL_Loco wrote:
       | Maybe your money is pretty safe in your bank. My dad worked for
       | 40+ years and paid every month his pension fund dues. When his
       | company (a very big and old company in our country) went
       | bankrupt, it was found that the pension fund was broke. They had
       | been using money from the pension fund to cover whatever they had
       | to cover due to corruption, bad administration, etc (it was
       | illegally done so, by the way). Not only that, but the government
       | knew about this, since it was a really, really big pension fund,
       | and had stepped in as pension administrator for the past six or
       | seven years. Didn't matter. The pension broke, the company broke,
       | my dad and thousands of others were left without their retirement
       | pay. This is not some outrageous story over here. It was so
       | normal that it didn't make any headlines. Two years ago postal
       | workers have started to take a pay cut to cover a hole in their
       | pension fund. The mail here is state owned, by the way, and it
       | didn't matter. The directors took their money, the workers had to
       | pay up. I did my research, I wouldn't put money in Beanstalk
       | Farms, or 99% of cryptocurrencies, but there are couple, two or
       | three, crypto projects that I know are legitimate and secure, and
       | I trust them more than the banks I have access to.
        
         | verall wrote:
         | There is an interesting false equivalence here between pension
         | funds and banks. But it's a personal annecdote, so really it's
         | up to you what made you lose faith in "the system".
        
           | EL_Loco wrote:
           | I know they're not equivalent. But banks have broken here
           | too, and people lost a lot of their money. By the way, credit
           | card interest here is over 300% annually. Can get up to 800
           | depending on the bank.
        
         | matheusmoreira wrote:
         | In the 90s my country was plagued by out of control inflation.
         | In a desperate attempt to control it, the government just froze
         | everybody's bank accounts. Nearly everyone was left without
         | money. Imagine logging into the bank and discovering that all
         | your money had been confiscated. Some people saw it coming and
         | cashed out beforehand, and suddenly became wealthy after
         | everyone else's money was wiped out.
         | 
         | I don't trust governments and I don't trust banks. I want an
         | economy that's completely independent of them.
        
         | emerged wrote:
         | What's hilarious is to take your side, you have to imagine
         | somebody saving into crypto for 40+ years and then cashing out.
         | The odds of any crypto lasting that long, and that money having
         | even remotely a predictable long term value, is pretty plainly
         | absurd.
        
       | louwrentius wrote:
       | After thirteen years this is what crypto gives us. A few people
       | get rich at the cost of all the rest. From coins getting
       | hacked/stolen to ransomware, to just cryto-gambling.
       | 
       | But there is something positive to say about crypto too.
       | 
       | The failings of crypto teach a lot of people about how and why
       | societies work the way they do. And that no amount of tech can
       | ever replace our institutions and human trust.
       | 
       | I'm 100% with Stephen Diehl on this one: the entire 100% of
       | crypto needs to be burned down to the ground. It needs to go
       | because of the enormous harm it does to people and our larger
       | society, for no gains at all.
        
         | rich_sasha wrote:
         | I'm no crypto maximalist, and would struggle to argue against
         | the position that crypto today is pretty much all scams,
         | pump&dumps and pixie dust selling.
         | 
         | To me it's a shame though, crypto _as a concept_ is very
         | interesting in many ways. Algorithmic money, defined by
         | serverless programs, not COBOL behemoths. Massively
         | distributed, yet consistent mutable database. A space where you
         | can bootstrap an idea on a shoestring budget. A bit like
         | internet vs cable TV and trad banks.
         | 
         | Except in this analogy, the "crypto" internet seems to have
         | gone straight from Arpanet to nothing but ads, child porn, dark
         | net and gambling, skipping past Wikipedia, Google, dotcoms
         | (when they were plucky upstarts not to vil conglomerates).
         | Shame.
        
           | louwrentius wrote:
           | > crypto as a concept is very interesting in many ways.
           | 
           | The examples you give mean nothing to me. What real problem
           | is being solved by any of your examples of 'interesting'?
           | 
           | We already have something that allows you to bootstrap an
           | idea on a shoestring budget: the cloud.
        
         | tonguez wrote:
         | "100% of crypto needs to be burned down to the ground. It needs
         | to go because of the enormous harm it does to people and our
         | larger society, for no gains at all."
         | 
         | well you've convinced me
        
         | JacKTrocinskI wrote:
         | Every investment has risks, stocks are not that different from
         | crypto in that regard.
         | 
         | Regulation, once it comes, will help better protect retail
         | investors.
         | 
         | Crypto is still in the early stages, the technology is
         | revolutionary though and I think it's here to stay.
        
           | 1270018080 wrote:
           | There is truly nothing revolutionary about an extremely
           | inefficient write once read many linked list.
        
