How I Robbed a Telegram Tip Bot and became a HONK Millionaire

If you don't know what HONK is you're not alone, I'll explain at the end.

On Monday morning 3am November 18th, in a Telegram Chat I run, we managed to find a balance duplication bug on a crypto tipping bot. The most credit goes to Avianmax who was the one to first discover the glitch.

We proceeded to increase our balances as high as possible and withdraw as much as we could.

One of the biggest limitations was the fact the bot only allowed 1 withdrawal per Telegram every hour or so. The maximum you can withdraw at once is 25M at once, but we had no idea of the limits when we started. Trying to withdraw over 25M would cause an error and you'd still have to wait over an hour to try again.

Luckily I already had several alternate Telegram accounts on hand and set out to withdraw with each one. But even with multiple accounts I quickly started to hit limits due to the bot running low on funds.

Well the bug was active for several hours we quickly depleted the on hand balance of the bot. After talking to the lead developer I found out as a group we managed with withdraw about 140M HONK. The developer also gave AvianMax an extra 25M and thanked him for finding the bug. He congratulated us for our exploit and said he didn't even want any of the HONK back.

My portion of the 140M ended up being 43M. So I guess you could say I'm good size stake holder in the token now, of course HONK is mainly just for fun and tipping.

If you don't know what a HONK is, it's a Bitcoin Cash based SLP coin that is used for tipping on several Telegram rooms. Along with SPICE another BCH based tipping bot it has become quite popular. Once you add the bot to your room (Telegram name Honktipbot) you can send people tips by responding to their name with a clown emoji or honk.

Unlike Ethereum based tokens SLP tokens on the BCH blockchain don't have contracts but the amount required to use them is much less compared to ETH tokens. They've become popular on Telegram and the BCH social site https://memo.cash.

Memo.cash allows users to post Twitter sized updates to the blockchain and buy/sell SLP tokens. Currently HONK is a top 3 token on the site.

Another fun integration is TXT Street, a fun visualization which displays the BCH and BTC blockchains as a city, where transactions are people getting on to buses. Try tipping a post some HONK while watching it in another window and you'll see it pop up as a visualization.