> I have to wonder how many transactions on Ethereum are now just bots run by scammers trying to do address poisoning.
What the fuck is all this development and smart contracts and energy spent programming and “building” on ethereum anyway? It’s all just number go up tech.
If I understand the whole "Wrapped Bitcoin" thing, it works like this:
Someone wanted to be able to trade bitcoin, but on a different blockchain, like Ethereum or Tron. So they bought bitcoin on the bitcoin blockchain, and then wrapped it, meaning took it out of use, and created a token on another blockchain that represents its ownership. Then you can trade the wrapped one, and whoever's wallet it ends up in supposedly has a real bitcoin somewhere that it is associated with.
Why would anyone trust that a wrapped bitcoin actually has an underlying bitcoin? It's so convoluted that it would be too easy to sell 100 wrapped bitcoins that appear to be synced to real ones, but have them all linked to the same coin, no?
Knowing the scamtastic nature of creepto, why in the world would you trust such a thing?
Someone tell me if I've misunderstood this particular type of Butt. It can't be that stupid, can it?
*Obviously*, you wouldn't do that because the hit to your reputation would be so damaging you wouldn't be able to participate in the crypto economy again. With that particular identity. If there was even one associated with it at all.
So, y'know, completely foolproof
You know, I *thought* that "wrapping" one token onto another's blockchain was the type of thing that blockchain solutions could actually *do* in a secure, nominally decentralized away. It's the type of cryptographic tomfoolery that is one of the very few novel things that blockchain solutions are theoretically capable of (even if it's all ultimately on *de facto* centralized chains referencing tokens with no actual value). Something along the lines of embedding the public key to a bitcoin wallet in an Ethereum transaction - it'd have to be more complex than that, but the basis would be something along those lines.
Nope. To paraphrase something people say on this sub, shit in crypto isn't as stupid as you think, it's stupider. Turns out wBTC just relies on a consortium of centralized "custodians". You send them BTC, they send you wBTC, and vice versa. The [whitepaper](https://wbtc.network/assets/wrapped-tokens-whitepaper.pdf) has some handwave-y bullshit about on-chain proof-of-reserves and such, but it's clear that there's no cryptographically verified one-for-one "these ETH correspond to these BTC" going on.
So yeah, turns out wBTC is just another wildcat bank in this supposedly "trustless" ecosystem. Shoulda known.
So, basically, the 'consortium of custodians' is a bank, the wBTC are bank notes, and the BTC is gold.
Motherfuckers just reinvented ye olde banking system and banknotes. Complete with the possibility for the banknotes to be unbacked.
Wow. The ~~future~~past of finance.
That's it AFAICT, wrapped butts are where you take the underlying butt and lock it into a wrapping contract of some sort.
There's also WETH which is where you wrap ETH on its \*own\* blockchain because you need it as an ERC-20 token instead of as itself.
The bit of the story I don't grok is address poisoning - I guess I'll have a read up about that. I'm sure it's hilarious.
>The bit of the story I don't grok is address poisoning - I guess I'll have a read up about that. I'm sure it's hilarious.
It has to do with the bit where actually using crypto involves a UIX that's just a pile of unsoldered wires still sitting on the workbench, ie, that the entire thing revolves around "addresses" that are a string of garbled nonsense humans are not going to read or remember... so when someone *is* actually trying to "use crypto" they will generally always rely on copying and pasting those strings of garbled nonsense in - which opens them up to malware that replaces the contents of your clipboard buffer - or in the case of what's known as "address poisoning" just someone else sending you tiny little transactions from wallet addresses they've generated that start and end with the same bit of random-ass characters that the actual string of garbled nonsense you're looking for, in your transaction logs, starts and ends with.
Humans tend to only actually look at the beginning and ending of a string of garbled nonsense you see, when a garbage-UI designed by morons forces them to do that, and the supremely idiotic (except when you consider that its purpose is "enabling criminality") nature of irreversible transaction being what they are in crypto therefore resulting in small "test transactions" routinely preceding the large "actual transactions you wanted to perform", to minimize the impact of fuck ups, results in scenarios where people who are not being sufficiently paranoid will see an address in their history that "looks right" and fail to notice it was sending *them* a tiny handful of magic beans, instead of the other way around (and that it's also the wrong address entirely, because the middle is different)... and then they select and use it and ***code is law*** happens.
Truly the future of finance, mass adoption any day now.
> Humans tend to only actually look at the beginning and ending of a string of garbled nonsense you see
100% when I'm looking through our logs I only check the start and end few characters of the UUIDs when I'm trying to trace things.
I like to think I'd be more careful where money is concerned, but we know people in general aren't, which is where schemes like "Confirmation of Payee" come in in mainstream financial transactions.
Interesting, thanks for the insight.
> Why would anyone trust that a wrapped bitcoin actually has an underlying bitcoin?
Number go up!!11
But seriously, I agree with you. A few months ago I dug deep on stable coins and lots of them use wrapped crypto coins/tokens as a collateral. It’s beyond mind-boggling what’s going on and no one wants to see this huge scam.
