The hackers started by using a phishing attack (where they fake a website or an email to try to gain credentials) to gain some kind of access to the exchange, according to the report. It worked, they had part of the permissions to send a transaction. But there was a problem.
The exchange had a multi-signature security setting. This means that multiple keys (like passwords) are required to send the money. So, it seemed like there was nothing they could do.
I also see a problem with this scenario as I seriously doubt that an exchange whose operators are stupid to fail for fake emails phishing attacks is using multi-signatures  Also, another problem: Instead they figured they would send a small amount of Ethereum to one of the whitelisted addresses but tack on an excessively large transaction fee. While they weren’t getting any of the money, they were costing the exchange dearly. And that gave them room to demand a ransom. So, rather than simply proving with a series of small 1$ tx than they are in some kind of control they decide to trash 2 million worth of coins, and then...demand a ransom. Man, it's like kidnapping somebody for a reward and burning their family house and assets to the ground and THEN asking for money! Good luck getting money after bankrupting them. Besides, if they would have done small transactions they could have defended themselves if ever caught with some sort of vulnerability reward testing, trashing two million to make a point it's a lost cause from the start. The hackers are assumed to be doing it because they do not have full access to the exchange and they do not have the time. The exchange might fix the security issues quickly. |
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I speculate that this might be one of the exchanges with the highest volumes for Ethereum if the theory is proven. The hacker would not pay a fee of $5 million if the exchange does not have $500 million of ETH in storage, I reckon. It’s been an expensive week for users of the Ethereum blockchain. In the last two days one user managed to spend $5.2 million in fees to make just two transactions—and one of them was only for $130! And now, a third transaction has taken place by another user, albeit for a fee of just $500,000, which seems small in comparison.
And these absurd transactions are prompting far-fetched theories.
While initially thought to be a bug, it appears an exchange is being blackmailed. Image: Shutterstock.
“The 3rd abnormal tx on ethereum with over 2000 ETH fee went [through]. Someone believes it could be a hacker's blackmail to some exchange,” tweeted NEO co-founder Da Hongfei.
“A [wild] guess [is] certain exchange/wallet/ETH services is being “kidnapped” by hacker,” speculated Primitive Crypto founding partner Dovey Wan.
But, according to China-based blockchain analytics company PeckShield, reported by Chainews, these theories aren’t so wild after all. PeckShield’s analysis explains that the million-dollar snafus were probably “gas price ransomware attacks.”
In short, the researchers claim that the hackers have gained access to an exchange’s funds. They are able to send money to certain whitelisted accounts that are marked as reliable in the exchange’s database to—but not to their own. So, they are sending the funds with excessively high transaction fees to sap the exchange’s accounts, and they’re demanding a ransom if it’s going to stop.Read in full https://decrypt.co/32145/hackers-blackmail-exchange-with-5-million-of-ethereum-fees-report |
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It appears that there might be machines outside of China that are always waiting and ready for a drop in hashrate hehehe. In the wake of the Bitcoin halving, the hash rate of the network dropped dramatically.
Due to an effective 50% decrease in profitability, around 30% of the machines mining BTC went offline from peak to the bottom of the trough, slowing transactions down and causing an increase in transaction fees.
But as blockchain data firm Coin Metrics observed on June 14th, the hash rate has since recovered.
It is unclear if the uptrend that Bitcoin’s hash rate has found itself in since the halving will continue though, with there being news that a large mining farm in China has recently had to shut down due to a large fire.Source https://www.newsbtc.com/2020/06/14/bitcoin-hashrate-halving-chinese-farm-burns/ |
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@Vishnu.Reang. Also, what states have the highest cases of the coronavirus and the highest projected cases of the virus on November? Blue states or red states?
The democrats also want to defund the police. Minneapolis has begun doing this. What would be its effect on independent voters?
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It doesn't mean that since the chances of winning is 50:50, the result is going to be equal between players. In 10 tosses of a coin, it could happen that the result is 0 heads and 10 tails.
Therefore, on an infinite timescale with finite bankrolls, one will always prevail over the other. And with absolute certainty.
What's the people's claim, by the way, that this truth is in contrast to?
