1y ago

Hackers steal NFTs worth millions. In other news, NFTs worth millions.

www.theblock.co Hackers steal NFTs worth millions, from Apes to Art Blocks, in NFT Trader exploit

The major hack may be the worst attack to hit the NFT community in its history, with millions of dollars in potential losses.

The way I read the article, the "worth millions" is the sum of the ransom demand.

The funny part is that the exploit is in the "smart" contract, ya know the thing that the blockchain keeps secure by forbidding any updates or patches.

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139 comments

No one is gonna buy any NFTs for millions lmao
- As crazy as it sounds, some people do.
  
  They did. For like a week last year. Then everyone realized it was a scam.
  
  Love how the NFT hype was a big wealth transfer event. So many rich people, like wealthy oil Arabs, bought into the scam and moved so much money into artists pockets while they essentially got nothing in return.
  
  Is there any way to confirm this? Or are there examples of artists who made a significant amount of money from NFTs? I understand its potential benefit for artists, but I mostly remember already-rich corporations (e.g. UFC) using them as another way to extract money from consumers.
  
  Beeple made a lot
  
  He was the first big one I remember. When it still had an air of legitimacy.
  
  There are curated NFT auction sites where only selected artists are allowed to sell their work. And you can see for how much they sell their pieces. During the hype many sold items for thousands to tens of thousands or more. Also there is Beeple who rode the hype early from the start and he became a millionaire.
  
  That's not really what happened. Some people who had invested in companies that would make money if NFTs went up in value chummed the waters by buying NFTs for huge amounts, convincing a lot of people that NFTs were going to be great investments. Then celebrities with an interest in the scheme pumped up the value too.
  That convinced a lot of idiots to "invest" in NFTs, then eventually the bottom fell out of the market.
  As for artists, some made some money, but most of the money went into shit like "bored apes" which were algorithmically generated.
  
  My favorite is Murakami, who after selling NFTs he made paintings after all all of them. So which one is the "original"? The actual physical painting, or the digital NFT?
  
  Technically, the NFT. In reality, the physical. Is a lot harder to brag about your art assets if you have to log into your pc to show them off.
  
  That's why I feel like he just trolled all the buyers of his NFTs.
  
  I do see potential use for them, but not in the way they are currently being used. I could see uses like door keys, tickets, memberships, etc being of practical value, but not stupid little pictures.
  
  Tickets, yes, door keys, no.
  
  Besides the obvious of your door lock needing to be connected to the internet, and that could be a problem, what else do you see as being an issue with using it for door keys?
  
  Another question is: why would you need it for a key?
  Long-established public/private keys and signatures are used in this way all the time to control access to servers around the world. No blockchain needed. Blockchain is helpful when we all need to agree on a series of events.
  Homes are a nice example of where you can have an isolated system which knows what it needs to about you (e.g. a public key) without sharing or cross-checking anything with the world.
  
  The chain would be used to establish who owns the home.
  
  That sounds more like a land registry system, than a key.
  
  That isn’t required for a key. What if I want to let my family member access the house tomorrow while I’m out? Do I have to sell it to them?
  The key/lock relationship is not connected to ownership. Ownership could be connected to the ability to issue new keys, but even then the ownership doesn’t need to be logged in a blockchain for that - it can simply be signed by a key held by the land registry.
  If you want to make an argument for using blockchains for the land registry then… go ahead, but it’s another discussion with a whole different set of arguments.
  
  Just like the NFTs in the article! Great idea
  Lol
  
  How exactly would that work? Keep in mind that the blockchain is by necessity not secret.
  
  Right, but all the lock is doing is checking whether you own the NFT or not. If your house was in NFT, people could see that you bought a house, but not where it was as long as it was generic like house #40000
  
  all the lock is doing is checking whether you own the NFT or not.
  So, you'd need a method to verify who "you" are. And once again we've come up with a way to use NFTs that actually works better without NFTs.
  
  Fair enough. I will say that I am not well enough versed in the topic to discuss it in depth.
  
  No offense, but this is literally the problem with almost everyone who says they have a perfect usecase for NFTs. I also don't know everything about everything either, but I know do know that we don't tend to make existing systems complex just for fun.
  Every time someone wants to fix something with NFTs, they're either slapping an NFT on top of the existing system, making it more complicated, OR they want to start a new solution from the ground up, throwing out decades or centuries of experience and edge-case solutions to replace them with nothing, leading to major problems.
  This post is about the second thing happening, your example is the first.
  NFTs are a solution looking for a problem. But all the problems have already been solved without NFTs.
  
