Binance Smart Chain is Dumb and Mango Markets, Too – Crypto Critics' Corner

Today Bennett and Cas discuss two recent major cryptocurrency problems: one via Binance Smart Chain, a "DeFi" protocol built by CZ and the Binance team, that suffered a $100 million hack, and Mango Markets, a DeFi marketplace, that suffered a $100 million exploit. Another fun week in cryptocurrency. Other resources mentioned in this episode: Unchained Interview with CZ: https://youtu.be/J0XJesFkdl0 Chris Brunet revealing Mango Markets attacker: https://karlstack.substack.com/p/exclusive-the-man-who-may-have-milked Bennett's newsletter about the BSC hack: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/protos/issues/cz-stopped-bsc-why-it-matters-1408029 This episode was recorded on Wednesday, October 12th and edited by Bennett Tomlin.

Today Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin discuss the hack of the Binance Smart Chain Token Hub and Mango Markets.

This episode was recorded on October 12th, 2022.

• Anchor
• Spotify
• Apple
• Google
• Overcast
• RSS Feed

Other episodes mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 49 – Oh, a thing called Wormhole ate $320,000,000? Are you surprised?
• Episode 95 – High Noon at Ooki Corral: CFTC Sues DAO Participants
• Episode 47 – Michael and Omar and 0xSifu, oh my!
• Episode 68 – Evading North Korean Sanctions 101
• Episode 94 – A Tale of Two Ponzis: Celsius and Luna, Alex Mashinsky and Do Kwon

Other resources mentioned in this episode:

• Unchained Interview with CZ
• Chris Brunet revealing Mango Markets attacker
• Bennett’s newsletter about the BSC hack

Where to find Crypto Critics’ Corner:

• Twitter
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Discord
• Bennett’s Twitter
• Cas’ Twitter
• Bennett’s Newsletter
• Cas’ Blog
• Bennett’s Blog
• Bennett’s YouTube

Subscribe to get each episode delivered to your inbox:

English Transcript:

00:00:05:09 - 00:00:11:27
Cas Piancey
Welcome back, everyone. I am Cas Piancey and I'm joined, as usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin. How are you today?

00:00:12:07 - 00:00:13:10
Bennett Tomlin
I'm doing well, Cas How are.

00:00:13:10 - 00:00:44:06
Cas Piancey
You doing? All right. We have a few crazy updates. I mean, not that crazy in the world of cryptocurrency. $200 million hacks, one for the Binance Smart Chain and the other being about mango markets, which is a decentralized trading platform. Right. So yeah, just to I'm going to quickly just let people help people understand what Binance Smart Chain is, because that's going to be the first one that we're going to dove into.

00:00:45:02 - 00:01:13:19
Cas Piancey
Binance Smart Chain basically is a I don't know how to explain this as it's their Defi platform, it's finances like supposed decentralized finance platform where you can build all these things on it, but it isn't decentralized. And the reason we were able to find that out was because of this $100 million hack that ultimately could have been valued at roughly nearly half a billion or more.

00:01:13:23 - 00:01:33:01
Cas Piancey
But because just because the Binance Smart Chain BSC is not actually decentralized, well, they were able to halt the blockchain and stop the hacker from stealing all of that money. But then why don't you give a more detailed explanation of what exactly went down?

00:01:33:09 - 00:02:03:19
Bennett Tomlin
The technical details, I think, are not super important for how this hack was pulled off. They took advantage of the fact that Binance Smart Chain was using an old pre compiled version of a library that had a slight flaw in the way it verified proofs. And so because of that, they were able to withdraw things they weren't supposed to be able to be piece of the infrastructure they were targeting is the Binance Smart Chain Token Hub, which is the bridge that allows for assets to be moved and to and off of the Binance smart chain.

00:02:03:19 - 00:02:24:07
Bennett Tomlin
And so that was targeted like bridges are often targeted. We talked about the wormhole bridge hack a few months ago where jump ended up having to step in. And what happened in this case is the hacker was able to pretty quickly move, as you mentioned, about a hundred million off of this chain under other chains and start liquidating it.

00:02:24:18 - 00:02:46:02
Bennett Tomlin
But Binance was able to get a hold of all of the validators who run the Binance smart chain and convinced them that it would be in there. And the users of Binance Smart Chain, best interest for them to halt it until they could come up with a way to Hard Fork and return those assets to the bridge.