That was why I reckon that there was a misunderstanding on the theory. An infinite coin toss cannot occur with a finite bankroll. Also, I reckon @deisik misunderstood zero sum also. |
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The infinite toss theory assumes that you also have infinte bankroll for the very long timescale to occur and for the wins and losses to always become 50-50 That's not the case here It is indeed about a very finite and, moreover, equal bankrolls. So the question is that whether one of the players is going to bust or it will be a "zero-sum game", i.e. no one winning or losing anything (give or take) provided the player's bankrolls are big enough to allow for a very large number of tosses We have two polar opposite outcomes which exclude each other, and I'm utterly curious to find out which one is actually going to play out in real life (as it may have very important and practical implications in other domains). So far it looks more like one of the gamblers will invariably bust eventually I reckon there might be another misunderstanding. It is a zero sum game. A zero sum game is a player's wins is balanced by another player's loses to the winning player. In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants.Source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory |
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I reckon that there might be a misunderstanding.
The infinite toss theory assumes that you also have infinte bankroll for the very long timescale to occur and for the wins and losses to always become 50-50.
Place a 1% house edge to the infinite bankroll, infinte toss game, what result do you have?
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This news was from mainstream media Vice and the emails, Slack messages and other proof that leaked were from Motherboard, another mainstream news website. I reckon stricter than strick regulations are coming to an exchange near you hehehe.  Cole Diamond, CEO of CoinsquareCanadian cryptocurrency exchange Coinsquare has been artificially inflating how much currency it is trading, according to leaked emails, Slack messages, and other files obtained by Motherboard.
According to the material, Coinsquare was "wash trading," which means it was automatically buying and selling currency between accounts it controlled. The news provides evidence of a practice that is often suspected in the cryptocurrency world but rarely proven, and can draw attention from regulators.
"Turn it back on," one seemingly angry March 2019 Slack message from Coinsquare CEO Cole Diamond to other employees of the company read, referring to the code that managed internal trades after an employee switched it off, fearing retaliation from regulators.Read in full https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dz35q/cryptocurrency-exchange-wash-trading-coinsquare |
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@Lucius. However, the present situation might be different today since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The movement of the American military has changed because the Chinese military has been more aggressive on the South China sea.
Also, the domestic pressure on Trump is high. This might cause him to be more desperate and might declare war, I reckon. There is 4 months before the United States election. Let us wait.
To be honest, no move, no matter how crazy or dangerous, would surprise me when it comes to Trump. But any war at the moment is of no interest to anyone because of the global economic situation. It is easiest to start a war, but it is extremely difficult to finance military ventures. China knows its limits very well, just as the USA knows them - and all you can see is actually a game of cat and mouse. If these two forces got into some serious military conflict, it would be much worse than a pandemic, because that would probably be the beginning of World War 3. If we think logically, decentralization of mining power is something absolutely desirable and in the interest of all of us. But there are reasons why, according to some, almost 3/4 of all miners are in China. Cheap electricity, cheap labor, cheap infrastructure and the blessing of the Communist Party to carry out such operations. If similar or better conditions occur somewhere, some miners will certainly migrate (as is already the case), but it is a process that will take some time. I disagree. If there is a rising superpower similar to China that is beginning to challenge the established superpower, America, the majority of these situations, a war has occured. This is another occurence of Thucydides trap beginning. |
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@cr1776. Destroy or disintegrate civilzation or society as we know it hehehe. The next clear step forward is private transactions or anonymous, private, scalable cryptocoins.
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@Lucius. However, the present situation might be different today since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The movement of the American military has changed because the Chinese military has been more aggressive on the South China sea.
Also, the domestic pressure on Trump is high. This might cause him to be more desperate and might declare war, I reckon. There is 4 months before the United States election. Let us wait.
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That approval rating is only from CNN. CNN and the other mainstream media hate Trump from the beginning of his first campaign.
The other Trump approval ratings are more than 40%.
