You won't hear about this on the TV
Imagine a scenario where a hacker successfully steals money or stocks from some financial institution or maybe from hacking credit cards. A hacker stole $1.5 million in the total value of money. A scenario like this would potentially end up discussed on TV or some major media outlets. Imagine the headlines "Malicious hacker steals funds from a bank" or "Hacker stole money from the people" etc. That definitely would be some news. Stories like this have happened in the past and are still happening.
A great example is the Lazarus group story. The hacking group from North Korea tried to steal over 1Billions dollars but managed to "only" steal $81M. Darknet Diaries had a great episode about that.
But what if told you hacks for a similar amount of money are happening more often than you think, and almost nobody from major media outlets is talking about it?
From a blockthreat report 2020 year in a review post.
The year 2020 was filled with almost weekly news of DeFi exploits, occasional exchange and blockchain hacks, user account compromises with a total monetary loss of around $500M.
$500M loss...probably if we took all the scams and Ponzi schemes into this evaluation, that number would be much higher. In DeFi alone last year, around $230M was stolen. $230M. Let those numbers sink in for a while. If such hacks had been happening to traditional financial institutions, you wouldn't be able to stop hearing about it on the TV.
Yesterday (on the day of writing this post), Uranium Finance was exploited for around $51 million. That's the most considerable exploits of this year in DeFi, and counting all the hacks/exploits since the beginning of this year, we're already around $160M in hacked funds. And we're not even in the middle of the year.
Why is nobody talking about it?
I think the reason is quite simple. It's all happening in the crypto space, and not so many people understand it. Why talk about some magic, internet money, and the fact people are stealing large amounts when we can talk about some more to the ground problems? For many years narrative on the TV when it came to crypto, mostly bitcoin for obvious reasons, was only used for criminal activities and people buying drugs and other illegal things online. Look at 2013-2017, and you will only hear something like that.
It's hard to excite people about something they don't understand. The same thing was with the internet in the 90s.
The same level of understanding is for crypto and blockchain nowadays. Apart from the ones already in the crypto space, not so many people truly understand what blockchain is, cryptocurrency, and a DeFi.
Another vital thing to notice in that interview is how the internet has evolved. You wouldn't have described the internet like that today. It has changed a lot, and back then, people had some ideas about how it would look in the future, but probably not many would have guessed that exact future. Smartphones weren't a thing, and that helped redefine our relationship with the internet also.
I'm always saying blockchain is in the same place as the internet was in the late 90s. After the dot com bubble bursting, everybody has thought it will be an end, but few companies stayed on the surface. Amazon, Google, eBay, Paypal, Yahoo etc. We know these are the ones right now and have stayed with us as they offered an actual value in their products. People wanted to use them. I think the same is going to happen to the blockchain space and is already happening. First major companies and applications are rising that I think going to stay with us, like Uniswap for example. DeFi going to go mainstream. NFT is the first thing that received so much attention apart from the blockchain space. We're already going through a few crypto bubbles, and that only made the space stronger.
We're constantly evolving, and it's hard to predict what's going to be next for blockchain and crypto in the next ten years. But even if a major crypto bubble will burst, it's only going to make us stronger, and maybe we will be able to go fully mainstream.
That's the Day 4 of #100daysofblogging challange. 96 Days to go!