Adjusting your comment for the situation:
> Is $100.00 in cash silly? It has the same property (non-reversibility)
No, not silly if that's what I am comfortable to keep on me (wallet, mattress, etc) and I'm mugged/robbed most people will recover. (Especially if you're also able to afford the inherent risk of crypto.)
> Is $1,500,000,000.00 in cash silly? It has the same property (non-reversibility)
YES! And probably a challenge for most humans even if you're able to get that cash in the limited US $100,000.00 bill [1] - that's 15,000 green slips of paper. (I'm making a bold assumption that this link [2] is reasonably actually for the physical scale, though this apparently only shows 13,000 not the 15,000 needed.)
They effectively treated the $1.5B like a pile of cash in a fence with a few (easily pickable apparently) locks keeping it shut.
That SHOULD have been in a 100% offline, air gapped system with multiple levels of 2+ person approvals to access.
But this failure implies to me that even THEY didn't really consider the crypto assets they were holding as something with a real value either.
I just want to piggyback off this and discuss the scale in terms of the largest most readily accessible bill, the $100 bill. The relevant parts are [1]:
- Height: 66.3mm
- Width: 156mm
- Thickness: 0.0043 inches = 0.11mm
- Weight: 1.0g
So the volume is 1138mm3. You need 15M notes so that's just over 17 cubic meters or approximately 603 cubic feet, which is a cube roughly 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) on each side, weighing in at 15 metric tons or 33,000 pounds. Put another way, that's over half the volume of a standard twenty foot shipping container (~1100 cubic feet).
But let's get it more compact. The current gold price seems to be about $2939 per Troy ounce, which is 31.1035g. You need 510,378 Troy ounces, which is actually heavier at 15.87 metric tons but way more compact. Given a density of 19.32g/cm3 that's 822,000cm3 or 0.822 cubic meters or 29 cubic feet.
Whatever the case, it's a lot less practical to steal.
Orders of magnitude matter, and you have to look at the overall system. You can’t move $1.5B in cash without a fleet of trucks and a lot of time, and serious banking has lots of safeguards around it to prevent thefts by requiring more people to cooperate on an insider theft.
Cryptocurrency was designed as a political statement rather than a serious banking system so you effectively have the same level of precaution for both large and small amounts, akin to a bank keeping a billion dollars in the teller’s tray.
> Is cash silly?
No, of course not.
Adjusting your comment for the situation: > Is $100.00 in cash silly? It has the same property (non-reversibility)
No, not silly if that's what I am comfortable to keep on me (wallet, mattress, etc) and I'm mugged/robbed most people will recover. (Especially if you're also able to afford the inherent risk of crypto.)
> Is $1,500,000,000.00 in cash silly? It has the same property (non-reversibility)
YES! And probably a challenge for most humans even if you're able to get that cash in the limited US $100,000.00 bill [1] - that's 15,000 green slips of paper. (I'm making a bold assumption that this link [2] is reasonably actually for the physical scale, though this apparently only shows 13,000 not the 15,000 needed.)
They effectively treated the $1.5B like a pile of cash in a fence with a few (easily pickable apparently) locks keeping it shut.
That SHOULD have been in a 100% offline, air gapped system with multiple levels of 2+ person approvals to access.
But this failure implies to me that even THEY didn't really consider the crypto assets they were holding as something with a real value either.
1- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-th...
2- https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/GHNABiJh6A
I just want to piggyback off this and discuss the scale in terms of the largest most readily accessible bill, the $100 bill. The relevant parts are [1]:
- Height: 66.3mm
- Width: 156mm
- Thickness: 0.0043 inches = 0.11mm
- Weight: 1.0g
So the volume is 1138mm3. You need 15M notes so that's just over 17 cubic meters or approximately 603 cubic feet, which is a cube roughly 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) on each side, weighing in at 15 metric tons or 33,000 pounds. Put another way, that's over half the volume of a standard twenty foot shipping container (~1100 cubic feet).
But let's get it more compact. The current gold price seems to be about $2939 per Troy ounce, which is 31.1035g. You need 510,378 Troy ounces, which is actually heavier at 15.87 metric tons but way more compact. Given a density of 19.32g/cm3 that's 822,000cm3 or 0.822 cubic meters or 29 cubic feet.
Whatever the case, it's a lot less practical to steal.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-doll...
Orders of magnitude matter, and you have to look at the overall system. You can’t move $1.5B in cash without a fleet of trucks and a lot of time, and serious banking has lots of safeguards around it to prevent thefts by requiring more people to cooperate on an insider theft.
Cryptocurrency was designed as a political statement rather than a serious banking system so you effectively have the same level of precaution for both large and small amounts, akin to a bank keeping a billion dollars in the teller’s tray.
It’s also impossible to steal from afar and transactions of $100/$1000000/$1000000000 each look very different.
Crypto is like having a $1.5 billion bill.
Keeping $1.5 billion in cash is silly.