Koin "Hacked" By GPU Mining!
Some industrious Koin miner figured out how to GPU mine Koin and is now pretty much scooping most of the inflation / reward pool. This actually wouldn't have been so bad if the announcement of this in the Discord channel didn't begin with "maybe we'll restart" coming from the lead dev.
Even with all the money going to one person, they were dumping the Uniswap pool, making Koin pretty relatively decentralized. Now that the Koin dev team has caused an EXTREME panic, massive dumping occurred. I was part of it. I'm not getting burned on a second Uniswap pool in a row. I'm out. You guys fucked up.
Freeze the contract?
Now apparently the dev team for Koin has stopped working on the project and is trying to develop a GPU miner to hack their own algorithm. Unfortunately for them, the person that hacked their algorithm is likely x100 times better at doing something like that than the Koinos dev team.
I'm not sure if contract creators can unilaterally freeze the contract... I know they can freeze the Uniswap pool. Whatever, I'm not going to speculate anymore. I'm out.
Why CPU mining?
Traditionally CPU mining usually get hacked by a GPU exploit. It's to be expected. I think a lot of people didn't expect it here because it was only a 6 month mine. Think again, I guess.
Had we started with GPU mining, the only thing faster is pretty much ASIC machines. Seeing as developing ASIC machines for a 6 month mine would have an extremely prohibitive overhead cost (impossible) perhaps we should have just opened with GPU mining and called it a day. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Doesn't matter now.
Conclusion
The GPU hack didn't ruin this project. The response to the GPU hack ruined it. Uniswap was on the brink of taking the #1 spot on the richlist. If that's not decentralization I don't know what is. The panic caused in Discord by the dev team ruined any chance for a decentralized distribution. Starting over ruins the distribution and destroys all confidence of the people who were buying, mining/holding. Trying to navigate this current clusterfuck as is won't help either. Rock & Hard Place: FUBAR.
When your entire opening distribution depends on an algorithm that is GPU resistant... maybe make sure it can't get hacked in 5 days... and if it does get hacked have a backup plan. Zero plan, infinite panic.
I'm trying not to be salty about this situation, but it's tough. It might not be a total loss. There still seems to be some buying pressure on Uniswap, but I have little faith that this isn't simply a few individuals willing to take the risk to buy this extreme dump. The Uniswap pool is a lot more centralized today than it was yesterday due to the panic that was allowed to set in.
If anything all this bad luck with Uniswap pools has made me want to work on my own project more. I think I'll get to it before I anger myself more about all this other bullshit.
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Lol so koinos starts off with a ninja mine go figure! I guess they jusy going to have one big ass market maker dumping in intervals not much they. Can do even with going GPU how many of these retail miners are going to opt in? The whole attraction was that it can be done ina CPU
I wouldn’t say the project is dead I’d just say it will have shitty distribution once it finally launches, same like any project! Lol in hindsight they might as well have mined the coins themsleves and jusy did a basic bitch airdrop
Here's the problem... the distribution might not be so bad... it might even be pretty good. It's kinda like a regular ICO.
Except in this scenario instead of the ICO funds going to the dev team it goes to a random miner that hacked the algo... so... that doesn't work obviously.
Another scam - it's sad / I lost, though not very large, but the last money - There is no more trust in any project on Hive - I'm sorry for the time spent!
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Live & Learn
Huh Koin wasn't on hive though.
Tru Dat, but even if Tribes blows up tomorrow, that ain't Hive.
Not a scam. A fuckup.
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and the cost of ETH are destroy and your losses all this is sad man.
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These hacks have been coming in lately, I guess number one measure was to not spread FUD. i guess they didn't know it would get hacked this early and quickly.
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Yes, I would have frozen the contract immediately to give some time to figure shit out.
Not saying that's the best solution but... probably better than what happened.
Yeah that's probably what they could have done. Hopefully that can still salvage it, I mean
this is not a "hack". If the provided solutions for the PoW algorithms in place are valid, there is nothing wrong with calculating them in any way a miner wants to. The work is done and proven, that is how PoW works.
Using a quantum computer to produce a BTC block in a few seconds calculation time would be no "hack", either. A "hack" would be to use the same quantum computer to factor old bitcoin 1xxxxx address' keys and sign a transaction stealing Satoshi's BTC 😀
I was thinking yesterday that I should try to rewrite the algorithm to use GPU, it seems someone was faster.
Hmm, what does this reminds me of... Oh right, STEEM. Restarted mining and failed fair distribution of supply.