  How would that work in reality, how would the lock know that the NFT in question is the actual legal ownership of the house?
  The only way to guarantee that is to change the law that deeds of houses can only be an NFT.
  Otherwise someone could sell a house on paper, but retain the NFT to have access to the house.
  An NFT lock would also have the following problems, excluding the trust of ownership in the real world.
  Power to the lock is required, if your backup battery is dead then you might be locked out during a power cut.
  Internet access is required, during a powercut your router will probably die as well, so even if a battery backup is working, you'd still be locked out.
  Your ISP could have service interruptions, no internet, no access to the latest blockchain updates, meaning that the lock can't trust that you actually have ownership/access, that would be an insanely easy way to hack the lock.
  
  The only way to guarantee that is to change the law that deeds of houses can only be an NFT.
  Which means that sovereign states would have to agree to no longer be the authority of who owned property, instead they'd just have to hand over all that authority to some distributed database. What's in it for them? What's in it for the people?
  If the authority on who owns a home is a blockchain, then what happens if someone shows up at the police station, bruised and bleeding, and claims that they were tortured until they agreed to sign over the deed to their house. In the real world, the police (or at least the courts) would have authority over that deal, and if their investigation proved that someone was in fact tortured, it would mean it's not a legitimate sale, and the ownership reverts to the original person. But, if "blockchain", the police and courts have no authority. What's on the blockchain is law.
  
  Well, just because a company holds the ledger of who owns what doesn't make it impossible to police, governments order companies to do stuff all the time, that wouldn't stop, but it would make it more difficult to police.
  
  I can't really address the first part about selling the house on paper and not transferring the NFT.
  I figure this thing would have cellular access as well as Wi-Fi. So if your Wi-Fi was to go down, then the cell network would be used instead. And those generally use different ISPs for fiber and often get restored first or dont go down at all since they are commercial contracts. In the event of a total internet cut, it is well known that a house does not change ownership very often, so the lock could be programmed to not accept any new keys for a period like a day. The lock would accept only the old key during that time like a cooldown period
  
  Ok, lets disregard the regulatory issues, are you really asking people to sign up for a completely different ISP just to unlock their house with an NFT key?
  As for a delay to update ownership, fine that would add some leniency and is not an unresonable feature.
  But I just can't see what problem an NFT key would solve, we don't usually lock/unlock our front door with the deed of the home, what would the advantage be of doing that?
  
  I thought of it as a good way for artists to earn a living by more tokenized artworks, but then it gets hijacked by this shit.
  
  Im sure you dont keep up, but NFT market cap still pretty big rn at 5.5bn
  
  I think of it like timeshare values. They’re really high …. Until you try to find someone who will actually buy it
  
  The person talking out of their ass is voted up.
  The person bringing up facts is voted down.
  The person posting dismissive nonsense is voted up.
  Gross.
  
  The only person providing any sources here would put that $5.5b market cap (if it's accurate) at 1/4 of what it was two years ago.
  That's one hell of a crash and burn.
  
  The vast majority of NFTs are worthless now
  “MacContract on Ethereum has a floor price of $13,234,204.2, but its all-time sales is only $18,” the report said, adding: “This stark discrepancy between listed floor prices and actual sales data exposes a significant issue in the NFT market – inflated valuations that don’t reflect genuine buyer interest or real-world transactions.
  “It becomes clear that a significant portion of the NFT market is characterized by speculative and hopeful pricing strategies that are far removed from the actual trading history of these assets,” it said.
  And this is a report from a crypto website with a vested interest in pretending crypto has uses.
  
  Those are the transactions that are actually happening.
  I'm sure there are lots of transactions that aren't happening because people have given up, and decided that a 99.9% loss in value is basically a 100% loss in value, so they've just walked away.
  
  Its hard to be definitive, especially from one data point, but theres no doubt that lots of NFTs are just copycats trying to ride the coattails of other succesful projects, and end up flooding the market with garbage.
  But that doesnt mean all projects are garbage, nor that the tech is bad or unutilized.
  I had a feeling id get flamed by even mentioning NFTs, so im not surprised a the downvotes or derision. Anyways, have a good one 😃
  
  Nah, that is what the NFT owners want the greater fools to believe it is worth.
  
