COINBASE for Crypto has come

[Clinamenic]

As an aside, this seems reasonable guide to which DeFi to avoid - rekt

Great list there. Most seem like either bad actors or, at best, inept actors. Some of the projects I think are good actors and seemingly just made poor decisions or were maybe victims of bad actors. Furucombo, Alchemix, Thorchain, Yearn Finance (a blue chip in DeFi), Sushiswap (also blue chip, or maybe just short of it), maybe a couple others. Aside from those, I got a red flag even just from some of the names.

But then again, if I didn;t know Sushiswap was an established DeFi protocol, I would have scoffed that one off too. Strange amount of crypto projects named after food.

 

[william_kent]

Some of them just seem like their code was a bit sloppy - others, like you say, are possibly scam artists

 

[Clinamenic]

WallStreetBets just launched a decentralized exchange largely based around their crypto asset WSB. Got an ad from brave browser, but don't think I'll look into further.

A WSB Dex seems like the quintessential crypto-meme nightmare for the likes of the SEC.

 

[Clinamenic]

Some of them just seem like their code was a bit sloppy - others, like you say, are possibly scam artists

I tend to think so as well. Granted I'm not literate in most of this stuff, but I have read claims that certain ostensibly decentralized protocol developers have left some critical admin functionality intact, which would dequalify the whole thing as decentralized, to a large extent. Might have been something about Uniswap, but I'm not sure.

But that is an interesting point re: regulation. Good chance, speculatively speaking, that regulators may mandate the preservation of some admin functionality, perhaps only accessible as some sort of failsafe, in order to assign responsibility to human actors. But that gets into Robinhood territory.

If some Uniswap developer is able to drain some liquidity pool, or lock it up while regulators inspect which addresses have assets in the pool, that would wreak havoc in the crypto community in terms of ethos.

I;m not necessarily against comparable measures, however. I think regulation in some forms can be beneficial, while other forms can be detrimental, in terms of the thriving of technical innovation and even financial inclusion.

 

[Clinamenic]

Should be a fascinating next few years.

 

[william_kent]

I'd be more forgiving of the 'sloppy code' instances because taking account of all the edge cases can be difficult, but that's why you should thoroughly test before going live - to be honest, there are about 4 programmers on earth whose code I would put money on as being bug free

 

[Clinamenic]

I tend to give the benefit of the doubt there, like you say because of the difficulty foreseeing every contingency, and also because regulatory guidelines are themselves a work in progress.

Does seem to be a common practice for blockchains to have some number of testnets with different parameters to stress-test features before rolling them out into a setting with a ton of money at stake everywhere.

 

[Clinamenic]

But there also seems to be something really exploitable about that benefit of the doubt. Aside from the developer herself, who is to say whether that critical bug was accidental or not? How hard can it be to disguise a scheme as an oversight?

Especially with these distributed development models, where the likes of the Ethereum Foundation seems to function to support independent developers or perhaps even commission/outsource developmental work. Seems like a treacherous landscape in terms of plausible deniability and robust obfuscational potential. Its really no wonder why the space has been such a wild west so far.

 

[Clinamenic]

Case in point re: gas fees, I just tried to swap $40 worth of ETH for Atari's token ATRI, but the transaction fee itself was closer to $50 worth of ETH.

 

[luka]

what a boring thread

 

[Clinamenic]

Polystyle's Boring Crypto Thread

 

[Clinamenic]

You clearly don't want to be an overnight billionaire @luka. Strange, seeing as that is something most people want.

 

[Clinamenic]

You know what isn't boring? Decentralized oracle networks.

r/Chainlink

r/Chainlink: Welcome to the Chainlink subreddit, a place for focused and technical discussion of decentralized oracles.

www.reddit.com

 

[luka]

You clearly don't want to be an overnight billionaire @luka. Strange, seeing as that is something most people want.

literally not remotely interested

 

[woops]

it worked for @polystyle, he has so many billions he doesn't post here anymore

 

[Clinamenic]

it worked for @polystyle, he has so many billions he doesn't post here anymore

Like having only a few billions will leave some residuum of interest in this place.

 

[william_kent]

biggest deFi hack so far - $600 million stolen

Interoperability protocol Poly Network has been hacked with more than $600 million stolen in the largest decentralized finance security breach in history. The market remains stable, despite the news

 

[Leo]

biggest deFi hack so far - $600 million stolen

About an hour following Poly Network’s announcement of the hack, the perpetrator attempted to move stolen assets through the Ethereum address into Curve.fi, but the transaction was blocked. The hackers continued trying for about 20-30 minutes before an anonymous user sent the hackers a message on the blockchain that USD Tether had been blocked.

The user told the hackers to try depositing the stolen tokens without Tether, which the hackers did successfully and they deposited all the addresses into Curve. The hackers then sent the anonymous user about $45,000 worth of ethereum for their help.

 

[william_kent]

The transfer to the "anonymous user" strikes me as the crypto equivalent of insider trading

 

[william_kent]

it seems other people suspect the same as me, that there was an insider involved in the "multisig" exploit