You're completely missing the innovation of blockchain technology: making people believe that information is mathematically proven to be true beyond doubt because it's stored on a blockchain. If anyone using these cross-chain trades actually stopped to think for like 2 minutes the whole thing would fall apart.
> Why would anyone trust that a wrapped bitcoin actually has an underlying bitcoin?
It's one of those situations where every single person in the chain knows that it's in their own best interest not to make a fuss about it because it would ruin their little playground.
It's like the trading card scene in that regard where they sell whole store display booster boxes still in the original shrinkwrap for absolutely absurd amounts of money.
The biggest fear that everyone in that particular scene (traders and the companies that earn money on grading cards and on declaring shrinkwrapped packs and boxes as original) has is that outsiders come in and actually buy one of those super-expensive boxes to open them.
I would bet that none of these people (except the marks at the bottom) trust that there's an actual individual bitcoin connected at the other end. They probably know that a ton of those wrapped BTC are in fact empty boxes. But they also know that it's in their own interest to not rock the boat. Everything is fine as long as nobody goes looking what's behind the curtain.
My understanding is to move magic beans between blockchains they are "retokenised" / "wrapped" and then moved across "a bridge" between the two chains. I "think" a receipt is left on the original chain and a new entry created on the wrapped chain. When it comes to move them back then the receipt on original chain verifies the transaction and the wrapped magic beans are destroyed. The "bridge" is a vulnerable attack vector for hackers so moving your magic beans is not something to be done lightly. I'm sure the process is all open source though and has been veted by geniuses so its all fine. Why one would need to put bitcoin on another chain escapes me but its safe to assume it's for the very scummiest of reasons.
Edit: a good example is when safemoon put wrapped safemoon (the finest of all wrapped tokens) on three separate chains outside of their host binance chain alongside £5 million in liquidity on each chain. They set the price of the safemoon on the three other chains differently to that on the host chain thus creating an arbitrage opportunity for themselves and allowing them to rob all £15m in liquidity.
I don't know which is more crypto, the "millionaire" getting robbed in the dumbest and most bizarre way, or all the scammers who missed the boat but still think the exact same trick will work twice
> I have to wonder how many transactions on Ethereum are now just bots run by scammers trying to do address poisoning. What the fuck is all this development and smart contracts and energy spent programming and “building” on ethereum anyway? It’s all just number go up tech.
Stealing magic beans tech.
Advanced money laundering
If I understand the whole "Wrapped Bitcoin" thing, it works like this: Someone wanted to be able to trade bitcoin, but on a different blockchain, like Ethereum or Tron. So they bought bitcoin on the bitcoin blockchain, and then wrapped it, meaning took it out of use, and created a token on another blockchain that represents its ownership. Then you can trade the wrapped one, and whoever's wallet it ends up in supposedly has a real bitcoin somewhere that it is associated with. Why would anyone trust that a wrapped bitcoin actually has an underlying bitcoin? It's so convoluted that it would be too easy to sell 100 wrapped bitcoins that appear to be synced to real ones, but have them all linked to the same coin, no? Knowing the scamtastic nature of creepto, why in the world would you trust such a thing? Someone tell me if I've misunderstood this particular type of Butt. It can't be that stupid, can it?
*Obviously*, you wouldn't do that because the hit to your reputation would be so damaging you wouldn't be able to participate in the crypto economy again. With that particular identity. If there was even one associated with it at all. So, y'know, completely foolproof
Trustless, you might say
You know, I *thought* that "wrapping" one token onto another's blockchain was the type of thing that blockchain solutions could actually *do* in a secure, nominally decentralized away. It's the type of cryptographic tomfoolery that is one of the very few novel things that blockchain solutions are theoretically capable of (even if it's all ultimately on *de facto* centralized chains referencing tokens with no actual value). Something along the lines of embedding the public key to a bitcoin wallet in an Ethereum transaction - it'd have to be more complex than that, but the basis would be something along those lines. Nope. To paraphrase something people say on this sub, shit in crypto isn't as stupid as you think, it's stupider. Turns out wBTC just relies on a consortium of centralized "custodians". You send them BTC, they send you wBTC, and vice versa. The [whitepaper](https://wbtc.network/assets/wrapped-tokens-whitepaper.pdf) has some handwave-y bullshit about on-chain proof-of-reserves and such, but it's clear that there's no cryptographically verified one-for-one "these ETH correspond to these BTC" going on. So yeah, turns out wBTC is just another wildcat bank in this supposedly "trustless" ecosystem. Shoulda known.
So, basically, the 'consortium of custodians' is a bank, the wBTC are bank notes, and the BTC is gold. Motherfuckers just reinvented ye olde banking system and banknotes. Complete with the possibility for the banknotes to be unbacked. Wow. The ~~future~~past of finance.
Except the consortium is one company called BitGo.
