“Daryl” was an ETH user who fat-fingered a transaction. Went online for help, guest said sorry, nothing anyone can do. Then later guest went o shit maybe there is.
Daryl was playing with uniswap, a smart contract letting people provide liquidity for exchanging crypto, e.g. ETH for USDC. Normally when providing liquidity you’d do two things in one transaction, with something like a try/catch letting you do them atomically. I guess Daryl had only done one of them? Anyway, his money was just sitting there, and as soon as anyone tried to take their liquidity from uniswap they’d get Daryl’s money as well.
Guest realized this and went to check, and the money was still there. But! He also remembered stories of generalized ETH frontrunners. These will examine the pending transactions, see if there’s something in there they can use to make money, and if so, submit their own transaction with a higher fee so it gets executed first. Guest worried that one of these would show up if he tried to recover the money. He asked on a group chat if others would also be worried, some of them were, and they got together to try to figure something out.
Ultimately they’d need to do some kind of obfuscation so that a bot wouldn’t try the thing they were doing. They settled on two separate transactions in one block, where the second one wouldn’t do anything unless the first had already happened, hoping bots would only try them separately. But there’s stuff set up to protect you from making transactions that don’t do anything, and it was stopping them from making the second.
Guest was tired and stressed and the money might disappear at any minute, so eventually Guest said YOLO we’ll do them in two different blocks and hope. The second transaction got front-ran and they lost the money. On the plus side his worries were vindicated.
Guest and Adam (host) discuss Meditations on Moloch. The thing they take away from it is that you need regulation/Leviathan. Guest says for Hobbes the Leviathan was hereditary monarchy, recently we’ve been trying democracy and that seems better overall, but he’s optimistic that smart contracts will be another solution.
Corecursive (2 May 2021): Etherium Rescue
“Daryl” was an ETH user who fat-fingered a transaction. Went online for help, guest said sorry, nothing anyone can do. Then later guest went o shit maybe there is.
Daryl was playing with uniswap, a smart contract letting people provide liquidity for exchanging crypto, e.g. ETH for USDC. Normally when providing liquidity you’d do two things in one transaction, with something like a try/catch letting you do them atomically. I guess Daryl had only done one of them? Anyway, his money was just sitting there, and as soon as anyone tried to take their liquidity from uniswap they’d get Daryl’s money as well.
Guest realized this and went to check, and the money was still there. But! He also remembered stories of generalized ETH frontrunners. These will examine the pending transactions, see if there’s something in there they can use to make money, and if so, submit their own transaction with a higher fee so it gets executed first. Guest worried that one of these would show up if he tried to recover the money. He asked on a group chat if others would also be worried, some of them were, and they got together to try to figure something out.
Ultimately they’d need to do some kind of obfuscation so that a bot wouldn’t try the thing they were doing. They settled on two separate transactions in one block, where the second one wouldn’t do anything unless the first had already happened, hoping bots would only try them separately. But there’s stuff set up to protect you from making transactions that don’t do anything, and it was stopping them from making the second.
Guest was tired and stressed and the money might disappear at any minute, so eventually Guest said YOLO we’ll do them in two different blocks and hope. The second transaction got front-ran and they lost the money. On the plus side his worries were vindicated.
Guest and Adam (host) discuss Meditations on Moloch. The thing they take away from it is that you need regulation/Leviathan. Guest says for Hobbes the Leviathan was hereditary monarchy, recently we’ve been trying democracy and that seems better overall, but he’s optimistic that smart contracts will be another solution.