Comment by huang_chung

4 months ago

Society has devolved a bit when not long ago a heist like this would involve sieging Nakatomi Plaza, now it takes just finding a bug in someone's defective Python codes.

It has been this way since the dawn of electronic banking. I once had complete access to all digital wallets for the Seattle metro, which I gained by looking at two cards and noticing the numbers were incrementing. Even with all of the flaws of electronic transactions, it's still better than walking to the bank and hoping a check won't bounce.

You don't even have to break into a wierd high-tech vault to get an unreasonably slow (or fast) billion-dollar progress bar with a snazzy custom UI toolkit these days. Not sure if technology or inflation is most to blame!

  • yes, this part won't play well in the movie: it takes just as long to transfer a billion as a dollar; the progress bar won't allow any time to build suspense... will they finish in time? cuts between parallel timelines...

    • well, min. required network confirmations could still replace the progress bar. I certainly pressed reload anxiously quite a few times :-)

I wonder how many programmers resort to crime after they were laid off and couldn't find a job. Like soldiers after a war.

  • not related to the current western market, but countries like Romania pre EU had a huge surplus of soviet-educated young people and no jobs. This definitely increased their involvement with "informal" economies for some time.

  • That might make for a good book or movie plot.

    • It was the basis of the plot of the first Jurassic Park movie. All shenanigans started because Dennis Nedry, the parc IT manager, disabled some security system at a bad time so he could sell some company secrets to concurrents.

      There are interesting character analysis to do between the book and the movie version, where the book version or Dennis Nedry is way more sympathetic (even if flawed), he's a extremely talented IT guy who was undersold the amount of work to do in the park, kinda stuck doing unpaid overwork in a remote island and generally been fleeced by a way more villainous book John Hammond.

  • That's pretty much what ex-IDF members do, but they set it up as a company so it becomes legal somehow, I guess...

You just gotta trust the wrong people.

Don’t forget FTX willingly hired the Ultimate Bet “god mode” guy.