Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

In every field, there are people at the top and bottom. Why is this? What makes somebody elite at a subject? This is what the post is about. With so many aspiring people, there has to be a secret. It's told from the perspective of an elite smart contract hacker.

Everyone wants to be a smart contract auditor for the money. The biggest bounty ever given out if $10m and there is so much other money going around. Spearbit DAO has crazy salaries and many people on Code4rena/Sherlock have made 100K+.

The reality of the thousands of people flocking to audit smart contracts is grime: it is really hard and competitive. On Code4rena, only 29 people have a lifetime earning of 100K+, 57 of 50K and 170 of 10K. Damn, that's really not that lucrative or helpful. On Immunefi, the numbers are in the millions for several people though.

What's interesting, is that this thing doesn't work on a full time job for many people. Even Pashov, the most lucrative private auditor, has only doing 30ish audits total. To hit my salary as an auditor, I would need to make $700 a day on Code4rena and Immunefi, which would put me in the top 0.1% of auditors; this simply is not realistic for me or very many people.

What are the top auditors secrets? Success is not the default outcome. There are two keys: perseverance and focus. Everyone claims they want to be the best but very few spend the actual time to do so.

For perseverance, do you spend 12 hours a day on smart contract auditing? Do you read every report that is released? Do you reproduce hacks that occur? If not, you're already growing slower than some people in the space. Progress is not always obvious either.

For focus, it is more complicated. Being able to sit down for hours upon hours to get good; you've got to put in the time. Here, we also need to consider efficiency. Are you learning the right content? Is your time sitting down only hacking or are you on Twitter? Being efficient is hard to do with your focused time. The call to action is simple to say but hard to execute: wake up on time, setup a real work schedule for this and be disciplined with your time.

If you're not here, that's okay! Armada, a famous Super Smash Brother Melee player ruined my Melee career. Why? He told me the amount of effort to reach the top. At this point, I realized I did not want to reach the top but that was okay. I do other things I enjoy! If you want to live a full time, with friends, sports, family and so on, you'll probably never be at the 1%. That's what these articles don't tell you.

A few other things, imo, make the space hard to get into:

• Required Knowledge: Most projects integrate with other projects with integrate with other projects. If you are missing some understanding, it makes a project hard to understand.
• Competitive: Everyone wants to make the money. The easy to find stuff is likely not going to be there.
• Bug classes are unique: Finance issues, denial of service, frontrunning and reentrancy are all unique to the space. Getting up to speed with everything is difficult.
• Moves fast: Every day there's a new hack, new technique, new article... it's easy to get behind in the space and miss something.

Overall, a good article! I wrote some of my own opinions in here as well, since the truth isn't always easy to hear.