Bitcoin despite having 2 major bugs in the past has never been hacked and continues to run into its second decade with a flawless record. It can achieve this by making trade-offs, keeping the code simple, not creating incompatible hard fork upgrades, and ensuring that everything built on top of it can be verified and settled on the base chain means there is a smaller room for error.
Bitcoin makes these trade-offs purposefully and bases the system on the reality of hardware and the limitations of what decentralization can achieve.
On the other hand, altcoins aren't restricted by wanting to be money, so they can try all sorts of weird things to try and attract people to their network. Ethereum has become a rube goldberg machine with patch after patch, and the amount of vulnerabilities and attack vectors grows each day.
When you don't consider the reality of technology and people and make assumptions you leave effectively leaving yourself open to anyone with the means and incentive to take money, will do it.
Second biggest crypto hack under the bridge
A piece of news I don't think got that much publicity is the latest hack of the wormhole bridge contract. This dumb contract allows users to transfer tokens between Ethereum and Solana blockchain.
As is the case with most smart contracts once the honey pot is big enough it's time to crack it open and the result was a loss of more than $320 million two weeks ago.
A report from blockchain cybersecurity firm CertiK confirms that the exploit of the contract allowed some lucky person to walk away with at least $251 million worth of Ethereum, nearly $47 million in Solana, and more than $4 million in USDC, a stable coin pegged to the price of the U.S. dollar.
Now, do we know if this was an outside or inside job? No clue, the way it's been covered and the walk around it makes me side with an inside job. But that's just me speculating.
What is the wormhole
Since degen crypto holders do not operate exclusively within one blockchain ecosystem and are looking for yield or cheaper fees and ways to arb, these bridges have become popular.
The wormhole is a protocol that lets users move their tokens and NFTs between Solana and Ethereum. Bridges like Wormhole work by having two smart contracts — one on each chain. When an asset is locked into the contract on 1 chain, a representative version is created on another, but it doesn't mean the original is destroyed, it's kept within the smart contract or custodial service taking on the liability.
How come every time you come around, my crypto, crypto bridge wanna go down
The story goes that there was an exploit in the Solana side of the smart contract which allowed the hacker to continuously mint wrapped ETH on the chain resulting in a bunch of unbacked ETH.
So when you break a bridge you're effectively creating a double spend event in that asset and diluting everyone. It's less of a bridge and more of a connection between two pipes of flowing water with a balloon.
As the water streams in the balloon expand, sure it allows the water to flow between the two pipes, but the more water, the more fragile the connection, and it's primed to pop.
All blockchains are simple ledgers, they cannot extract data from outside their environment, and bridges like these are always going to be fundamentally broken implementations that will continue to provide a point of failure.
Jump Crypto bailout
The hacker was able to make off with the funds and when contacted to return the funds, for an offer of $10 million they refused. So why wasn't there cascading systemic losses from this hack?
Any rational person involved in the ETH bridge or Solana ecosystem would surely be worried as their wrapped ETH on Solana would trade at a discount. This could in theory break a lot of DEFI protocols and lending protocols that use the wrapped ETH as collateral.
The reason was Jump Crypto, one of the largest liquidity providers in Solana, who mint 90% of the chains USDT also manage Wormhole. So they have pretty serious exposure in the Solana ecosystem.
I imagine that doing the math, Jump Crypto realized that they would lose far more through the knock-on effects to the Solana ecosystem, and decided to make everyone holding funds in that contract whole.
Now, where they came up with the funds to do so is anyone's guess.
Shitcoiner tears are a delicacy
I am amazed at how people can write off these issues and carry on when it's so obvious that these shitcoin systems aren't built with any security measures. I guess gamblers never cared anyway.
Personally, I find it highly entertaining to watch!
May the losses continue until critical thinking improves.
Have your say
What do you good people of HIVE think?
So have at it my Jessies! If you don't have something to comment, "I am a Jessie."
Let's connect
If you liked this post, sprinkle it with an upvote or esteem and if you don't already, consider following me 
| Safely Store Your Crypto | Deposit $100 & Earn $10 | Earn Interest On Crypto |
|---|---|---|