Hackers steal NFTs worth millions. In other news, NFTs worth millions.
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?
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, complyadvantage.com/…/art-money-laundering/, this just made it easier.
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.
No matter how you personally feel about it, 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.
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 old.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/search?q=Lost+my+bt…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Oh, but i have. Or >95% anyway. I keep a few dollars around in case i need them.
Must be nice to be rich.
Plenty of us can’t afford to order groceries to be delivered and Aldi sure doesn’t accept Bitcoin.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Why would they change an entry on the blockchain?
To make the dumb idea of tracking peoperties on the blockchain there needs to be admin tools to restore the NFT to the proper owner.
If the NFT gets transfered to someone else illegally, there needs to be tools to add another entry to the chain with a note saying that the NFT was stolen, and this new change restores the ownership to the lawful owner.
there needs to be admin tools to restore the NFT to the proper owner.
The whole point of the blockchain technologies is that they’re (supposedly) immune to state interference. What’s on the blockchain is the “truth”. The state wouldn’t have any power to restore the proper owner of the NFT / house because they chose to trust blockchain instead of having control over the database.
If states can “restore ownership to the lawful owner”, they can also seize people’s cryptocurrencies.
That’s why no state would ever have house registries on a blockchain that they didn’t control. And if they did control it, there’s no point in using a blockchain when they could just use a traditional database.
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.
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 with everything else, all those things you suggested are already done much more reliably without NFTs.
If you still want to see a more “pratical” use of it, look no further than Decentraland, where it’s used as “ownership” of digital “land” and other “goods”.
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