  It's a great way to launder money.
  
  Better than the current money laundering techniques? Using art appraisals to inflate assets and move dirty money, or straight up using banks like Deutsche or Credit Suisse (RIP) to move dirty money?
  
  The smart criminal understands the value of diversity.
  
  I mean yeah, it’s better to launder money using a difficult to trace digital ledger. But no, the things you mentioned won’t go away, because there’s also money in the laundering, and double dipping is the name of the game
  
  Mmm, considering NFTs are all on transparent blockchains, I don't know that I would choose that particular method to accomplish that.
  
  The transparency is the feature that makes it great. I can buy drugs or whatever, and exchange you buy an NFT from me of equal value. Now when the bank comes and says “where did this >$15k transaction come from?” I can point to the blockchain and say that I sold my fancy monkey pic.
  This has been a thing in the physical art world for a while, https://complyadvantage.com/insights/art-money-laundering/, this just made it easier.
  
  Yeah, I know it's happened for a while, but my big question would be why are you having to put your money back in the bank instead of leaving it on a blockchain such as Monero. The dollar is about the biggest scam around along with all other government fiat currencies.
  
  Because sometimes even criminals need to buy things that aren’t illegal, I guess. And the legitimate people who have those things don’t want to play games dealing with fake internet money.
  If I want to buy a jetski, the place I buy it from isn’t going to take crypto because the people that sell the parts for it don’t take crypto and the people who build it can’t pay for food in crypto.
  Crypto is only useful for rug pull scams, money laundering, and black-market transactions. It’s real innovation is undoing centuries of banking regulations so that people can learn the hard way why all those regulations exist.
  
  Because sometimes even criminals need to buy things that aren’t illegal
  Money has value basically because people need to pay taxes. The shop owner sells things for Euros or USD partially because eventually at the end of the year they need to turn over Euros or USD to the government as taxes. If they sold things for bitcoins, they'd eventually have to convert those bitcoins to USD to pay taxes.
  Other than speculation, the only reason bitcoin has any value is that sometimes people need to pay ransomware ransoms. That means they need to buy bitcoin somehow. And, even the criminals who receive that bitcoin will launder it and change it back into real assets because it's not useful to them as bitcoin. Eliminate ransomware and suddenly the only value for bitcoin is people who hold it hoping there's a greater fool out there who will buy it from them for more than they paid.
  
  For now, sure. However, i will say that i have been buying food woth crypto for over a year now and havent starved yet. And if i wanted a jetski and wanted to pay in crypto i could do so. Fundamentally, crypto and banking are two totally different things because with a bank somebody holds your money. With crypto, you hold your money.
  
  With crypto, you hold your own money
  You own a cryptographic key that a bunch of strangers have decided points to a spot on a ledger. These strangers have no legal connection to you, but things have been working out pretty well so far because your incentives align.
  As a bunch of Ledger owners are finding out, there are reasons for FDIC insurance of banks and that reason is so that people don’t have to be exposed to the dangers of storing all their money under their mattresses. Everyone recommends getting your crypto into a hardwallet, but what happens when a Ledger update bricks it? Or the company decides to backdoor it to escrow your “private” keys? And what can you do with those hardwallet funds besides HODL? Can you imagine if every time you wanted to spend part of your dirty fiat savings, you had to expose all of it to danger to do so?
  
  As a bunch of Ledger owners are finding out, there are reasons for FDIC insurance of banks and that reason is so that people don’t have to be exposed to the dangers of storing all their money under their mattresses
  The FDIC is a scam. If JPMorgan or Wells Fargo failed they would not have enough to cover the loss. In fact they only hold ~2% of what they insure which would leave 98% of people with nothing. The only reason the FDIC is not bankrupt is because a cascade of banks have not failed all at once
  what happens when a Ledger update bricks it?
  The recent incident was a software supply chain attack. I am not aware of a bricked update but thats not saying much since i dont follow them closely
  the company decides to backdoor it to escrow your “private” keys?
  You lose all trust in them as you should and no longer use their products.
  what can you do with those hardwallet funds besides HODL?
  That is the point of a hardware wallet to hold your funds securely until you want to use them.
  expose all of it to danger to do so?
  Your hardware wallet acts as savings and use a hot wallet as a spend account with less money in it.
  