         | josu wrote:
         | >After forty years this is what the internet gives us. A few
         | people get rich at the cost of all the rest.
         | 
         | Sure, if you want to focus on the negative you can focus on the
         | negative.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | onion2k wrote:
       | I wonder if this will turn out to be North Korea as well.
        
       | charcircuit wrote:
       | This tweet thread explains what happened:
       | https://twitter.com/FrankResearcher/status/15156938958872944...
       | 
       | The key step was: "Further, they deployed and voted for a fake
       | BIP-18 that moved all funds from the protocol contract to the
       | exploiter."
        
         | the_mitsuhiko wrote:
         | Lovely that loan providers legally? benefit from criminals in
         | the crypto world.
        
           | charcircuit wrote:
           | So do the people in the liquidity pools, so do the miners,
           | and probably a few more groups of people.
        
         | josu wrote:
         | What does "fake" mean in this context? Malicious? Or that the
         | attacker made it look like a BIP so it would get executed? Or
         | something completely unrelated?
         | 
         | EDIT: More context here
         | https://twitter.com/peckshield/status/1515692144190648322/ph...
        
           | charcircuit wrote:
           | My guess is that it just means it isn't from
           | https://github.com/BeanstalkFarms/Beanstalk/tree/master/bips
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
       | >...However, they were later slightly more optimistic, writing,
       | "it may also be the start of something good... there may be a
       | path forward. We don't want to comment on next steps until that
       | path is at least visible to us"
       | 
       | How on earth can people just shake off a loss of $182MM? And is
       | this one of those contracts? Have the courts ruled that code is
       | law, and that a poorly implemented and exploitable contract is
       | legal? There is so much wrong with this.
        
         | JacKTrocinskI wrote:
         | The same way Wallstreet does.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | optimalsolver wrote:
       | Exploit, or exit scam?
        
         | px43 wrote:
         | The fact that this dude literally sold millions of dollars of
         | magic beans, which made the beanstalk, which suddenly
         | disappeared, has got to be at least a little suspicious.
         | 
         | It was a super basic flash loan oracle manipulation, which
         | could have been done by anyone, so it probably was just another
         | Waterloo kid finding their fortune, but really, who are these
         | people who dumped millions of dollars into magic beans?
        
           | MisterSandman wrote:
           | As someone from Waterloo, this is a very weird reputation our
           | university is getting.
        
       | smrtinsert wrote:
       | Great site. Bookmarking
        
       | ohmanjjj wrote:
       | Another "hack"
        
         | formvoltron wrote:
         | "exploit"
        
       | grumpymouse wrote:
       | It would be interesting to create a cryptocurrency where
       | transactions take an additional time to settle based on amount
       | from the time the transaction is requested.
       | 
       | $20k? No delay other than getting the transaction through the
       | mining pools or whatever. $500k? Maybe an hour to settle. $1m+?
       | That's going to take a day (in which time big red warning lights
       | can flash on your defi project wall boards).
        
         | Georgelemental wrote:
         | Instead of one large transaction, l33t haxx0r can just make
         | plenty of small ones
        
           | nscalf wrote:
           | That can be solved by adding a delay for each subsequent
           | transaction from a wallet. Solana has been considering this
           | to solve some spam issues. t+(n*cooldown period), or
           | something
        
       | js4ever wrote:
       | The more I read news about crypto the more I believe they
       | delivered none of the promises (high transaction fees, slow,
       | burning a lot of resources for nearly nothing) and bringing more
       | problems
        
         | bombingwinger wrote:
         | Well they got big money to buy in. Sure Ethereum-based DeFi
         | projects are scams, but the so-called blue chip currencies will
         | probably stick around. Ultimately, the traceability of crypto
         | is its unique selling proposition.
        
         | matheusmoreira wrote:
         | Monero is the closest to the original cryptocurrency dream.
         | Enforced privacy, low transaction fees, fast transactions,
         | mining viable on commodity hardware. I've gotten paid via XMR,
         | it works great.
         | 
         | Too bad nobody seems to care much about it because the numbers
         | don't go up.
        
           | criddell wrote:
           | Does it beat Visa on transaction speed and fees?
        
             | charcircuit wrote:
             | Visa can take a few days to settle where with Monero you
             | will typically want to wait for 10 confirmations which
             | takes 20 minutes.
             | 
             | Visa's fees are 1.4%-2.5% for the merchant where Monero's
             | median fee over the last 100 transactions was $0.002.
        
           | djbusby wrote:
           | I've used XLM for some payments before. Fast, cheap to send.
           | Sitting below $1 USD maybe keeps it out of the hype zone.
        
       | gizajob wrote:
       | Unstablecoin
        
       | nullc wrote:
       | The great ethereum meta-scam is continuing to perform exactly as
       | designed.
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-17 23:02 UTC)