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Comment by rawtxapp | Hacker News Reader

How many bugs had a direct financial return in the same way? If you found a bug in maker (or any of the other big contracts) today, you can walk away with billions of dollars worth of coins, that's a huge sum.

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Major bugs in smart contracts can cause the system to stop working rather than handing anyone billions. As such people can discover such issues without disclosing them in much the way infrastructure can be vulnerable without people damaging it.

The Parity wallet bug from 2017 is the classic example so far, where someone who was just messing around with the smart contract 'accidentally' locked up $280m in assets[1]. I've linked to the GitHub thread below...this person didn't get anything from the exploit, and it wasn't for street cred (they deleted their account).

https://github.com/openethereum/parity-ethereum/issues/6995#...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-have-froz...

Even being able to grind a smart contract to a halt would be very profitable if you shorted it right beforehand.

Even then you are limited things to people who are willing to break the law and have a giant sign pointing them as a likely culprit.

I mean people short crypto all the time, averaged over a long enough period of time long/short ratios are roughly ~50/50 [1]. It's normal market behavior. And if you're shorting one of the big ones, you can most likely do it on defi without even providing a name.

1: https://www.bybt.com/LongShortRatio

Let’s assume something like 100 people have very large* short positions on a system that goes down. Dropping the possibility from X,000,000,000 to 100 is quite a big deal.

*very large being required for significant money to be at stake, making say 10k illegally from a short is hardly going to inspire a lot of effort.

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