NFT trading robot was teased and lost 800 ETH. Is transparency a double-edged sword?

Author: 0xTransparency, Deep Tide TechFlow

Entering the weekend, the slightly quiet NFT market staged a wonderful show of praying mantis catching cicadas, followed by orioles.

Hanwe (@HanweChang), an NFT leader on Twitter, found that there is a robot bot on Blur that imitates and follows his own quotation strategy, so he decided to give this robot “a little bit of strength”, played tricks on the robot, and publicly tweeted to express his profit 800 ETH (about 1.46 million US dollars).

how did you do that?

Users who are familiar with Blur should know that trait bidding (Trait Bidding) is available on the platform, that is, you can bid on the traits you like in the NFT series, such as the Azuki character wearing glasses or the background is white.

Another well-known Chinese big V 0xSun (@0xSunNFT) analyzed the beginning and end of Hanwe playing Bot:

Hanwe realized that the robot would follow his own quotation strategy, so he ambushed and scanned multiple Azuki products (possibly using another account) in advance, and then began to act: he had a lot of pictures with Off White A in the background of this batch of products. An Azuki quotes 50 ETH.

Subsequently, the robot bot automatically followed his bidding strategy and also sent a bid of 50 ETH. At this time, Hanwe immediately accepted the quotation from the copy robot, and sold the batch of Azuki NFTs to the robot at a high price of 50ETH; at the same time, the quotation of the decoy bombs he released before was withdrawn.

To put it simply, it is to quote a high price for its own goods, and then lure the robot to follow the high price, and then cancel the order by itself to make a profit and leave.

Robots don’t have tears. The transaction records of the 12 Azuki in this operation were coldly written on the blockchain browser. The selling price of each Azuki is expensive when converted into US dollars. The owner of the 0x97 address behind the robot must have been cut off. Numb and want to cry without tears.

Please return the money you “stolen”?

800ETH is not a small amount.

Just when Hanwe happily showed off the decoy bomb operation on Twitter, the entity behind 0x97 also started to line up.

A Twitter user named elizab.eth left the following text in the comment section of Hanwe’s bragging post:

“We want to talk to you about the bounty. If you return 90% of the money you stole from our robots this wave, you can take 10% as a bounty.”

Note that in this passage, “stolen” is used, stolen.

Robots copy other people’s strategies and are played by others, causing losses. Is this thing called stealing? If it were in the real world, such huge property losses and controversial behaviors would indeed be dragged back and forth as a legal case.

The strategy of Hanwe’s play is not complicated. It just uses the characteristics of the robot’s mindless copy order and teaches it a lesson. Morally speaking, there are indeed some chicken thieves; but in the encrypted world, there is no yardstick to constrain the behavior of participants.

If this can be regarded as stealing, then can all kinds of futures price pin insertion, ancient network cable pulling, and the project party’s “sorry we failed” all be called stealing in a broad sense, taking away the chips in the hands of leeks?

Or put it the other way around, when the robot succeeds in making profits by copying other people’s strategies, has it ever had good intentions and considered sending a red envelope to others to share the benefits?

In a dark forest like Web3, maybe you can’t just eat meat chicly and happily when you’re a hunter, but cry out that your meat hurts when you’re a prey.

Everything reincarnates. There are moments when skills are superior, and there must be times when skills are inferior to others. Especially when there are no rigid regulations and institutional constraints, all ups and downs become a barbaric, disorderly and willing to gamble to lose market behavior.

And in elizab’s latest tweet, it seems to show open-mindedness after awakening:

I just find it rather ironic that the lessons you have spent money to buy from others, others will also spend money to buy from another higher person.

In our Web3, there are many lessons and few teachers.

Tell the world or make a fortune in silence?

In the comment area of Hanwe, some people also questioned why they should publicly admit this kind of robot playing. After all, it seems a bit malicious, and 800ETH is indeed a jealous number.

Whether it’s showing off or venting your anger, the boss’s personal motives and preferences are not the focus of our discussion. This incident seems to lead to another topic: in Web3, all transactions and decision-making behaviors on the chain seem to be so transparent, any action as long as you want to dig it, you can publicize it to the point of making it known to the world;

But as the old saying goes, we still have to learn to make a fortune in silence.

Tell the world or get rich silently? What’s interesting is that your Mushengfa Cai will be watched by various chain detectives, copy robots, clip attacks and other hidden opponents, who will carefully study, follow, imitate and use…

And if a trading strategy that makes money silently is targeted and followed on a large scale, will it still have the effect of making money?

On the chain, there are games everywhere. You get rich silently, I copied your rich strategy, but it is very likely that you showed me this strategy on purpose…

There are thousands of routines and multi-level reversals. In many cases, we cannot fully understand a person’s true motivation through transparent and open data on the chain.

And this kind of transparency is precisely the arbitrage space that Web3 leaves for different levels of participants:

Third-rate leeks, with transparent beliefs;

Second-rate robots, deeply transparent;

First-class boss, use transparency.

May every small transparency of Web3 go on its own path safely.