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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

All fully-automated crypto platforms have an automatic bug bounty the size of the platform built in. This kind of thing happens regularly.

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Hackers are just tech debt collectors.

* Not my joke. It was a co-worker's.

That's a great line.

and now it's mine

That's an interesting point. I suppose we will find that any DeFi platform that survives for a decade or two will have some of the highest quality software in the world. It's survival of the fittest code.

That's how the coins themselves seem to be viewed to some extent as well.

Price of Bitcoin will continue to rise as each year people figure out that, if someone can hack wallets, they're not doing it widespread enough for it to be a concern to the average bear, pun intended.

I think the underlying protocols of the big name crypto like BTC, ETH, etc... are relatively robust - I don't think anyone is doubting those. I think the thing in doubt is the complex applications running in the application space of currencies that support such functionality. These applications can often be nearly as as the underlying protocol with much looser requirements around testing!

> It's survival of the fittest code.

That codebase has a name: it's called Bitcoin.

No discernable hackage seen in the wild for the better part of the last 7-ish years.

And the incentive to find one grows exponentially with time.

Bitcoin isn't relevant here - it isn't DeFi nor is it unique in being the only unhacked cryptocurrency.

And yet people lose money to bitcoin-related hacks all the time.

Also intresting to see that do these Defi platforms start bring formal proofs and other pretty academic stuff to actual every day development.

It really is a whole new class of software I think - trustless software that is also "open source" and holds billions of dollars of value is the sort of thing where formal proofiness starts to look reasonable.

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