Comment by flessner
19 hours ago
At a certain scale nation-state-level actors have to be part of your threat model, there's no excuse.
But yeah, it's quite baffling how in a couple years we seemingly went from stealing email addresses to credit cards to straight up billions of dollars.
If we can expect that everything shifts online eventually, where will this end? Clicked on the wrong link? Guess your house is gone... tough luck.
This is why it is dangerous to replace people and laws with code. With laws, you eventually get to talk to a human being who has leeway in interpreting the situation. With code, it just works the way it does, regardless of circumstances.
Cryptocurrencies avoid a central authority, but by doing that, they also avoid any possibility of human discretion, oversight, or recourse. There is no institution to appeal to, no customer service to call, and no regulator to enforce fairness.
It does feel, doesn’t it, that the cryptocurrency crowd seems mainly to comprise the kinds of actors who correctly anticipate that the legitimate banking sector—and most humans, if asked—will say “no” to them…
Which I guess the idealists would say is part of the point: “first they came for the DPRK extortionists, and I said nothing,” etc.
> correctly anticipate ... will say “no” to them
Could conceivably, under different circumstances, say no. And are uncomfortable with that state of affairs.
Or to be snarky. Doesn't it seem that the crowd that gets up in arms about unlawful search and seizure are the sort of actors who correctly anticipate that the legitimate authorities would take issue with their behavior?
What concerns me is the idea that risks like these might leak into the regulated financial sector.
Right now, if I want to avoid my dollars being among those billions stolen, I can (and do) keep them someplace far away from instant digital currency. With firms that, while they could move large sums of their money somewhere else, build in a whole lot of friction in proportion to the amount being moved—by their customers, their staff, and their counterparties. Limited and well-understood modes of potential malfeasance, and strong structural discouragement for each of them.
There is nothing that I need to do that needs to move fast. But I’d hate for the firms servicing my slow, boring needs to be tempted by the new shiny.