Comment by kevin_thibedeau

I don't understand the attack vector when you're dealing with a regulated entity like banks. Crypto has to deal with the technical reality of cryptography and anonymity, but banks have none of those risks, and humans generally get involved as checks and balances.

If you bank with eg. Chase (biggest consumer bank in the US), you're not at real risk. In the hypothetical that the chase app is compromised, where does the money go? If the attacker moves the money to.. idk, US Bank, then US bank reverses the transaction and moves it out of the attacker's account. You can imagine hundreds of scenarios where the money is attempting to be moved to unregulated and irrecoverable destinations, but it doesn't exist at a scale that Chase et al. wouldn't be able to recover or accept the loss on to make customers whole (as is their responsibility).

You can't transfer "illions" to cash. You maybe can transfer it to a new bank - but then this same problem exists just one step away, with one more regulated institution to get involved. You can't suddenly fund/wire that money without a human calling you - if you try to wire even a much smaller amount, like <100k, as a random individual, then the bank will block the transfer and call you and ask about the money. If you're a corp that regularly banks in the "illions", you're not casually going to money launder. If you try to transfer it overseas, you're still in USD, so you're still in the regulated banking. Whoever exchanges that cash for a foreign currency is on the hook, and for "illions" of dollars, that entity is going to be regulated and behaving. This is all ignoring the fact that many banks and financial institutions will not accept an unexpected random large transfer (or thousands of smaller ones!) without some sort of audit or paper trail on the origin of the money.

As a mundane example, I recently bought a condo, and my bank required an in-person ID check to wire money over $25k, and then required me to later call and verify (twice) before I could start transferring my HOA payment to a random account. If you compromised my phone, that doesn't get you in-person with my ID in a branch, nor does that get you secondary confirmation over the phone (w/ a voice match check now!)

> which will disavow any responsibility as soon as they're on the hook for *illions

I haven't even touched on the political fallout if they disavowed responsibility, which is why all the regulations and KYC/CYA for the bank exists.*

Go to court and sue them? Like every other disagreement about money basically.