5 ms·

Is anyone else as horrified by this as I am? Bitcoin being a sewer rat, and the banking system being a bubble boy, I knew a day would come when the bubble boy

Is anyone else as horrified by this as I am? Bitcoin being a sewer rat, and the banking system being a bubble boy, I knew a day would come when the bubble boy would be exposed to something bitcoin had grown immune to, get sick, and possibly die. I didn't know his protective bubble was already gone. I thought these banks all communicated on leased lines and weren't exposed to the public internet. Is there any indication that a criminal hacker gang couldn't have compromised this or other SWIFT service bureau's or banks in a similar manner? Which fiat bank will be the first Mt Gox?

nickpsecurity 10y ago
"Is anyone else as horrified by this as I am?" My quick skim shows they're gaining information about transactions in Middle East and Panama. One is essentially a hotbed of competing interests among imperialists and terrorism. The U.S. invaded two countries over there. There's proxy war going on in another. Far as Panama, it's one of leading spots for rich people, threatening or just tax-dodging, to set up offshore accounts, companies, and so on. They use it to hide their transactions. FinCEN has been fighting for access to tax haven data for years. No surprise NSA is monitoring illegal, money moving given targets of interests might be involved in it in that specific place.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  It's clear why they're penetrating those networks and it's at least arguable they have cause too. My comment was about the security house of cards surrounding the fiat banking system.
- lovich 10y ago
  What's illegal or not changes with political winds, and if they can access one part of the system the rest is now circumspect
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    It really doesn't. Spy agencies have been collecting economic and military intelligence on foreign countries and companies since their inception. It was a NSA apologist that correctly noted that each country with a spy agency makes it illegal for people to spy on them, complains about it internationally, and then funds an agency to spy on everyone else for their own benefit. Regardless of what laws or technicalities say, all these countries with spy agencies want foreign spying to happen & legally endorse it by creating said agencies. This should be expected. Even if they made it illegal, I still wouldn't trust them as they'd try to do something to get an edge on negotiations. That something would be illegal activity they outsourced to mercenary organizations or partnered with nations with spy organizations with some benefit promised back to them. For example, nearly all of Europe has intelligence sharing agreements per Snowden leaks with the very agency (NSA) they're publicly griping about. Only 3 didn't in whatever deal that was: Switzerland, Iceland, and one other I can't remember.
foepys 10y ago
> exposed to something bitcoin had grown immune to I don't know where this myth is coming from that Bitcoin is immune to state-level actors. If a relatively large government really wanted to manipulate the Bitcoin network, they could either just buy some thousand Bitcoin and spam the network with transactions or buy enough hardware to get over 50% hashing power. Especially China only needs to take down the 2 or 3 top miners and can cut the mining power in half within a day. Bitcoin is simply not interesting enough at the moment to get manipulated by state-level actors. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible, regardless what Bitcoin advocates want you to believe.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  Definitely not impossible, but a quick check at the moment suggests that with the best available ASICs, it'd cost about $376M retail (or perhaps less wholesale) to buy hashing power equivalent to the current network. (And that assumes sufficient supply to do so, though it might be possible to scale that better.) So, definitely in the range for states to accomplish, but not trivial; it'd have to be extremely critical to do so. (And an attempt to do so would likely get noticed, and there are ways to work around it.)
  - maxander 10y ago
    The U.S. threw ~$80M worth of missiles into Syria several days ago, just to damage an airfield. No one would blink at half a billion to take out bitcoin, and that's assuming that the NSA/CIA don't already have billions' worth of codebreaking hardware that could be applied to that purpose (they almost certainly do.) Taking control of bitcoin is probably "fun weekend project" level work for them.
    - rsync 10y ago
      The cost ($80M) is not the interesting metric - consider the press coverage, positive poll results and resulting political engagement. The power gained is the interesting result. Currently there is no power to be gained in wiping out bitcoin when half of the constituents have never even heard of it. Never mind the cost.
neffy 10y ago
The big advantage of double entry book keeping is that it provides multiple layers of security in the basic ledger handling the banks must perform. (The big disadvantage is the implicit instabilities that result from the associated statistical multiplexing of money.) So SWIFT being compromised is bad, just ask the Central Bank of Bangladesh, but it's not the end of the world as we know it.
kasey_junk 10y ago
The idea that the stability of banks is largely determined by their internet security is not something anyone who is familiar with bank operations believe. Breaches, fraud, inside jobs (and much more commonly) errors in SWIFT or other electronic communications are assumed to be happening by the banks. Double entry accounting, auditing, charge backs and correction protocols are all normal, standard and expected in even the smallest credit unions and the amount of dollars spent on these things at the larger financial institutions is staggering. That is essentially the job of a bank. To back stop that we have insurance and regulatory bodies working to prevent and mitigate losses. Again, this is normal and expected. The thing those of us who have worked in banks find so funny about Bitcoin isn't that it solves some issues that banks don't know about or does something clever. Its how unprofessional the whole thing is. It doesn't account for hardly any of the real world problems of the banking system. > Which fiat bank will be the first Mt Gox? Depends on what you mean? A bank that is brought down by theft by its employees? That was such a big problem in the early banking world that banks competed on the edifices and security theater to prove it didn't happen at their bank...150 years ago or more.
sfifs 10y ago
Bitcoin is quite trivial to take down (spam with transactions because clearing rate is so slow). Also remember that the core promise of Bitcoin is decentralization not anonymity and anyone with resources amd will like the NSA should be able to comfortably trace back users unless there's unusually good opsec (even Tor merely increases the cost of unmasking). The point of the banking system is not necessarily high security, it's the legal frameworks and process flexibility to identify and prosecute fraud and reverse the effect of fraud of detected in time

