Read the Vox article and I think this is what I’m seeing a lot of too.
I still see very little about Crypto that fulfills the promise of true decentralization or a truly different way of making the world work, and I see a lot more of “Hey you know how those guys got rich? Let’s do what they did… but crypto… so I can get rich!”
The if statement is the $300M fix. So now you just have to find the right key to feed to check_id. Maybe someone one the inside can help. Unless that just won’t work because of how blockchain works or something.
Hacker News discussion also had this fascinating story:
The Dark Forest is my favorite science fiction book. It introduces the concept of a “dark forest” — an environment in which detection means certain death at the hands of advanced predators. In this environment, publicly identifying someone else’s location is as good as directly destroying them. (This concept is also the inspiration for the Dark Forest game on the Ethereum testnet.)
In the Ethereum mempool, these apex predators take the form of “arbitrage bots.” Arbitrage bots monitor pending transactions and attempt to exploit profitable opportunities created by them. No white hat knows more about these bots than Phil Daian, the smart contract researcher who, along with his colleagues, wrote the Flash Boys 2.0 paper and coined the term “miner extractable value” (MEV).
Phil once told me about a cosmic horror that he called a “generalized frontrunner.” Arbitrage bots typically look for specific types of transactions in the mempool (such a DEX trade or an oracle update) and try to frontrun them according to a predetermined algorithm. Generalized frontrunners look for any transaction that they could profitably frontrun by copying it and replacing addresses with their own. They can even execute the transaction and copy profitable internal transactions generated by its execution trace.
That was why this rescue wasn’t going to be simple. This burn function could be called by anyone. If I submitted a transaction calling burn , it would be like a flashing “free money” sign pointing directly at this profitable opportunity. If these monsters were really in the mempool, they would see, copy, mutate, and frontrun my transaction, taking the money before my transaction was included.
Note how much more brutal this environment is than even the Ethereum blockchain state itself. This free money had been sitting on-chain for about eight hours, undetected, waiting to be swept by anyone who called burn . But any attempt to pick it up would get instantly sniped in-flight.
But instead of grizzled men getting wasted off illegal still hooch and blasting each others brains out over a claim in the rugged mountainside it’s a bunch of nerds trying to code slightly faster bots than each other.
You can watch the frontrunning bots in real time at dextools.io because they mark those trades with an icon. Pick any brand new pump and dump shitcoin where liquidity is low and you won’t have to wait long to see it happen. Usually they only skim a few percent, but sometimes they take almost all of it when people set slippage to “idk wtf I’m doing”. It’s pretty wild how much some people lose this way.
I was watching when someone went to buy over 4eth worth of a low liquidity extreme shitcoin called $CHEDDAR and got sandwiched for 75% of it. Pretty sure he was destined to lose it all anyways but there are some absolute geniuses in this game.
Short trip report on my first attempt to buy an NFT:
I only have a small amount of ETH in my wallet because most of my funds are still subject to waiting times from the initial ACH deposits into the exchanges. I was trying to mint an NFT with a purchase price of 0.025 ETH (about $65), and I had another hundred dollars or so worth of ETH in my wallet.
You might think that would be enough to cover transaction fees, but you would be wrong. This NFT collection proved incredibly popular, driving up the demand for processing power on the network, which in turns drives up transaction fees. Some people ended up spending over $700 in transaction fees plus the $65 purchase price.
This is basically what happened to me here, I thought some 0.009 ETH (~$25 at the time) NFTs looked pretty neat so I bought ~$120 worth of ETH to buy a couple (lol me) and found out that even buying one would be closer to $175. This was all of course after I bought $175 worth of ETH on Binance only to find out it has to just sit there for 10 days before I can move it anywhere else and the same day I tried to use Public to buy some Matic to mint more RivermanDAOs only to find out that Public doesn’t let you transfer cryptos, only “invest” in them. I also bought some Matic through Binance but not enough to send to my MetaMask wallet apparently so I consider these all basically lessons that I’m currently too dumb to do anything in the crypto/NFT space and will likely just set my money on fire.