How to become a millionaire overnight? Well, let me tell you how hackers think, and I'll use a practical example as well. I will keep it super basic, and sweet and short.
Cryptocurrency is all the rage now, and will be for the next 8 years until either Putin or climate change destroys mankind. Meanwhile, you want a private yacht and a private plane. Why risk your pelt with an old school bank robbery, when you can steal hundreds of millions of cryptocurrency anonymously from behind your computer?
There is a major flaw in some blockchains that can bring millions of transactions and data transfers to a virtual standstill. (At this point in the movie, the cat meows.) I will be using this as just one example of how many people can – and do – become millionaires overnight. Again, I'm going to keep it very basic.
But first, TON, because they tie in with this story. The Open Network was initially developed by the messaging app Telegram's brilliant coders. It is a 'new' blockchain and is worth sacrificing your soul for. Just the past five months, half a million people installed their TonKeeper wallet software, and on a graph one can see the uptake is some of the most dramatic I've seen in the world of crypto.
It even offers bridging to other blockchains for interoperability (or they're working on it) and is able to process millions of financial transactions per second, compared to Visa's 17 000 per second. It also offers smart contract functionality like Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and others, but better.
Plus, transactions happen in a second, at a super low cost like one cent. Compare that to your traditional rip-off scum-sucking degenerate tosser criminal controlling traditional bank that takes three days to send money to another country at an exorbitant fee!
Just like with Bitcoin mining you can make money with this blockchain as well, but by doing staking instead of mining, that isn't as rough on energy consumption as the latter. And in several other ways too, which is beyond the scope of this short article.
Basically, to do some ‘mining’ of your own, you would download their software, and register your computer to become a node for the blockchain. All fine, you earn money passively while your computer just do some mathematics and validate encrypted data blocks passing through.
Somewhere someone is sending money, and somewhere else on the other side of the world someone is getting paid. Your computer plays banker on your behalf and get a small transaction fee from those data passing through it. Times a million transactions of others, which makes it worth it, while you sleep.
Unfortunately, new tech brings new challenges. A few days ago, TON issued an official warning on Telegram that will only scare legit validators, while hackers grin at that emphasis on 'immediately'.
One of the network's requirements is that your computer must have 64 GB of RAM in order to handle the load. Too low, and your computer becomes a blockage in the network, so to speak. This same issue applies to most blockchains.
And so here is what hackers can do, and may have done, to upset the developers in the UAE that are behind the TON blockchain:
Rent a botnet consisting of just a few hundred, or even thousands, of old computers. One can rent such a botnet for as little as 150 dollars on the dark web. So cheap, because those home computers still run outdated operating systems like Windows 7, and have low specs such as 1 or 2 or 4 GB memory. The owners of those computers know about nothing, the clever ones may notice that their CPU loads spiked if the rootkit installed by the botnet owner was configured not stealthy enough. But most don't even notice that.
Install the TON validator software on each of those computers, and run a script to register them all as new nodes to the blockchain.
Sit back and watch a whole blockchain grinds to a halt.
The reason is that the old computers in your botnet are dragging their feet validating data, and therefore millions of data transfers that should take a second, now takes several minutes, or even bomb out and revert.
Why would any hacker do this? Easy, for making huge amounts of money very fast by simply shorting on the price of TonCoin.
By placing an offer-to-buy at any of hundreds of crypto exchanges, the hacker commits himself to buy X amount of coins at a certain future date, at whatever the price will be. With him of course expecting it to be much cheaper then. This can all be setup online, even without KYC. Know Your Customer legislation is aimed at curbing the freedoms of law-abiding citizens and to control what you do with your own money with some flimsy excuse, so that politicians can control you. Or else, you can use the stolen identity details of someone on Facebook, complete with profile pictures downloaded from there. In fact, you can even provide your real details, your buy-order will be 100% legitimate.
Just a quick disclaimer: I'm not encouraging anyone to do anything illegitimate, okay. See this article for informative purposes only. Leave other people's blockchains alone.
An hour after he submitted his contractual offer at a leverage of up to X300 at the crypto exchange, the hacker hits the 'red button' to launch his rented botnet. A few hours later, the news of the DDoS attacks has every owner of that blockchain's tokens in a frenzy. The price drops dramatically, guaranteed, as everyone in a panic tries to swap their coins for another coin. And then the hacker buys as his contract stipulates on that time, automatically, at a super low cost.
One should also remember his botnet did allow many transactions to complete, earning him loads of those coins too. So he'll keep them a few days till the price inevitably rises again. A week later after the price had gone up significantly, as is almost guaranteed as well, the hacker will exchange his very legal loot for dollars again. And nobody but him knows how he really made a million or more USD in one week.
To be clear, as far as my knowledge goes, TON was not DDoS'ed this way. Even if it was, it did not impact any user from what I could find out.
However, such a hack did happen to Solana in 2021, when it was effectively stalled for a whopping 17 hours after an unexpected surge of transactions. It “created a memory overflow, which caused many validators to crash, forcing the network to slow down and eventually stall”, according to the official explanation.
Despite that, Solana's price went up that year with a whopping 8600%. If you had just 1000 US dollars in SOL, it would have been worth 86 000 dollars a year later. Not bad! Any blockchain that offers intrinsic value will always see its price rise again, it is a law of nature.
Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum and many of the other well-known blockchains are all single-layer. That is what made some of them so slow and transaction fees so high. Lately they started adding layers on top to help, almost as an afterthought, in my opinion. The Lightning Network for Bitcoin does just that, it's an extra layer. Ethereum and others are upgrading as well now.
The guys behind TON, they came up with a multi-layer approach from the beginning already, some years back already during the planning phase. See why I'm calling them smart cookies?
The developers behind the TON blockchain are regarded as some of the best cryptographic coders in the world. With Telegram behind them (unofficially now, after the banks that rule the SEC behind the scenes got the latter to interfere on some technical excuses), one can expect a solid product. I can therefore imagine that they – that keeps a close spying eye on their competition blockchains, as one can see in their documentation – will implement measures into their blockchain to mitigate any such attacks that tries to overload the network. One never knows to what lengths the traditional banking sector will go to disrupt blockchains that threaten their very existence.
TONcoin itself is valuable because of the value the blockchain unlocks for users. It is already integrated in Telegram with its half a billion users, so you can send money and receive money right in your Telegram messaging app as if it's a wallet too. From what I understand, other currencies are in the process of being added too, making it a multi-currency crypto wallet then. What more do you need? Doing a banking transaction is becoming as easy and fast as sending an ordinary message.
This blockchain is guaranteed to spike in price this year, regardless of bad behavior from hackers or sneaky propaganda from traditional banks. In the past two weeks several more crypto exchanges added TONcoin to their inventories of exchangeable coins, which is a strong sign of trust from the experts.
TON beats most other – in my opinion, all – blockchains, for numerous reasons, like ultra-low transactions costs, speed, number of transactions, scalability, and the smart contracts it can do. Apps are already being built on it, unlocking its value. These features guaranteed that TONcoin will be a major blockchain by the end of this year. Which means, the price of each coin will be many times more than now.
Click my invitation link to see how you can score – legally - from it too. Who knows, the coins you'll get free may be 8600% worth more by the end of the year.
And do follow me for more lazy tricks.
IMAGE SOURCES:
Cover photo from Telegram
Second photo: Screenshot by myself from inside Telegram messaging app.
