Dan Held shared: I’m hearing that over 200M dollars’ worth of NFTs has been stolen from Open-Sea via an email phishing hack. Wow.

Good time to remind everyone that private keys management is super tricky. Be extremely cautious with your hot wallet. Check links, check signatures, don’t rush into doing something.

Should have noted *been stolen from open-sea customers, not open-sea itself via phishing* and looks like the attack is closer to 3-4M dollars.

Community Response:

If they’re non-fungible and provably stolen, can’t new ones be minted to replace them and everyone just acknowledge the old ones are fake? Or does theft of a non-fungible thing add to its value?

Kind of sexy to think we can null stolen goods and wipe out black markets on a blockchain. Questioning the assumptions is The Way.

That’s 0% sexy. Completely defeats having a blockchain.

So integrity trumps safe to use and the possible eradication of illegal markets?

There is no point in using a blockchain if you can do that. There is a trusted third party that can step in.

What if it’s developed in the coding and origination of the NFT? A trigger that if said good is stolen generates the authenticated version and nulls the previous hot version? Untraceable theft is block chain’s Achilles Heel in pursuit of mass adoption.

The entire value of blockchain is its ability to be trustless and permissionless. If you want to centralize power to the creator of something on a blockchain don’t do it on a blockchain. If you don’t trust yourself to self-custody assets safely, buy other forms of assets.

Respect your position but to the layman (me, mass adopters) this feudal live-and-die by the sword way of thinking might be blockchain’s fatal flaw. What digital CAN do that IRL assets can’t do could be the way to widespread adoption and blockchain success? Just saying.

It can’t be trustless and be trusted. There is no in-between.

But why absolutes when the users are human and fallible? Why be so punishing to victims in this space?

And by the way, there ARE in-betweens. You give custody to your crypto & NFTs to centralized powers like Coinbase. You can get insurance on that crypto. You can relinquish the self-custody /sovereignty of your assets without removing the only reason for blockchains to exist.

We’ll probably hear the same thing from other firms soon too.

Best to get a hardware wallet, like a ledger. Also to disconnect all the sites in Metamask. Revoke all contracts on Snowtrace.

Getting a Ledger is great advice, but why disconnect MetaMask? Every person who was robbed had entered into a shady agreement on their own accord. Please pay attention when working with crypto. Be slow and fastidious.

Can’t the address that stole the NFTS be tracked just like the Bitcoin address that was responsible for the big Bitcoin theft, making everything that was stolen worthless?

Closer to $4-$5m.

Is that because the value of a stolen NFT is 0? Or did the NFT market decrease from 200M to 2M between the hack and the tweet lol.

Good thing NFTs aren’t real and can just be reissued?

Good thing I lost $4500 on worthless jpegs, go ahead and steal them. I learned a valuable lesson and have a tax loss. Don’t buy something anyone can right-click save as and have an exact binary duplicate, no matter what the narrative is.

I find it funny how people say NFTs are worthless to discredit the space, then the same people attribute value to them when there’s a hack to discredit the space. So which is it? Value, no value, or to discredit the space irrespective of views on value?

They put a value on how much the customers paid for them and how much they have lost to the thief in real dollar value. Even if these NFTs have no intrinsic value, the former owners have still spent real money to buy them. Money that they now can’t use anymore in the real economy.