Comment by acc_297
4 months ago
^Yep
When you decentralize finance like this what becomes okay to do according to system rules is exactly what is possible to do according to system rules. We don't have humans in that loop anymore to enforce moral judgments about what constitutes unlawful theft (except for 1 or 2 rare "hard-forks" of various blockchains to reverse devastating transactions).
I feel bad for people who lose large volumes of cryptocurrency to malicious actors in the same way I feel bad for people who lose large volumes of real money to a casino.
It is 2025 now and we all know that anyone who can somehow get your private-key to whatever blockchain backed assets you have "owns" those assets just as much as you do and they are permitted to take them under the rules of the system so whatever you do do not lose that key.
There is no higher arbiter of justice in this space so use it at your own risk.
Being doomed to spending millions of real dollars litigating to buy a trash dump full of used diapers and toxic waste, just to dig around in it looking for a hard disk drive for the rest of your life, seems to be a particularly satisfying Sisyphean form of justice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_buried_in_Newport_land...
> After the 2008 bank bailout, Howells considered fiat currencies a "scam", favouring the vision of Bitcoin inventor Nakamoto instead.
I wouldn’t call it justice, it’s more like falling down and instead of being helped up you’re just kicked some more. It feels like a cruel set of circumstances. It does feel like trying to find the drive is also living in denial, given the odds.
Oh no, it's justice. Sweet sweet justice. It's not like he worked hard for all the money he lost through stupidity and incompetence, or that it generated any value to the economy or society. Any competent IT professional knows very well about the importance of performing backups, and testing their backups. He may "subconsciously blame" his partner for losing the hard drive, but it was 100% his own fault he never bothered to back it up. He's doing just fine if he can afford all those legal fees, so he doesn't need to be "helped up", and playing the world's smallest violin in sympathy of his fate is hardly "kicking him".