00:02:46:06 - 00:03:25:29
Cas Piancey
Right. So this makes you question the reality of I believe we've discussed a lot of I don't know if we've discussed it here necessarily, but there's a lot of claims about blockchains and decentralization in the cryptocurrency industry in general. And a lot of times what you just have is like six people or eight people or ten or 15 or whatever it is, and they try to claim this is decentralized, that there's, you know, maybe there's some way of electing these nodes and who's going to run them within the within the ecosystem.

00:03:25:29 - 00:03:42:29
Cas Piancey
And maybe it's by voting with through how many tokens you hold or whatever it may be. But a lot of the times these things just are not decentralized. And the reason they're not like one of the benefits of not being decentralized, it turns out, is for security.

00:03:42:29 - 00:04:08:11
Bennett Tomlin
Reasons. Yeah, it's certainly like it gave them the ability to stop this and I think that is more notable than some people have recognized. Right. Because there have been comparisons made to like the Ethereum hard fork after the DAO hack or the Bitcoin overflow rollback. But in both those cases, it was not possible to actually like hold the chain and stop it from progressing.

00:04:08:26 - 00:04:42:20
Bennett Tomlin
In the case of Ethereum, a bunch of Whitehat hackers took advantage of the same vulnerability that the Blackhat hacker had taken advantage of, moved the funds to their own little child DAOs inside the DAO and then they forced it away, removing the hackers access to the part of Ethereum he stole here. The difference here is that he was able to call up the validators or get in touch with the validators however he did, and let them know, Hey, we think it would be best if this chain no longer progressed until we figure this out.

00:04:42:21 - 00:04:46:18
Cas Piancey
Is there any idea about who the hackers were or are yet?

00:04:46:26 - 00:05:10:05
Bennett Tomlin
I don't know that there is for the Binance chain hack. There is some other information for some of the other hacks, like I was talking about the DOE Hack, and that's from 2017. So it's not news. But earlier this year, Laura Shin, the host of Unchained, did figure out when she was publishing her book Cryptopia, and that Toby Hoenisch, the co-founder of TenX, was the DAO hacker.

00:05:10:23 - 00:05:16:01
Cas Piancey
Yeah, ten acts, which we don't need to get into, but also a really stupid, stupid.

00:05:16:08 - 00:05:17:26
Bennett Tomlin
2017 scam. Yeah.

00:05:18:04 - 00:05:32:13
Cas Piancey
Do you think this will over the course of any amount of like extended timeline besides just the moment of do you think this will have any real lasting effect on Binance? Smart Chain or on B and B or on BINANCE'S in general?

00:05:34:00 - 00:06:14:11
Bennett Tomlin
Who the fuck knows? Binance Smart Chain doesn't make sense as a concept. A centralized way to do Defi. A chain that's this controlled doesn't serve a purpose. The only reason cryptocurrencies are ever useful is for censorship resistance. And we're showing here why this chain is not that meaningfully censorship resistant, right? So the only reason it's ever existed is as a way for people to profit from copycat schemes and like Ponzi schemes and these weird games and scams and stuff that propagate in this alternative chain, all the while driving value to be and be the token that Binance created.

00:06:14:18 - 00:06:34:13
Bennett Tomlin
Right? That derives its value primarily from the efforts of Binance and so what's it going to do to Binance Chain? Why does Binance Chain fucking exist? I mean, what it does is shows any regulators we're looking at protocols on Binance chain and think, Hey, that looks like a Ponzi scheme or Hey, that looks like you're offering unregistered merchant trading.

00:06:34:21 - 00:06:47:04
Bennett Tomlin
They can now say, So why don't you stop the chain and make them remove that? Because you just proved you can stop the chain and remove things. That's what you did. And so now you might have people asking you to do that.

00:06:47:15 - 00:07:02:23
Cas Piancey
Laura Shin had seasoned her podcast. Maybe it was two, three, four years ago, and that was when BnB had just begun. And she had specifically asked him, is, is this a security?

00:07:02:27 - 00:07:25:13
CZ
Right, right. So so the way I view it is basically just because multiple people around the world have a view doesn't mean that we all agree. So but there's no legal definition that a certain coin, at least Binance coin, is at least not defined legally by anybody as a security. Many people may think themselves or they may be even a comment or an email may not be.

