No, you couldn't have made more money than the Twitter hacker
Picture this: you’ve stumbled across the vulnerability of the year. You figured out how to gain access to any verified Twitter user’s account: Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, XXXTentacion, Apple, you name it. That was step 1 of your evil plan. What should step 2 be?
Maybe you log into the president’s account and post a fake tweet about launching missiles to North Korea. I’m not convinced that you can start a world war just by sending out a few fake tweets, but for the sake of argument let’s say that you can. But you’re not interested in watching the world burn anyway; no, your goal is to make as much money as possible. What should you do?
The people who carried out today’s Twitter hack had one answer: post variants of the message “send 1 BTC to this address and I’ll send 2 BTC back” on famous accounts, and then (here’s the kicker) don’t actually send 2 BTC back.
They managed to run off with a little over $100,000 before Twitter got the situation under control. Several people (on Twitter, on Hacker News, everywhere really) scoffed at this and claimed that they would have done something much more interesting with this kind of power. Let’s explore some of their ideas to see if we really can do better.
Stock Market Manipulation
This is the first thing that comes to most people’s minds. It sounds easy: buy a bunch of Tesla stock, log into Elon Musk’s account, tweet “Taking $TSLA private at $2000,” and sell in the time between the rise in price and when Musk/Twitter/the whole world realizes the hack.
This requires a fair amount of capital to buy the underlying stock, which the hacker may not have had, but there are other options: maybe you short the stock and then tweet (fake) damaging information about Tesla’s new line of cars. Maybe you just short Twitter’s own stock, which will surely take a huge hit in the market tomorrow (the hack was executed after trading hours).
oh lol i'd buy HTZ, that's the trade. "i've decided that Tesla will buy Hertz out of bankruptcy at $69 per share and make its fleet entirely self-driving," i'd be a billionaire and Money Stuff would end on the highest possible note— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) July 15, 2020
The big issue with all of these is that it’s very difficult to participate in the stock market anonymously. The SEC has all sorts of monitoring in place to catch more common forms of insider trading and fraud and you can guarantee that they would conduct a long, thorough investigation into a hypothetical hack-based market fraud. Unlike Bitcoin transactions, wire transfers and stock purchases can be reversed after the fact, and the exposure and risk go way up when you’re actually working with US dollars....MUCH MORE
Blackmail.....
HT: Marginal Revolution
