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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> The team behind the protocol also promised legal action and requested that hackers return stolen assets.

Legal action? By who? A central authority!? No way...

No one wants to pay taxes / be regulated, but do want the government to enforce law&order on.. everyone else

Keep in mind that previous attacks like this were dealt with by simple hard forks ie. current ethereum vs ethereum classic.

If the federal government mandates their citizens pay taxes on crypto, it most definitely should come with federal help in catching criminals.

Which federal government? The whole point is that these are assets that are not tied to any country.

The country you reside in may tax you non-state-currency assets, like selling a painting. But if a painting is stolen around the world at the same time, many governments may have collected taxes on part of that painting. Which government should be the government to persue the theft?

In a different way, if 600 million USD was stolen in cash in France. The US would work closely with the French government to close that case. The US would not be the one to foot the entire bill of solving the case.

Here no government has any real stake or harm to reputation to close the case.

Both sides of a theft are ppl, which are resident of some country.

But which country is it enforced? The one where the thief resides or the one where the victim resides?

Assuming you can find the thief and assuming the victim even wants to talk to the authorities about how they got it in the first place.

Yes but cryptobros want to have it both ways.. 1) It's not a security so it doesnt need to be regulated 2) But also if something bad happens the law should save me

Do the police get involved if someone steals your sword in WoW? Do they get involved if a bigger Twitter account "steals" your meme and reposts it without attribution?

> If the federal government mandates their citizens pay taxes on crypto, it most definitely should come with federal help in catching criminals.

Not necessarily. The OP is pretty light on details on what this "hack" was, but if this was the case of someone playing "code is law" games with a flawed smart contract, then I think it'd be totally legitimate for the government to require taxes be paid but not swoop in with law enforcement when someone made a bad deal (i.e. had their flawed contract exploited).

Bitcoin fixes this

This is... good for bitcoin?

Few

don't tell that to cryptofanatics they'll spin into orbit

Strange how when the going gets tough, many cryptocurrency enthusiasts revert to statist inventions and conventions

I remember when the crypto market tanked and the fine folks on r/cryptocurrency were demanding the SEC shut down Bitmex and arrest its CEO.

Seems that at any given time, rugged crypto individualists are 10 percentage point losses from begging Big Daddy Government to step in.

> Seems that at any given time, rugged crypto individualists are 10 percentage point losses from begging Big Daddy Government to step in.

People are typically "rugged individualists" only so long as they feel they're winning from the system.

It's funny, this is in many ways exactly the same thing that corporations try to achieve over and over again: reap the profits if they are there and externalize the costs. Of course crypto isn't any different. But if designed properly they've closed the door on this and that makes badly implemented crypto far worse than the alternatives, because the whole reason to exist is the lack of recourse.

Because the project was not very well known, or known at all, outside China and it looks like an insider job, I would say in China by Chinese authority.

So you're advocating for decentralize financial systems but a centralize legal system? How do you reconcile that?

I am not advocating, I am speculating what could likely happen. The Poly project seems to be obscure, low quality, so maybe it’s better for investors and users to lose what they had, so they can be smarter next time?

Also it seems the project was not very decentralised if everything was stolen with a single private key.

A project worth 600million usd is obscure?

Those are two different institutions right? I don't see the immediate conflict that you are supposing must be reconciled. Can you elaborate?

Probably dozens of defi hacks since 2019 and no arrests . Good luck with that

There are all sorts of people working in this space with a variety of beliefs like any other industry. They're not all crypto-anarcho-capitalists.

But the entire premise of decentralized finance is to have no central authority, is it not?

Just because there is no central authority in control of crypto transactions like traditional banks does not mean laws and courts no longer exist. You can steal someone’s bitcoins by hacking their wallet but you can still be ordered by a court to pay it back and/or face jail time.

Thank God for real world centralized authority.

I think what the "centralised authority" steal from the people every year will put the all the crypto theft till now, combined, to shame.

> does not mean laws and courts no longer exist. You can steal someone’s bitcoins by hacking their wallet but you can still be ordered by a court to pay it back and/or face jail time.

I'm not aware of any court that would, for example, jail a Chinese citizen who stole virtual money of a US citizen? Are you?

If judges have the last word on who owns how many bitcoins why are you wasting all that electricity for? I thought it was to avoid relying on an authority...

My understanding is that decentralization helps avoid things like runaway inflation or banks deciding at will how much money they want to siphon off each transaction. If you are stealing someone else’s money, a court is not going to dismiss charges just because the transaction is not reversible according to the protocol of whatever cryptocurrency you used.

Decentralisation doesn't help with inflation, it only makes everything more expensive due to the extravagant cost of the consensus mechanism. Banks are already decentralised (should be obvious since there are many banks, not just one) and competition among banks is what prevents them from charging high fees.

Everyone wants no central authorities until they're being enslaved by their regional warlord.

Everyone wants central authorities until their money is incessantly devalued and squandered through cronyism and waste.

No central authority within the system. Treating the hacked crypto as stolen property to report to a central authority who can use the threat of physical violence is not incongruent with the current defi system. Its a false dichotomy presented by those naive to the pros and cons of all this.

Ideally governance would also be done in a decentralized manner, but we’re not there yet.

It's completely incongruent. The whole point of "decentralized" is to avoid relying on a central authority, and the price to pay is inefficiency. But if you're relying on a central authority anyway, why be inefficient?

Physical matter is decentralized but that doesn't give you a right to steal someone's gold without legal action.

Decentralized systems have different benefits for different people. For instance, some people like to trade 24 hours without corporate middlemen stopping you from trading at night. That's not the same as avoiding legal authority.

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