00:07:25:17 - 00:07:44:28
CZ
I think for every person that you find that who think that way, I can find more people who are not. I can find people who thinks otherwise. So I think is is a different opinion, but it's definitely not classified legally or anywhere as far as I know. And to be honest, even if it's classified legally in some countries are probably classified differently in other countries.

00:07:45:15 - 00:08:00:28
CZ
And the whole discussion about whether coins are security or not only came some within the last, I don't know, six month or so before that, there wasn't that there wasn't any discussion about whether a crypto coin actually client is or is not a security and nobody cared.

00:08:00:28 - 00:08:21:03
Cas Piancey
And he said no, but he couldn't explain how it wasn't a security. And you can hear her pushing back and being like, I don't know. I've spoken to a lot of lawyers, spoken to a lot of people about this, and they all say it sure looks it looks like it quacks like and it and everything about it seems to be a security and he just pushed back and said no.

00:08:21:15 - 00:08:28:28
Cas Piancey
So I think we're testing the limits of that with with moves like this where you stop a hack from occurring by making some phone calls.

00:08:28:28 - 00:08:54:01
Bennett Tomlin
One of the things like in the CFTC settlement against Ooki DAO recently that they made note of in the order was that bZeroX LLC had these admin keys that enabled them to stop the protocol and it used them like in this period before they handed those over to the DAO. And so like the ability to stop conducting the behavior is a thing that like we have seen considered in other cases.

00:08:54:15 - 00:09:13:25
Cas Piancey
We've discussed B and B BSE. You discussed CC and this, but what about mango markets? This happened a couple of days ago as of recording mango markets, decentralized exchange hacked for over $100 million or somewhere around $100 million. What what what happened here?

00:09:14:01 - 00:09:15:23
Bennett Tomlin
I'm not sure this one's a hack.

00:09:15:23 - 00:09:16:02
Cas Piancey
Okay?

00:09:17:12 - 00:09:42:09
Bennett Tomlin
And it it's really more of a market manipulation, right? It's another one of those cases where they took advantage of how an oracle was programed, ran up the price of an asset, and then and then in this case, borrowed against that asset with the intention of basically letting them seize the worthless collateral. It's a little bit similar to how Danny and Sifu who were accused of cashing out of Wonderland.

00:09:42:15 - 00:10:32:22
Bennett Tomlin
Right. Is taking is basically manipulating the price of time up, taking out these debts against it, and then using those to liquidate with no intention of ever repaying because you don't want that collateral anymore. And so they didn't really do anything they weren't supposed to. They just made the markets briefly irrational and took advantage of that irrationality. Now, having said afterwards, they are now going into the governance forums and trying to make proposals and negotiate with the members of the DAO and how much they should have to return to avoid criminal charges, whether or not that's going to work out for them, especially since there is people online claiming to have identified the person who

00:10:32:22 - 00:10:40:21
Bennett Tomlin
did this hack is less clear to me, but that is currently where we are at with the mango markets situation.

00:10:40:29 - 00:10:57:23
Cas Piancey
What Bennett is saying here is that essentially by having these these tokens that this this lad stole or not stole, that he made markets irrational. Like then it was saying, we've seen a lot of this sort of like flash loan type situation, right? Like this.

00:10:57:23 - 00:10:58:19
Bennett Tomlin
Is similar.

00:10:58:21 - 00:11:32:13
Cas Piancey
Yeah. So this isn't exactly a flash line, but the concept being like you take out a giant loan, move that money into some asset or whatever, immediately profit from that position and then pay back the loan, which is now probably valued like 1000 times less than it was originally. And you've made a bunch of money. It's taking advantage of the parameters of these different protocols and using concepts that are perceived as being good for efficient markets and making inefficient markets out of it.

00:11:33:00 - 00:11:51:15
Cas Piancey
So that's what we saw. And what what Bennett is saying is now that he controls all of these tokens, he's proposing things for the community to vote on where they pay him a certain amount of money so that he doesn't get in trouble. But also they get all their tokens back. And this is a common this is a common thing in decentralized finance.

