Yeah, I think stealing that kind of money pretty much guarantees that you'll need to be paranoid for the rest of your life. I wouldn't take that for any amount.
North Korea might. Silk Road went under due to attempting to hire one.
The more likely concern is that someone will sell you out to any of the numerous governments who feel you wronged them. Leading to decades of life in prison.
I wouldn't expect there to be documented cases yet. The hypothetical case in question is a hacker taking hundreds of millions of dollars, not being caught initially, but then being caught years later. Crypto as a whole is just 15 years old, and it's only really been hot for under a decade. There have only been a handful of cases with such large dollar amounts, and most occurred in the last 5 years. And I expect most of the people who pull this off will be properly paranoid.
What sort of crime are you envisioning that exploiting this would fall under? It's not always fraud to satisfy a poorly written contract, although that is commonly the case.
Taking advantage of bad contracts can be legal depending on various nuanced circumstances. If the potential payout is lucrative, then it makes sense to consult with legal counsel first.
I am not making a judgement about this specific case.
That person committed fraud. My point wasn't even about cryptocurrency or DeFi.
Here's a simplified hypothetical example to help you understand the legal nuance: I offer all of my money to the first person that can solve 5x5, and I errantly believe that it's a difficult problem to solve.
Can you provide a more real-world example? I don't understand what point you are making, if it isn't about making money via cryptocurrency. When you say "bad contracts", I assume you are talking about smart contracts. Is that not the case?
Hello from Berlin, Germany. Currently spending my days mostly learning for exams and doing homework. I hate every second of it. Not because I'm opposed to learning stuff. But because I just think other topics are way more interesting and useful for me in the future. Every time I sit there and try to memorize something that I really don't see any value in, I feel such a loss of a lifetime. I just think of all the things I could do instead...
(theoretically I could drop out, but I don't have the courage right now)
Honestly, I'm passionate about all those fun little niche coding projects I have written in my notebook and want to work on. But I don't really have the time to develop my beginner-skills to the extent I would like to, for me being able to build them.
If anyone is in a situation where he has uniquely more than average free time. Please use this time to develop a skill, you'll be grateful for it, I can guarantee.
I'm passionate about all those fun little niche coding projects I have written in my notebook and want to work on. But I don't really have the time to develop my beginner-skills to the extent I would like to, for me being able to build them.
One of them is an app I'd like to build for my galaxy watch that lets me enter data on the go, that is going to be synced with my notion database. This would be super useful for habit tracking.
*this one seems to be one of the more feasible ideas
I didn't say that it has no use. I was pointing out that blockchains do not allow "borrowing / lending money to other people without the parties having to trust each other or having to wait for a slow and expensive legal", contrary to what the OP claimed.
I didn't claim you said it, either, just wanted to mention why it can still make sense. However, the process of depositing something as collateral (irrelevant of the value) and borrowing on it can be described as just that, borrowing.
You can check Immunefi's Bounty-Board for reference, currently paying up to $15M per find.
Another good source is rekt.news, creating post-mortems about all the DEFI-hacks and an own leaderboard, $624M for #1.