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RE: Crypto exchange accidentally sends user $35 million on $127 withdrawal
Yea it wasn't entire clear how or why it happened. Just something to do with an automated process they were using.
Yea it wasn't entire clear how or why it happened. Just something to do with an automated process they were using.
Maybe it was simple case of integer underflow... You put negative number and it wraps to positive number due to some systems silently ignoring sign bit instead of returning an error... I was once asked in our own system why one exchange got really big number returned when they tried to send an transaction... I had to calculate the binary version of the number on paper because the number was too big for my computer to understand... when I finally got the number converted to binary, it was really long stream of 1's... essentially part of the code returned -1 but it couldn't show it as that part of the system wasn't designed to print negative numbers.
Could be. The news article didn't really elaborate what happened exactly. Just that it was an automated process gone awry.
As a developer and software designer myself, I can guess what could have been the cause. It's very common to just write minimal verification for user input to reduce complexity of the code in favor of getting fastest possible execution speed.
I don't know a thing about programming, guess we learn new things every day.
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I've been a programmer for 35 years and I still learn new things every day...