00:11:51:15 - 00:12:19:14
Cas Piancey
Again, you have like governance based on which I mean, wow. Talk about going back to exactly the way things once were. Basically, if you have the most money, you get the most votes most of the time. This is not that's not every single dao or or defi protocol, but it certainly is most of them. And yeah, that's kind of being fully taken advantage of right now, which is a little bit funny.

00:12:19:15 - 00:12:20:17
Cas Piancey
It's just a little bit silly.

00:12:20:27 - 00:13:02:12
Bennett Tomlin
In the vein of it being a little bit silly. The Karlstack Substack Chris Brunet writing the piece revealed that they had discord messages from the person who had been planning this and then executed it. And so the attacker of the mango markets here, allegedly, Avraham Eisenberg, was not even being particularly cautious with their OPSEC or anything before engaging in this, describing like exactly what they were thinking about doing and what effects it was going to have in a discord.

00:13:02:26 - 00:13:12:23
Bennett Tomlin
And then they did it. And now they're trying to negotiate to convince no one at the door to file criminal charges against them for manipulating it.

00:13:13:08 - 00:13:31:04
Cas Piancey
Yeah, this is similar to though. This time it was. Yeah, it's the same. We've spoken about this many times. It feels like almost every week we say if you're going to do crime, try not to, like, chat it up with a bunch of people about it. Write it down in places where it can be used as evidence against you.

00:13:31:14 - 00:13:55:00
Cas Piancey
Not to say that I want to help criminals, I don't. It's just you guys are really dumb. And I feel like even this level of, Hey, don't be this fucking dumb, I need to express to you because you're making everyone else's life very easy in trying to capture you and render justice unless you want to get caught, then maybe start taking more precautions.

00:13:56:28 - 00:14:25:14
Cas Piancey
So that that's that's both of these, I guess at least ABC Hacker. We don't know who that is yet. And and it could be it could be anybody. And they they've done some level of decent, you know, operational security. But it is just it it's laughable how often this happens that they do almost no like covering their foot, their footprints and no due diligence.

00:14:25:14 - 00:14:55:11
Cas Piancey
We talked about this about North Korea and Virgil Griffith, where we specifically who also was in the news again recently. It just all of it is is is is absurd. I think total I did the math and it was something like $11 million a day has been lost in the cryptocurrency industry this year. If we average it out and someone responded to that with like and yet the credit card industry loses $70 billion a year.

00:14:55:11 - 00:15:11:24
Cas Piancey
And I was like, you know, the beauty of I didn't respond to him because I'm just exhausted by that argument. But the beauty of the not to suggest that I'm a fan of credit cards and debit cards and banks, but the beauty of those things is that you can charge back, that you can get your money back, and then it's not gone forever.

00:15:11:27 - 00:15:37:20
Cas Piancey
That $11 million a day that's being lost in the decentralized finance industry is gone. And your odds of getting it back, unless you're bringing criminal charges against somebody and you figure out exactly who it is and where they live are minimal. So I think it's apples to oranges. It's not the same fair comparison. But yeah, I guess this is $200 million hacks in roughly four or five days separated from one another.

00:15:38:02 - 00:15:46:12
Cas Piancey
It's getting to be a little bit taxing. I would say. It's it's almost like even for critics and skeptics, you just go like, oh, so another $100 million hack.

00:15:46:12 - 00:16:08:12
Bennett Tomlin
The numbers are almost like mind numbing. The mango markets hacker, though I was just referring to in the Discord when he was describing it, someone asked him or said like, unless it is highly illegal to be like, Are you sure you want to do this? And his response was, Are there rules these days? It's very tricky though, in substantial capital risk, like are there rules these days?

00:16:08:17 - 00:16:31:06
Bennett Tomlin
These things, these hacks are so commonplace and so mundane and rarely is it possible to definitively figure out who's responsible for them. And many times, like the people who created these deeply flawed things, who caused these people to lose their assets and get hurt, or then immediately back doing another one.

00:16:31:06 - 00:17:07:15
Cas Piancey
Yeah, we've seen that with Sifu or Michael pattern and pattern as we we've spoken about before. We've I mean, Joe Kwan, I was talking to Ben Munster, I forgot the Do Kwon even launched a Luna to right after. And that still exists? No, of course it does. But he he said, I don't remember who he is quoting, but the idea being that like after the failure of Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns, it would be as though those companies were like, Oh, okay, so Lehman Brothers 1.0 failed, then Bear Stearns 1.8 failed.

