[gambiting]

I just don't understand the entire article - who is this guy? What is he doing? Why is he doing it? What are the dozens of different acronyms in this article and what do they mean? Who owns the 9.6M dollars and where was it at the risk of going?

Maybe this is a good article for someone deep into crypto, but for myself, as a casual morning read - I have no idea what happened.

[superjan]

What I pieced together from the referenced “dark forest” article, ethereum cryptocurrency allows you to upload programs (smart contracts) that specify under what conditions cryptocurrency changes hands. If there are bugs in these programs, the money can be stolen. Fixing the bugs after the fact is only possible with new contracts, and there are bad actors constantly scanning the newly uploaded contracts, copy them while making themselves the beneficiary. This is fully automated. To bypass this they gave the contract directly to a miner, so it is only publicly visible after it is run/completed. I can imagine the appeal of working on this, it is really a specialized type of unpaid white hat security researcher.

[Paradigma11]

The money was in limbo due to a bug in a contract. There are contracts (monsters) that scan for such bugs and situations to profit from them. The guy tried to save the money from the monsters and failed.

The situation was worse since it happened already in the mempool where the pending transactions reside.

I am dabbling a bit in the Tezos currency and environment and find this 2 language projects interesting aimed to increase safety: https://github.com/metastatedev/juvix (alpha) and https://archetype-lang.org/ Not saying it might have helped in the concrete case.

[Kiro]

This is not the same article as https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ec...

Here they actually managed to save the funds.

[Octopodes]

Honestly I just read through it like it was a cyberpunk short story. His heart is pounding as he collaborates with super-hackers all over the world in an effort to rescue some desperate person's millions. All of the jargon was totally lost on me but gave it a certain flavor.

[brmgb]

My personal take on it is that between the anime avatar, the constant verbiage, the hero complex and the relectance to properly document things, it feels more like kids playing at finance than actual professional.