NEW ATTACK: 4,000 Bitcoin Stolen OVERNIGHT??? Are You Affected? | EP 1586

Nico Moran (0:02)

A new Bitcoin hack has drained 4,000 Bitcoin overnight worth over $300 million.

And what's suspicious about the timing of this new exploit is the fact, of course, that it comes only five weeks after the record-breaking $130 million cold-card hardware wallet exploit. And really, it's probably more that the Bitcoin price didn't even flinch on the news. It's just doing its own thing. But this is a brand new exploit that broke yesterday. So we don't have all the information yet, but I'll do my best to try to explain who and or what was affected and what this means for Bitcoin moving forward. So, guys, what's Nico always say? It's never boring in Bitcoin. Well, hey, this might actually be the worst bear market ever in terms of sentiment. I think that's confirmed now. And of course, in terms of the exploits, we didn't really see the capitulation, but it's been pretty brutal for everyone involved in Bitcoin. So anyways, what am I talking about?

I think this might have been the first tweet that really kind of highlighted what happened. And it was ergo BTC. And it goes liquid got got. We saw a liquid peg out transaction of 4,000 or 400 or 420,000 Bitcoin and the hacker, there was an op return message and the hacker basically said, we are white hats, contact us on change. So it wasn't at least while we had this ongoing information yesterday, it wasn't a hacker, someone attacking and stealing that Bitcoin. It looked like it was a white hat, someone that is essentially was looking into the code. And did this preemptively so that hackers weren't able to exploit the code. Now, going further, of course, same message. It was a Lightning, or sorry, Liquid Network Bridge that was exploited. And the timing is suspicious just in terms of this ongoing, as everyone's been calling it, token wars or really using AI to exploit code, you know, critically important code. And there is another kind of suspicious timing of all this. So apparently ChatGBT launched ChatGBT6, aka Astra, a few days ago. And now we see this happening with Liquid. So it looks, again, we don't have all the information, but it looks like the hackers were out there. You know, we had the Infamix Red team that were doing very good response after the cold card exploit. We also had Bitcoin Loop from Block doing something very similar. But it looks as if we are still, as I said was going to happen, in this phase right now where everyone is using the latest AI, you know, agents to check code here. And not just good guys, all right? So this was a pretty good example of the good guys doing it. So at first, it did seem a bit uncertain whether the coin would actually return, whether they were actually white hats. But I do have updates on all that. So we are still in the midst of the quote unquote token wars, where coders, hackers, whether they're good guys or bad guys, you know, white hats or actual, I guess you would say criminals, are using AI to double check all of the critical infrastructure code out there and see if there's any bugs, any latent bugs. So as we keep going further into the beginning of the 2030s and as we start to see AI improve incredibly and dramatically, I think we are going to continue to see similar things happen. Though I guess the silver lining is, is as these AI exploits kind of continue, that the code does become better. And as the newer AI models come out, hopefully the current bugs and exploitable code has already been fixed. So the newer code AI agents won't actually be able to exploit this critical infrastructure moving forward. So again, it seems like we are in the midst of a new AI model coming out. And then hackers and coders using that to double check and also potentially exploit the critical code.

Not just in Bitcoin.

Again, I do want to emphasize that this isn't just a Bitcoin problem. As I mentioned last week and I believe the week before, we are starting to see that these AI exploits are kind of spreading to other critical infrastructure. TradFi, obviously the big story that we saw last week was that allegedly Chinese state-backed hackers hacked into the Fed and the DOJ, and there was someone else. So it's not just a Bitcoin issue, but obviously, as we know, Bitcoin is a bearer asset. Sorry, not critical, a bearer asset. So if you are able to exploit the coins and you own that coin and you send it to an address that you own, there's really nothing you can do to roll it back. And that's why we are seeing Bitcoin attack first, because of the, I guess, I don't want to say inherent characteristics of Bitcoin, but because of the characteristics of Bitcoin, that once you own the keys, once you hold that Bitcoin, it's your Bitcoin. It really goes back to that classic, you know, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Well, in Bitcoin, it's everything. If you possess the coin, it's yours. Yes, there is, of course, a legal route here and a criminal element of this. And hopefully, you know, law enforcement is actually capable of doing their job.