nickpsecurity 10y ago

"Is anyone else as horrified by this as I am?" My quick skim shows they're gaining information about transactions in Middle East and Panama. One is essentially a hotbed of competing interests among imperialists and terrorism. The U.S. invaded two countries over there. There's proxy war going on in another. Far as Panama, it's one of leading spots for rich people, threatening or just tax-dodging, to set up offshore accounts, companies, and so on. They use it to hide their transactions. FinCEN has been fighting for access to tax haven data for years. No surprise NSA is monitoring illegal, money moving given targets of interests might be involved in it in that specific place.

ryanmarsh 10y ago
It's clear why they're penetrating those networks and it's at least arguable they have cause too. My comment was about the security house of cards surrounding the fiat banking system.
lovich 10y ago
What's illegal or not changes with political winds, and if they can access one part of the system the rest is now circumspect
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  It really doesn't. Spy agencies have been collecting economic and military intelligence on foreign countries and companies since their inception. It was a NSA apologist that correctly noted that each country with a spy agency makes it illegal for people to spy on them, complains about it internationally, and then funds an agency to spy on everyone else for their own benefit. Regardless of what laws or technicalities say, all these countries with spy agencies want foreign spying to happen & legally endorse it by creating said agencies. This should be expected. Even if they made it illegal, I still wouldn't trust them as they'd try to do something to get an edge on negotiations. That something would be illegal activity they outsourced to mercenary organizations or partnered with nations with spy organizations with some benefit promised back to them. For example, nearly all of Europe has intelligence sharing agreements per Snowden leaks with the very agency (NSA) they're publicly griping about. Only 3 didn't in whatever deal that was: Switzerland, Iceland, and one other I can't remember.

foepys 10y ago

> exposed to something bitcoin had grown immune to I don't know where this myth is coming from that Bitcoin is immune to state-level actors. If a relatively large government really wanted to manipulate the Bitcoin network, they could either just buy some thousand Bitcoin and spam the network with transactions or buy enough hardware to get over 50% hashing power. Especially China only needs to take down the 2 or 3 top miners and can cut the mining power in half within a day. Bitcoin is simply not interesting enough at the moment to get manipulated by state-level actors. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible, regardless what Bitcoin advocates want you to believe.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
Definitely not impossible, but a quick check at the moment suggests that with the best available ASICs, it'd cost about $376M retail (or perhaps less wholesale) to buy hashing power equivalent to the current network. (And that assumes sufficient supply to do so, though it might be possible to scale that better.) So, definitely in the range for states to accomplish, but not trivial; it'd have to be extremely critical to do so. (And an attempt to do so would likely get noticed, and there are ways to work around it.)
- maxander 10y ago
  The U.S. threw ~$80M worth of missiles into Syria several days ago, just to damage an airfield. No one would blink at half a billion to take out bitcoin, and that's assuming that the NSA/CIA don't already have billions' worth of codebreaking hardware that could be applied to that purpose (they almost certainly do.) Taking control of bitcoin is probably "fun weekend project" level work for them.
  - rsync 10y ago
    The cost ($80M) is not the interesting metric - consider the press coverage, positive poll results and resulting political engagement. The power gained is the interesting result. Currently there is no power to be gained in wiping out bitcoin when half of the constituents have never even heard of it. Never mind the cost.

neffy 10y ago

The big advantage of double entry book keeping is that it provides multiple layers of security in the basic ledger handling the banks must perform. (The big disadvantage is the implicit instabilities that result from the associated statistical multiplexing of money.) So SWIFT being compromised is bad, just ask the Central Bank of Bangladesh, but it's not the end of the world as we know it.

kasey_junk 10y ago

The idea that the stability of banks is largely determined by their internet security is not something anyone who is familiar with bank operations believe. Breaches, fraud, inside jobs (and much more commonly) errors in SWIFT or other electronic communications are assumed to be happening by the banks. Double entry accounting, auditing, charge backs and correction protocols are all normal, standard and expected in even the smallest credit unions and the amount of dollars spent on these things at the larger financial institutions is staggering. That is essentially the job of a bank. To back stop that we have insurance and regulatory bodies working to prevent and mitigate losses. Again, this is normal and expected. The thing those of us who have worked in banks find so funny about Bitcoin isn't that it solves some issues that banks don't know about or does something clever. Its how unprofessional the whole thing is. It doesn't account for hardly any of the real world problems of the banking system. > Which fiat bank will be the first Mt Gox? Depends on what you mean? A bank that is brought down by theft by its employees? That was such a big problem in the early banking world that banks competed on the edifices and security theater to prove it didn't happen at their bank...150 years ago or more.

sfifs 10y ago

Bitcoin is quite trivial to take down (spam with transactions because clearing rate is so slow). Also remember that the core promise of Bitcoin is decentralization not anonymity and anyone with resources amd will like the NSA should be able to comfortably trace back users unless there's unusually good opsec (even Tor merely increases the cost of unmasking). The point of the banking system is not necessarily high security, it's the legal frameworks and process flexibility to identify and prosecute fraud and reverse the effect of fraud of detected in time