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Seems like someone needs to develop a "Social Engineering" insurance.

• aianus 11y ago
  Oops, I got socially engineered and sent all my money to this Bitcoin account that totally doesn't belong to me or my brother in law wink. Please double me up, Mr. Insurer. Come on.
  • eli 11y ago
    Insurance fraud is a crime. They already insure against technical hacks, which I would think would not be much harder to fake if you wanted to.
    • aianus 11y ago
      Crime or no crime, if you make something profitable and easy to get away with, people will do it. For all we know, this was an instance of insurance fraud. I wouldn't touch insuring Bitcoin hot wallets with a twelve foot pole. Cold storage, maybe, but only if I had my experts set it all up and maintained control over all private keys.
• zekevermillion 11y ago
  Big moral hazard problem. I'm sure someone would write a policy that covers social engineering attacks (and I would say arguably the Hartford policy also should cover this loss). But the loss limit, as with the Hartford policy, would be so low compared to the risk as to render it largely useless. I mean come on, I have a higher loss limit on my freakin car insurance than BitPay has to cover their hot wallet balance. To date, as far as I am aware, insurers will only write policies to cover small losses on hot wallet balances. Most of the big exchanges and processors are probably well-capitalized enough that they could in effect self-insure against such a loss. And the larger magnitude risk of a deeper-level intrusion, or flat out physical robbery of the private key components for cold wallets, is not insurable.