00:17:07:15 - 00:17:14:06
Cas Piancey
But now we're going to start Bear Stearns to point out and like no one wants that. No one wants that.

00:17:14:08 - 00:17:36:00
Bennett Tomlin
I think even more troubling than that is often when there's hacks of defi protocols, there are accusations that, again, they're very often challenging to prove that it's the developers themselves who end up often hacking these protocols. Right. Is that they who have been working on it, wells could not.

00:17:36:00 - 00:17:36:18
Cas Piancey
Who else could.

00:17:38:12 - 00:17:42:25
Bennett Tomlin
The developers of other protocols who also like read solidity and.

00:17:42:25 - 00:17:47:11
Cas Piancey
Understand that means such a small pool, such a small pool to begin with, you know.

00:17:47:21 - 00:18:11:26
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. And so like often it feels as though like they get it up to 20 million in total value locked or something and then the protocol stalls out and their token starts freefalling and no new deposits are coming in and it's slowly bleeding out. And then you'll see this protocol that you vaguely remember hearing about months and months ago, but not since suddenly get hacked in the and the developers behind it disappear.

00:18:12:02 - 00:18:15:10
Bennett Tomlin
And are they disappearing because they're ashamed? Maybe.

00:18:15:16 - 00:18:40:18
Cas Piancey
Yeah. There's also been some questions recently about like criminality in the space. I think a lot of people are suggesting that it's easier to it's easier to push the narrative that, like you were just experimenting with a protocol or whatever, whether you're a criminal hacker or whether you're a failure of a founder like Doug Juan, like how much?

00:18:40:18 - 00:19:05:22
Cas Piancey
It's almost like diff. Decentralized finance makes this significantly more difficult to prove intent. Now, I'm not sure if that's actually true. I'm not suggesting necessarily that it is harder to prove intent because I think when I look at Doug Kwan's case, for instance, it stinks of criminality. And I don't think that the South Korean law enforcement agencies are going to be fooled by him being like, what?

00:19:06:09 - 00:19:24:21
Cas Piancey
Just because I was the face of it and I made all the decisions, I'm not the one who should be prosecuted. And it's like, actually, you should. So I don't think there's I don't think there's much of a case to be made for him, but maybe there is for some of this other stuff I don't really know. And, you know, we haven't heard much from three.

00:19:25:03 - 00:19:33:16
Cas Piancey
So is it is it easier to get away nowadays with with crime? I don't know the answer to that either. That maybe that's true. Maybe it's not. I don't know.

00:19:33:20 - 00:19:47:07
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. It's just it's disappointing to see how commonplace these still are. And I think they're all the time they hurt real people. It's very hard to get the people who did them.

00:19:47:07 - 00:20:28:11
Cas Piancey
And also that's the other thing we hear a lot about is like that, you know, not your keys, not your coin. If you're going to be doing stuff in this industry like expect rug pulls, expect exit scams, these moments are going to happen. And I do like it's hard for you to feel bad for the decision makers at Celsius for putting money with three three years capital like I or for tether for becoming you know equity investors in that like I don't feel that bad for them do I feel bad for retail investors at Celsius though?

00:20:28:11 - 00:20:55:11
Cas Piancey
Like, of course I do. People who like normal people who put $50,000 their life savings into Celsius, of course they feel bad for them and I don't look at that and say like, well, I guess that's a lesson you're learning, because I think that's a really shitty way of perceiving that concept. Like shouldn't just flout it in front of retail traders, but then you wonder like how much maybe Celsius had a lot of retail, but you wonder like how much of retail.

00:20:55:24 - 00:21:20:05
Cas Piancey
And when we say retail, I guess I mean dumb retail as in and that's an unfair characterization. I say I say dumb retail meaning money that doesn't understand what it's necessarily investing in. So mango markets like like for Celsius. I know I know there's a lot of quote dumb money because it's like these people were assured a lot of of lot of things from Alex Mashinsky in the Celsius team.

