Having a government-insured bank deposit means that I've never had to think about this in my lifetime. It's a problem that I don't need.
Government-insured bank deposits are mostly BS, the fine prints say they have about 10 years to reimburse you and in case of a systemic failure good luck.
In case the bank app, their "system" or your computer is compromised most banks will not reimburse you. It is very easy for them to say you were ultimately responsible for the hack. Very few banks have the policy of taking the loss and it is hard to know which one still do that unless you know someone in their fraud department.
From what I understand, government insurance goes more towards bank failure, not fraud.
Not your keys, not your money. Crypto that requires trust is not crypto.
People who do not understand that trade-off have no business buying crypto.
Really? Most crypto is not anonymous, it is at best pseudonymous. If a big enough government agency wants your crypto, they will get it.
I think of them as primarily an ideological technology, designed to establish the primacy of free market capitalism over any sovereign law.
I think that is why people still hold onto them, despite nothing but scams coming out of them so far.
As somebody who doesn't think unrestrained free markets are a good idea, it feels like the capitalist monkey paw: Finally, there's completely unrestrained uncensorable money. Unfortunately, the result of that is what every advocate of regulation would've told you: Nothing but scams.
Ironically, the phrase capitalists use to describe why socialism can't work - "doesn't account for human nature" - has been proven to apply to their preferred ideology.
They got what they wanted and turns out it sucks. The technology that was supposed to establish the primacy of their world view ended up disproving it instead, plunging them into ideological crisis.
They have no choice but to double down despite ever more evidence of free market failure. There's a certain ideological cost sunk fallacy going on - to admit error and change ones ideological framework completely would be too painful, so they keep waiting for redemption.
Just my grain of salt as a socialist.
Well that's simply not true. Next year, it'll have been 15 years since I first bought LSD on Silk Road using bitcoin.
I think "in my lifetime" is the key here. Probably banks weren't as foolproof initially as they are today, and was a bit wild west too in the beginning.
With that said, I do think cryptocurrencies are still in a "exploring" phase and it's been way oversold on what it could help solve, especially by people who are looking to make a quick buck. Which is a shame, because the technology itself does have useful applications.
Whatever opinion you might have about this industry, the core work is done by the Bitcoin and Ethereum teams and it is pretty admirable. They have been progressing for 10 years in a system where any mistake can collapse the entire system.
But ultimately those wallets and Web3 apps are built with web technologies and run in a browser and this is just not made for this.
This hack was targeting seed phases or private key because the keys have to be stored in the browser extension. How insane is that? But there isn't really any other ways to do it within the framework of a web browser.
Ultimately if the extension or web app is compromised an hardware wallet cannot really ultimately protect you (at least you would only be compromised when interacting with it).
Ethereum also now built in the secp256r1 signature checker so passkey/yubikey can be used but, same problem the "web" is the weak link.
Bottom line if they want that thing to succeed they will have to create a way to interact with smart contracts outside of the web browser. Maybe it will take building a simpler "dapp browser". Their apps are pretty basic in the end, a TUI would be enough to swap a token and approve a transaction...
100% sure about this? How?
addams•1mo ago
addams•1mo ago