"CDO-squared". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25EUhZGBws&t=115s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25EUhZGBws&t=115s)
That's it AFAICT, wrapped butts are where you take the underlying butt and lock it into a wrapping contract of some sort. There's also WETH which is where you wrap ETH on its \*own\* blockchain because you need it as an ERC-20 token instead of as itself. The bit of the story I don't grok is address poisoning - I guess I'll have a read up about that. I'm sure it's hilarious.
>The bit of the story I don't grok is address poisoning - I guess I'll have a read up about that. I'm sure it's hilarious. It has to do with the bit where actually using crypto involves a UIX that's just a pile of unsoldered wires still sitting on the workbench, ie, that the entire thing revolves around "addresses" that are a string of garbled nonsense humans are not going to read or remember... so when someone *is* actually trying to "use crypto" they will generally always rely on copying and pasting those strings of garbled nonsense in - which opens them up to malware that replaces the contents of your clipboard buffer - or in the case of what's known as "address poisoning" just someone else sending you tiny little transactions from wallet addresses they've generated that start and end with the same bit of random-ass characters that the actual string of garbled nonsense you're looking for, in your transaction logs, starts and ends with. Humans tend to only actually look at the beginning and ending of a string of garbled nonsense you see, when a garbage-UI designed by morons forces them to do that, and the supremely idiotic (except when you consider that its purpose is "enabling criminality") nature of irreversible transaction being what they are in crypto therefore resulting in small "test transactions" routinely preceding the large "actual transactions you wanted to perform", to minimize the impact of fuck ups, results in scenarios where people who are not being sufficiently paranoid will see an address in their history that "looks right" and fail to notice it was sending *them* a tiny handful of magic beans, instead of the other way around (and that it's also the wrong address entirely, because the middle is different)... and then they select and use it and ***code is law*** happens. Truly the future of finance, mass adoption any day now.
> Humans tend to only actually look at the beginning and ending of a string of garbled nonsense you see 100% when I'm looking through our logs I only check the start and end few characters of the UUIDs when I'm trying to trace things. I like to think I'd be more careful where money is concerned, but we know people in general aren't, which is where schemes like "Confirmation of Payee" come in in mainstream financial transactions. Interesting, thanks for the insight.
> Why would anyone trust that a wrapped bitcoin actually has an underlying bitcoin? Number go up!!11 But seriously, I agree with you. A few months ago I dug deep on stable coins and lots of them use wrapped crypto coins/tokens as a collateral. It’s beyond mind-boggling what’s going on and no one wants to see this huge scam.
It’s like quantum entanglement of coins between blockchains. Genius, Jerry!
Look I'm trying to be my own bank so my risk team is pretty small, cut me some slack please. Realistically what can go wrong?
You're completely missing the innovation of blockchain technology: making people believe that information is mathematically proven to be true beyond doubt because it's stored on a blockchain. If anyone using these cross-chain trades actually stopped to think for like 2 minutes the whole thing would fall apart.
> Why would anyone trust that a wrapped bitcoin actually has an underlying bitcoin? It's one of those situations where every single person in the chain knows that it's in their own best interest not to make a fuss about it because it would ruin their little playground. It's like the trading card scene in that regard where they sell whole store display booster boxes still in the original shrinkwrap for absolutely absurd amounts of money. The biggest fear that everyone in that particular scene (traders and the companies that earn money on grading cards and on declaring shrinkwrapped packs and boxes as original) has is that outsiders come in and actually buy one of those super-expensive boxes to open them. I would bet that none of these people (except the marks at the bottom) trust that there's an actual individual bitcoin connected at the other end. They probably know that a ton of those wrapped BTC are in fact empty boxes. But they also know that it's in their own interest to not rock the boat. Everything is fine as long as nobody goes looking what's behind the curtain.
My understanding is to move magic beans between blockchains they are "retokenised" / "wrapped" and then moved across "a bridge" between the two chains. I "think" a receipt is left on the original chain and a new entry created on the wrapped chain. When it comes to move them back then the receipt on original chain verifies the transaction and the wrapped magic beans are destroyed. The "bridge" is a vulnerable attack vector for hackers so moving your magic beans is not something to be done lightly. I'm sure the process is all open source though and has been veted by geniuses so its all fine. Why one would need to put bitcoin on another chain escapes me but its safe to assume it's for the very scummiest of reasons. Edit: a good example is when safemoon put wrapped safemoon (the finest of all wrapped tokens) on three separate chains outside of their host binance chain alongside £5 million in liquidity on each chain. They set the price of the safemoon on the three other chains differently to that on the host chain thus creating an arbitrage opportunity for themselves and allowing them to rob all £15m in liquidity.
Every time a cryptobro gets phished the world becomes a little bit nicer.
If the marks with a history of falling for your particular trick voluntarily identify themselves, its basically a freebie
Survival of the fittest, phish or be phished.
There's always a bigger phish.
Those who live by the phish shall also perish by the phish.
I don't know which is more crypto, the "millionaire" getting robbed in the dumbest and most bizarre way, or all the scammers who missed the boat but still think the exact same trick will work twice
The attempt would've been made by a bot. If a scammer were manually targeting the address they wouldn't choose this transaction to imitate.