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Given how technically inept and thoroughly entrenched the major institutions of our financial system are, I'm almost at the point where I'm waiting until Russia
by davesque 9y ago
Given how technically inept and thoroughly entrenched the major institutions of our financial system are, I'm almost at the point where I'm waiting until Russia or North Korea reveals that they've been planting malware for years in all of our major banks and that they're going to go ahead and push a big red button and just take all our money. Or maybe that's already happening and they're being smart by not talking about it.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> go ahead and push a big red button and just take all our money This would result in a twenty-four hour recession. The U.S. banking system can be shut down [1] while records are analyzed and fraudulent transactions reversed. Presumably a digital hack would result in digital dollars being stolen and subsequently frozen. Whatever couldn't be recovered would probably be, in large part and at least at the retail level, re-imbursed with new money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Banking_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Banking_Act
- greenleafjacob 9y agoThankfully since we aren’t all using Bitcoin, all such transactions can be reversed.
- davesque 9y agoBut you can't spend any Bitcoin unless you possess some wallet's secret key. Explain to me how that poses a comparable risk to the egg baskets that are today's financial institutions. If your secret key isn't compromised, there's just no way your coins can be transferred. Furthermore, in the event that any kind of mass fraud takes place which exploits some flaw in the protocol itself (contrasted with a flaw in an exchange platform or something similar), the ledger could be hard-forked. It was done after Ethereum's DAO debacle with /relatively/ little consequence.