Fuck, last time I was on here was all "Uniswap, you got some more of that shi?!" and now..
Bloody hell! I haven't been in the KOIN Discord for a couple of days and all hell breaks loose - this is what happens when I turn my back for a moment 😆
Well, that sucks that some sort of "exploit" was found but saying they will restart it all again, after a lot of regular people got involved with CPU mining from the beginning and spending their ETH...? That's a let down and a half!
Do you know if there's a way to get the ETH out of the miner? We all had to have a seed phrase so I imagine it's possible to do on MEW?
This was going to be my first mine attempt, but I pulled out when I saw that one miner had taken 30% (at the time) of the pool. Seemed all too familiar.
"Steemed" all too familiar
"Oh hey, the kichen is on fire!!"
Let's just burn the house down and make a new one on the foundation...
interesting read buyer beware as always do your research
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And that's coming from former Steem employees...(?)
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Have a suitable algorithm go through all Hive accounts to find a list of ones to airdrop the token to. Surprise everyone by announcing that the accounts in the list are entitled to claiming their tokens. Problem solved.
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I suppose this and the WLEO incident both shows how getting in early can be very rewarding, but at the same time a great risk.
Hopefully we, as a community, will learn from all of these cases and improve on the processes to make contracts safer in the future.
As Janet Fitch put it, “The phoenix must burn to emerge.”
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It turned out to be false alarm. There is no GPU Koin mining, yet.
If it was a bastardization of SHA3, it was only a matter of time to be prone to exploitation. I feel like they thought their wallet software was enough of a barrier to entry for mining. Could they have built more fairness into the ethereum smart contract side of things if anything, such as capped distribution based on various parameters? Maybe have the wallet pull a pki cert or something...
Yeah, it was really frustrating! I mined 2500 KOINS in the first few days but then it stopped. And if they cancel this token, I'll have some losses because selling also doesn't feel right. What if something happens and they go up?
Anyway - it was an interesting experience and a worthy lesson!
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I just shut mine down. That is really too bad. I wish I had been a day or two earlier, but oh well it seems none of it matters now anyway.
Ha that was a fun remake.
Reminds me of the CPU mining of Steem back in the summer of '16. First someone figured out how to fake the mining to gather most of the rewards. Then when the Steem team fixed that, someone actually made a private GPU miner and grabbed all the mining rewards. So they killed mining rewards altogether. It didn't last 6 months either.
haha, when this new shittoken appeared on my feed the first time, I wrote that I won't waste my time or electricity with it. The reason was not that it was marketed GPU-proof, but that the whitepaper sucked in my opinion by failing to answer the basic question "why would I like to have a stake in it". It read like an ICO-era like money grab adapted to the DEFI!!! age.
IF you start a new coin in 2020, please provide a use case. "Defi!!!" is no usecase. And employing POW for an ERC20 token is a concept that need some explaining. Why would one want that? A use case would for example be "proof of useful work" like solving distributed.net tasks, folding@home tasks or something similar. But this already exists in Grid computing, on serious hardware, with serious scientists on serious funding.
using mining in 2020 for initial distribution is peak amateur hour
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So early on in the mining, already a big drama. And indeed, this was caused by the statement: "Restart is a consideration". After that statement by the KOINOS team, the team stopped further communication, which resulted in even more worry about the whole mining thing. The good news, as we know it by now (well since monday night CET/GMT), the KOINOS team dont think a GPU miner is active. I actually think the KOINOS team and mining community scared each other more and more, without doing in-depth analyses. Sure, some mining farms are part of the game with performance much much higher than the fastest laptops around, but that was to be expected. I stoped mining last Monday, but was planning to stop last weekend already. I had more energy and fee costs than the value of KOIN on the Uniswap. No point then to mine further, at least not for me. I'll take an investor approach now, and use Uniswap to buy instead of mine. When large mining farms continue to sell their tokens, decentralisation may become larger than could've expected by the KOINOS team. What we need to do though is to bring KOIN to the attention tof a much wider community. Though the hick-ups by the KOINOS team so early on in the mining project, I continue to believe in their ability to deliver the tech as they promise, making KOIN an very interesting token. But as we all know in crypto space, nothing is guaranteed. At this stage we just know a high level concept and the names of the KOINOS team members.
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I bought about 5 ETH worth of Koin and was super stoked. Then I quickly sold most of it before it completely lost its value as it dumped like crazy. Got about 2.35 ETH back. I am not at all happy.