pull down to refresh

Seems like the negotiations between Blockstream and the hacker are still ongoing

Miguel Medeiros on X is doing a nice job of keeping track:

And then more recently:

241 sats \ 21 replies \ @k00b 10h

How much bitcoin did they keep?

reply

598BTC

reply
526 sats \ 17 replies \ @optimism 10h

I should never send a responsible disclosure again.

reply

What does this mean?

reply
323 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 10h

Being a bad guy pays better.

reply
126 sats \ 2 replies \ @Bell_curve 6h

not always but you are probably right 80 percent

reply
12 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 6h

I'm just doing the cope thing over here telling myself about how not being the bad guy is better for the soul.

reply
126 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 5h

split it 50/50

it’s what I should do when a stock is overpriced

126 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 6h

I always think this when I pay for a tram ticket and then nobody cared

reply
55 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 6h

A few months ago I was in Dusseldorf and they violently dragged a guy out of the U-bahn in Neuss because he had no ticket and no ID. I think they were more pissed about the ID than the ticket. The only other place I've ever seen such violence by public transport functionaries was in Moscow whenever they kick the homeless out of line 5.

reply

maybe they will give more back once some additional negotiation is completed 🤔

reply
365 sats \ 4 replies \ @optimism 10h

What I mean? That being honest and not causing a public hostage situation is not as rewarding as just forcing the issue. In fact, I'm deep in the fucking red.

reply
126 sats \ 3 replies \ @Bell_curve 6h

stop being so pessimistic

stop being in the red!

reply
12 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 6h

reply
126 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 6h

Thank you for your service. I also need missile defense

Is there any world where these coins are free and clear? Seems like even if Block stream agreed not to pursue, there are other entities that will.

reply

Apparently. If he could've taken away a genuine 5-10 BTC, then it wasn't the same case. But 598 BTC..I can't digest it. It's way too much.

reply
reply
114 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 10h

Yes but I will not tell you how.

reply
103 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 6h

this is unbelievable
they actually returned most of the funds

I was thinking around 10 to 20 percent, 15 is the middle

reply
57 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 10h

Holy moly

reply
207 sats \ 1 reply \ @nichrome 6h

Update:
Hacker sends the remaining 600 BTC back to themselves with message after encrypted back and forth with blockstream:

:(

reply

I wonder what that is about?

reply
328 sats \ 0 replies \ @nichrome 10h

I wonder if the 600BTC kept was an agreement or they just unilaterally decided their bounty was worth a 15% tip lol

3400 returned is better than 0 I suppose.

"Either we keep this much or keep it all and your network dies" makes the hat grey, not white imo.

reply

This doesn't make sense to me:

Even if Blockstream publicly states, "it's a bug bounty, we gave it to them" these btc have a huge target on them. There is no world where they don't have to take significant measures to obfuscate the source of these coins. Is there something I don't understand here?

reply

I think he'll return more. He must do it or he's not a white hat.

598 BTC isn't what a white hat would takeaway.

reply
103 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 4h

Agreed.

Doesn't sound like white hat behavior

reply

Blockstream has a war chest but I doubt even they can fill that hole, I guess 1LBTC=0.85BTC for the foreseeable

So much for saving money on opening a Lightning channel

reply
12 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 9h

600 is quite the bounty. I imagine they will return more.

reply

Somewhere Adam Back exhales

reply
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 9h

Plus Opensats will pay for the tokens ahahah

reply

Now that this and the coldcard hack, how much is work on convenants really worth? A few 1000 BTC?

reply

That's a large bounty. I think they should negotiate he should keep 10-20 bitcoin or something. Definitely a difficult situation.

reply

Need that meme where they at the party 🥳 and bro is saying 'they don't know about the 4,000 btc hack'

And then it was mostly paid back

This is going down as ultimate bitcoin lore

What a crazy 48hrs

reply

inside job ? with rumours swirling around back, blockstream, employees, and finances for a while now, maybe a good old fashioned rugging was in play, lol

reply

Such crazy drama

reply
reply

This re-enforces and just proves further that bitcoin is secure.
With the inflation bug that was exploited in monero and now liquid, also rumored zcash in the past; the theme is that confidential transactions introduce complexity and a large attack surface for exploitation. What many said was one of Bitcoins flaws (lack of onchain privacy) actually is its strength. The trade-off of going without confidential transactions onchain, in exchange for solid transparency and security.

Privacy can still be achieved via coin control, coinjoin, payjoin, coinswap, lightning. This liquid hack only proves further how secure Bitcoin really is. Bitcoin does not use confidential transactions which resulted in hacks of things which do like monero, Liquid, (zcash?). I was a fan of liquid network, though going forward I lack confidence in confidential transactions on anything.

reply