00:21:20:12 - 00:21:40:08
Cas Piancey
They were promised that this was you know, that there were all this like nothing could ever happen to these investments in these these lending schemes. There was nothing that could possibly go wrong. They were assured that repeatedly, over and over and over again, that had plenty of dumb money. How much dumb money is in mango markets? Right. Like, I don't really know.

00:21:41:10 - 00:21:42:17
Cas Piancey
I doubt it's that I.

00:21:42:17 - 00:21:43:26
Bennett Tomlin
Doubt those types of dumb.

00:21:45:07 - 00:22:11:02
Cas Piancey
But. Yeah, sure. And I guess my point, I guess my point being a bit here that perhaps perhaps the dumb the quote, dumb money in or let's say retail money. Let's just say retail. Let's go back to retail. Let's call it retail money. Again, if we go back to to retail money and we suggest that there's of this $100 million that was moved off of mango markets, $100 million worth of tokens that he's off of mango markets.

00:22:11:04 - 00:22:27:04
Cas Piancey
How many of the people involved actually are just like, yeah, well, we deserve this versus the people that Celsius who I, I would assume a lot of them are like I never could have possibly seen this coming. The people that mango markets are probably more informed about the cryptocurrency industry right?

00:22:27:04 - 00:22:27:29
Bennett Tomlin
They should be.

00:22:29:28 - 00:22:35:05
Cas Piancey
I it's I guess I mean, it's hard to it's harder to use decentralized platforms in general.

00:22:35:09 - 00:23:09:18
Bennett Tomlin
Yes. There's a higher barrier to entry. Anyone who's been trading in mango markets probably had a harder time getting started than someone depositing money into Celsius to earn a yield. And so you hope that that's going to filter out more of the most vulnerable. This is part of why we got so upset about stable gains, which was like taking deposits from regular people and putting them directly into anchor right that way Combinator project because it's removing any of that filter and making it so that potentially some of the most vulnerable end up exposed to these most dangerous projects.

00:23:09:27 - 00:23:34:14
Bennett Tomlin
Because the issue is there is a tiny bit of truth in the it's an experiment, it's untested. This is new and things might go wrong, right? The nature of crypto is that it's designed, once a transaction happens, to make it very hard to reverse that transaction. And so hacks are going to have larger consequences because of that detail.

00:23:34:24 - 00:24:06:09
Bennett Tomlin
Right. And because of that, when you're deploying new financial software, if you were not really confident about each and every piece of it, there are going to be more harmful hacks, exploits and problems. That's just the nature of what cryptocurrency is. That part is true. The part that's less true is the like. There's still often like in the case of Binance Smart Chain, the issue is they had not stayed up to date with updates to the bridging system in Cosmos.

00:24:06:09 - 00:24:32:22
Bennett Tomlin
They were using an older pre compiled version because they hadn't stayed up. It had this one vulnerability in it. And so we're like, and they running this chain that's like number three in total value, locked behind Ethereum and Tron, they should be responsible enough to handle something like that. Right. And like in the case of mango markets, your work design is known, you've published it, and you can to some extent model it.

00:24:32:22 - 00:24:51:27
Bennett Tomlin
The hacker even talked about like creating models in simulations of how the Oracle worked. The people who developed mango markets should have at least as much ability to simulate some of these more stressful situations for the protocol. And so there is still just a lot of stress testing and a lot of hardening that goes undone in crypto.

00:24:52:14 - 00:25:04:12
Cas Piancey
Yeah, I mean, you've called out a lot of protocols for this. It's kind of crazy how much money gets invested in these concepts, whether it's I don't remember if it was FE There were a few. Yeah, there's fe.

00:25:04:12 - 00:25:06:09
Bennett Tomlin
Fe was where the math didn't and that.

00:25:06:26 - 00:25:17:12
Cas Piancey
That was one there was wasn't there another one more recently that you also called out that had bad math in the in the white paper. I feel like there's been two or three, but it doesn't matter. It might.

00:25:17:12 - 00:25:17:19
Bennett Tomlin
Have been.

00:25:17:21 - 00:25:36:02
Cas Piancey
There's these people are able to collect hundreds of millions or billions of dollars from venture capital, hedge funds, angel investors with unchecked, flawed white papers. None of these venture capitalists know how to look at that stuff and read it like it was.

00:25:36:02 - 00:25:44:03
Bennett Tomlin
It was a theory. And prog pow Justin Sun's work for Give It Theory. Their white paper was blank. They had no way they're right.