  I’m just saying what I saw over at https://old.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/search?q=Lost+my+btc+upgrade&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
  Obviously I haven’t checked up on all of those, but it does seem to happen a bit. I’m not sure how frequently would be considered okay here, but that’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t happen.
  
  The exchanges are basically cryptos banks. They hold your money, not you.
  And they are much more prone to scamming you than any bank ever could.
  
  They don't hold my money. I use them as they are supposed to be used. I get in, exchange my crypto, and then immediately withdraw it. They are not meant to hold your money. And true crypto people don't let them hold their money.
  
  why are you having to put your money back in the bank instead of leaving it on a blockchain such as Monero.
  Because my mortgage company, supermarket and power company only take real money.
  
  The mortgage I could see being a problem. As for groceries and power, I can pay for those with crypto.
  
  If you really believe crypto is the future, you would have converted all your money to the blockchain.
  Since you say you can buy everything with it.
  
  4
  Oh, but i have. Or >95% anyway. I keep a few dollars around in case i need them.
  
  Good and services are still primarily purchased with fiat in most of the world. You need to be able to actually use it for it to be useful, so whether or not blockchain is theoretically better doesn't matter there if there isn't wide enough adoption.
  
  True, thanks to the internet if the good is not immediately available in my local area for crypto i can order it online and have it delivered. Depending on exactly what the service is makes that an option too.
  
  Hahahahahahaha!
  I'm being serious when I say this: you don't understand what you're talking about. I know that's dismissive, and I'm sorry.
  
  did
  
  wouldn't the above article still point out that people do?
  
  Nope!
  
  Seth Green has entered the chat
  
  Those who buy art and pack it in a safe until it's worth more?
  Im glad that doesn't work as well in digital.
- They're priced like police drug busts.
- People buy them for millions or their value would not be in the millions
  
  First, DO people buy them for millions, in the present tense? I know that people did in the past, but I thought the price on most of these took a huge hit.
  Second: do people BUY them for millions, in the sense that they trade things of well-measured value (like fiat currency or gold) for coins to buy these? Or do they buy them for millions of dollars in equivalent coins that they already have, and don't want to actually sell for real goods or money because they'd realized huge losses if they actually cashed out, so they have to keep them circulating within the blockchain to maintain a hope that they'll return anywhere near their previous value? Because if you have 10 million dollars worth of etherium that you bought at 20 million and an NFT of questionable value, can't you just buy and sell it to a few wallets you own to make it look like it's recently been purchased for a few million to create the illusion of value without actually ever giving or receiving anything?
  
  I'll get my friend to buy it from me for millions, then he can give the money back to me and when it sells again, we can split the profit. It's win-win!
  
  This seems like kind of a meaningless distinction when the comment was speaking about the relative value of these. How some pays is irrelevant.
  This feels like you're trying to shit on them so just refuse to believe that the concept of value has any meaning. Things are worth whatever someone will pay for them.
  That doesn't make the people willing to pay for it smart.
  
  The distinction isn't meaningless, it's actually vitally important. The thing is, we've been here before, hundreds if not thousands of times, with the stock market and other speculative bubbles. Once a big enough entity decides to cut their losses and bail with whatever they can get, all that "value" disappears and there's no inherent value of the asset itself to fall back on. So it has been with other crypto crashes in the past few years.
  Granted, this is generally true of fiat as well, we just have a lot more people and hopefully some safeguards and, vitally, an active economy holding up that value.
  
  All art is inherently without value, and it's value is entirely speculative.
  I think NFTs are dumb as fuck, but they're worth what people will pay for them. Same shit with tulips in Denmark famously spiking - bubble or not, things are literally worth what someone will pay
  
  I'm sorry it feels that way, that's not my intention.
  I think it's a meaningful distinction because my understanding is that many large matter holders are early adopters who acquired coins at at basement prices that them became highly valued when crypto took off. These people, as I understand it, have a different spending pattern than we associate with conventional wealth. They may shuffle their coins between digital assets with limited conversion into real world good and services, because inside the block chain they're billionaires, but if they tried to buy a house or a vacation they're forced to find buyers at prices that are reflective of the value among crypto holders, but not nearly as high to those outside the system who they'd need to complete cash transactions.
  
  No
  
  That is literally what the concept of value is.

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