I still think it would make more sense for CNN to fake polls and approval ratings pro Trump - or at least that is what I would do, if I was to support Biden. I am thinking about those people who are not that eager to go voting, but lean (strongly) towards one of the candidates. If I lean towards Biden and see him being 60% favourite, I might say to myself, well, he will win anyway, so I don't need to give my vote. If I lean towards Trump and see him trailing, I might feel the urge to actually give my vote to him. This only works until a certain threshold of course, because at some point you will have discouraged the underdog voters; maybe they are trying to do that  I cannot agree. I reckon that what might work for Donald Trump might be a disastrous blunder for the campaign of Joe Biden. |
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@Carlton Banks. The developers should implement it perfectly and there should be no excuses. It would be life or death for people in some countries to be using a privacy technology that can really be traced by the government. Announced via a HRF blog post, the foundation is spearheading the initiative “to support software developers who are making the Bitcoin network more private, decentralized, and resilient so that it can better serve as a financial tool for human rights activists, civil society organizations, and journalists around the world.”Source https://decrypt.co/31899/human-rights-foundation-activists-worldwide-bitcoin |
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@Karartma1. The American government knows that bitcoin has an important part to play in society despite many of their criticisms. They are clearly afraid that its part is on helping the disintegration of civilization. It is clearly more than how we use it today.
There was also an article on Coindesk written that bitcoin will only having value in a dystopian society. The present situation in the United States might be the nearest to dystopia occuring in its whole history.
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That approval rating is only from CNN. CNN and the other mainstream media hate Trump from the beginning of his first campaign. The other Trump approval ratings are more than 40%. Source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_approval_ratingThe big difference between pollsters and bookies is that bookies are talking from money perspective, who people would put money into for a bet, I would say they would do it even bigger for Hillary back in 2016 (didn't check odds back those days) because it was looked much better, risking your money and who you are voting are different, you may like Trump but think Biden will win and bet on Biden but vote for Trump. That is why you could see some differences between those two results.
Polls are naturally not trustworthy because you ask at most 10-20 thousand people (usually a lot less) and hope to guess what 120+ million would vote.
The sportsbooks and the pollsters had Hillary more as a certainty on 2016 than Biden for 2020. |
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A sharp fall soon might be correct. That was nice of you to use that instead of dump hehehe. However, it will certainly be followed by another pump. Tether has printed billions. Where would that go? How will it be used? Dump and pump hehehe.  Source https://coinmetrics.io/ |
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This is good news if China's domination on mining goes down, however, I am not convinced. This might only be a small adjustment after the halving before going back to normal. In any case, the miners in China should begin to find other countries with cheap electricity. I speculate war coming in the South China sea region and this might change the political landscape that might become unpredictable for local and foreign businesses.  TokenInsight cites data from Cambridge University’s Centre for Alternative Finance, which estimates that the overall electricity usage of Bitcoin miners that comes from China had fallen from 75.63% in September 2019 to 65.08% by the end of April.
Cambridge’s estimations provide a rough indication of the hash rate produced by China, Johnson Xu, chief analyst at TokenInsight, told Decrypt.
In the same time frame, Cambridge’s data shows that electricity consumption from Bitcoin miners in the US has increased from 4.06% to 7.24%. Bitcoin mining in Kazakhstan also appears to have boomed: back in September, Kazakhstan’s mining industry accounted for 1.42% of the hash rate; by May 7, it accounted for 6.17% of the hash rate.
Xu said that miners are leaving China to set up shop elsewhere. “The mining landscape in China is quite unstructured,” he said, “limiting opportunities to access capital.” Read in full https://decrypt.co/31915/crypto-bitcoin-china-mining-industry |
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@Carlton Banks. However, would blockchain analytics firms know what utxo came from a coinswap? That might be a weak point because some exchanges can freeze accounts of users that deposited coins that did a coinswap.
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The emission rate is just to high, I think this coin will end like zec...
Its monetary policy will cause Grin's price to be more stable than bitcoin and become more attractive as a store of value. Anonymous, fungible, scalable, stable. Everything bitcoin was assumed to be. |
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This best represents the way of the Chinese to create a poor copy of what was created by westerners and scam everyone by marketing it as a better version. Tron 4.0 is 2 levels more advanced than Eth 2.0 according to Justin hehehehe.
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