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Comment by gillesjacobs | Hacker News Reader

That's an issue with all cryptocurrency infrastructure though: projects need to be proven to demonstrate robust value and it's probably one of the most adversarial spaces in software. History has shown that hacks and exploits of projects hurt the price of the native taken but do not really damage the long-term earned trust.

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Exactly this, it's a very adversarial environment with huge stakes for those that can exploit it. Even projects that have been around for months, years can get exploited which is why I'd recommend waiting a long time before putting non-trivial amounts into any smart contract or crypto related projects.

That's also a big plus for Bitcoin, because it's been around the longest and because it's so much simpler than more complex chains like eth, it's as secure as it gets.

> That's also a big plus for Bitcoin, because it's been around the longest and because it's so much simpler than more complex chains

I’ve always understood this on a basic level, but reading an entire exploit debrief with intricate technical details really hammered this point home for me.

A simple exploit is that somebody got ahold of a wealthy person's private key, isn't it?

Are the stakes that huge for potential exploiters? It seems that exploits can write off a bunch of value from the exploited but, at least for big and quickly noticed exploits, it is hard to launder the gains into the ‘legitimate’ part of the ecosystem with big exchanges and suchlike.

I think last year alone had more than a billion dollars worth of crypto hacked on defi, there's some trackers out there [1]. On one hand, you have amateurs that leave their private keys on cloud services and try to cash out while living in a place like NYC, on the other hand, you have people who know what they are doing or perhaps live in places that actively encourage those activities [2].

1: https://cryptosec.info/defi-hacks/

2: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59990477

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