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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, while some are quoting a "single line of code", the article is actually using some even stranger information:

> "Mr. Wang created this back door by inserting a single number into millions of lines of code [emphasis mine] for the exchange, creating a line of credit from FTX to Alameda, to which customers did not consent," [FTX lawyer Andrew Dietderich] added. "And we know the size of that line of credit. It was $65 billion."

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$65B seems oddly specific - could it be that they just set the liquidation limit for Alameda's account to 65,535 (max 16bit unsigned int), in millions of dollars?

It feels more likely that he just chose $65B rather than an exchange using unsigned 16 bit integers to do accounting.

This is FTX, remember.

This is less of a "haha FTX so dumb" and more of a "how could that possibly ever hang together for 2 years??"

Nah, seems like they'd be more likely to use floats for accounting.

Not quite the worst use for floats, bad though that would be.

I've received a few SMSes over the pandemic that used a float for their caller ID.

Not sure why the German Federal government chose to identify itself as "+4.4786E+11" when welcoming me into the country (actually me switching my UK SIM card to no-longer-Airplane-mode) and telling me to quarantine and test.

I recently recieved an email from Phillips (re CPAP recall) which said "In the meantime, your device registration confirmation number is 2.02xxxxE+15." [some digits obscurred by me, although they dropped some of the trailing digits].

a 16 bit unsigned integer with a unit of a million dollars, a very odd choice indeed

Pretty sure their whole stack was in Python

Their tech team almost exclusively came from Jane Street, wouldn’t it be OCaml?

OCaml still wouldn't have 16 bit ints.

Uint8.t ;)

Reading between the lines (and pattern matching), my interpretation is it’s likely a line that prevents balances going below zero. The number was an account number which was exempted from that particular check.

The $65B figure probably leads somewhere else and sounds like it would be counting bitcoins which peaked at over $65k per coin.

If there was some other limit that prevented his balance from falling below -$1M BTC, then Alameda “had access to” over $65B in credit (in October 2021)

It must have been an existing boolean flag he set to true, allowSecret65BillionDollarBackdoor

Maybe some specific accounts were hard-coded to have credit lines of certain amounts, and they just changed the one for Alameda from 0 (or whatever) to 65 billion.

Not uncommon for a startup to hack features into code directly before there's a db column and frontend to support updating values through an admin interface.

we're also basing a lot off a reporter's interpretation. Inserting a value into the database by hand would probably have similar effects and still be "programming".

This is very likely a big factor. It could very possibly just be embellishment, as well.

> inserting a single number into millions of lines of code

So basically a clean npm install.

Absolutely lulzy to think of cranking out millionssss of lines of code in the ~2 years FTX existed.

I feel like it's safe to say the bulk of that was generated, and/or they're including all code imported as vendored dependencies

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