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.
> 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".
In this case yes - everything went by the design and law of the underlying code. There was no exploited bug or vulnerability flaw besides human laziness here.
1) Their multi-signature wallet signing employees lazily clicked through in unison to approve a new smart contract without examining the contents to see if it was unusual.
2) Bad security architecture to keep too much in a single wallet that wasn't properly kept cold. There should have been a few fully cold wallets, that only rarely transact with mostly-cold intermediary "airlock" wallets which are also separated from the exchange operations and wallets. The signers also need to be different combinations of people for each of those wallets - preferably some of those signers being additionally liable 3rd party technical experts.
I see this quote repeated here often, but working in the industry I've never heard it said unironically by any of my peers or thought leaders in the space. Best I can tell it is a sort of lazy straw man repeated by skeptics. Does it have an origin?
I suppose so, however Ethereum Classic is a fork of Ethereum that failed. I don't think it's generally well regarded in the space. I doubt many of the newer entrants to the ecosystem have even heard of it.
This would be like finding a quote from some old poorly maintained Linux distribution and attributing quotes from the maintainers as being representative of all kernel developers.
Thanks for a good faith response. This is what makes this website excellent.
While I must admit that I have some anti-cryptocurrency biases, I am also not that familiar with the cryptocurrency world. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge.
The original idea with crypto was that the "code" was so strong, it removed the need for physical banks, tellers, FDIC, law enforcement, etc. The theory was, we can have everything the banking system has, but cheaper, because the only way to steal money was to break the crypto itself, hence "code is law".
The industry cannot appeal to the protections of law enforcement, civil tort, and other features of the regulated banking system, without simultaneously undermining the "crypto" part. If you're going to summon authorities when hackers hack, you're no better off than if you just acted like any other bank and stored the client's balance in an excel sheet.
The Bitcoin paper pretty heavily alludes to this, though behind the guise of censorship resistant currency, which is exactly the same concern.
I personally know of at least one person who was able to escape Russia at the very beginning of the Ukraine war because cryptocurrency was a viable way for his brother in America to fund his escape despite sanctions and other hurdles.