00:25:44:03 - 00:26:04:15
Cas Piancey
And so if we think about that and maybe we're seeing the end of that now, like maybe that was the easy money cryptocurrency industry. Like everything's exploding in value. It's so easy. You can literally have a blank white paper and collect hundreds of millions of dollars type of thing. Maybe those days are now behind us, hopefully, but I doubt it.

00:26:04:29 - 00:26:33:15
Cas Piancey
I think these exploits and hacks are a great example of it's like more than not your keys, not your coins. It's showing the world that to really if you really want to be if you want to be on top of dealing with cryptocurrency and holding your coins all the time, you have to be like technically savvy. You have to code, you have to know how to read code.

00:26:33:15 - 00:26:56:07
Cas Piancey
You have to know what changes are being made, when and how they could affect you. Because ultimately, when $100 million or 500 possibly million dollars could be moved off this chain, if you have a bunch of money in that, the value of your money could depreciate significantly just because you didn't know about this hack, this exploit that could be taken advantage of.

00:26:57:00 - 00:27:22:18
Cas Piancey
So I think it's showing like another level of this that we've never really discussed, which is how difficult it it is to actually be protected like in any of these coins, unless you are completely fluent when it comes to programing and coding and all of that. And I mean, the reality is I'm not I'm not that I couldn't I couldn't possibly like confirm I'm trusting code if I buy Bitcoin, right.

00:27:22:18 - 00:27:50:12
Cas Piancey
I'm not I don't own Bitcoin to clarify everybody. But like when I bought Bitcoin in 2017, I read the whitepaper and thought it was cool. I looked at the charts and was like, Oh, this is interesting. I had no conceptual concept of like, Yeah, no concept of like, what is if I, if I go deep into this code, will I find any errors or whatever I couldn't have possibly told you that.

00:27:51:10 - 00:28:13:14
Cas Piancey
And I think that's most people who are involved in this industry. And yeah, like I couldn't, I couldn't still couldn't tell you what the what exactly happened with like the the bridge hack for, for Binance and Cosmos Binance, Smart Chain and Cosmos. I couldn't tell you what the Flash loan type procedure was for mango markets and the governance tokens and all of this stuff.

00:28:13:23 - 00:28:23:06
Cas Piancey
No. And that's like such a crazy, difficult nuance that most people are not going to be willing. It's like having to learn a language.

00:28:23:18 - 00:28:44:10
Bennett Tomlin
It's like be you are your own bank, your own bank, CEO, CTO, Chief Security Officer, Chief Informatics Officer And you are like the head of the exchange monitoring and the you're also the analyst for pricing all the assets and yeah, so that's just all you have fun. Yeah.

00:28:44:20 - 00:29:00:17
Cas Piancey
Yeah, right. And I've, you know, people have purchased ledgers or hardware wallets and these are things that you think are like, well, that's secure, right? But then it's like then there's plenty of exploits in regard to those as well. And we've seen complete doxing of what was a ledger.

00:29:02:00 - 00:29:05:11
Bennett Tomlin
Ledger leaked to their whole customer base, so or get hacked or whatever.

00:29:05:11 - 00:29:33:20
Cas Piancey
So I think you can't so hard to be again like we talk about the niche use cases of cryptocurrency and I think those still exist, but the niche keeps getting niche here and niche year and not niche or although maybe that too anyway, I think that's going to do it. We just wandered into $200 million. I don't want to talk about how that happened.

00:29:34:05 - 00:29:52:19
Cas Piancey
If you leave a like subscribe comment, we'll pass you some B.S. tokens and bingo market tokens. We'll throw them your way. Not I mean, we will throw cryptocurrency your way. I shouldn't have been that specific about which tokens we were going to give you, but we're very happy to have found this money and to be able to support ourselves.

00:29:53:07 - 00:30:09:27
Cas Piancey
If you can, you can hit that like and subscribe and it'll make our lives easier because we can get rid of some of this cache that we've stumbled into, these hundreds of millions of dollars. Sorry. I'm getting word that. Okay, Bennett, I won't. No problem. I won't mention that we can cut that right out.

00:30:10:03 - 00:30:13:19
Bennett Tomlin
You're going to have your own red notice soon.