8 ms·
If all of AAPL stock is tokenized, and someone hacks a custodian of say 30% of AAPL, is the hacker now owner of 30% of AAPL?
by hendzen 8y ago
If all of AAPL stock is tokenized, and someone hacks a custodian of say 30% of AAPL, is the hacker now owner of 30% of AAPL?
- gomox 8y agoI think it's safe to assume that all of us are going to be cashing in on that "may you live in interesting times" curse.
- theamk 8y agoOf course not, they will just hard-fork the chain!
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoWhich has its own problems; it's the equivalent of restoring a backup, and you lose the past x hours / days of all transactions. It's not something you want to be able to do in a blockchain intended for contracts or currency. And what happens to people that exchanged real money for BTC or in this case AAPL shares? It's like err, a double spend but without any winners.
- gomox 8y agoHard forking doesn't necessarily mean the newly forked chain starts from the state as it was at the time of the change you want to undo. Notably the ETH/ETC hard fork happened much later.
- ISL 8y agoThe hacker would suddenly discover the various international justice systems. The tokens would be tainted, unspendable, and worthless. A wild guess at the potential reward for unmasking the hacker? ($950B * 0.3 * 0.001 --> ~300 M USD). After the first such hack, companies might add a clause to the bylaws enabling the company to re-issue stock to the aggrieved party, restoring balance to the universe.
- ISL 8y agoA double-spend attack is more subtle, as the correct resolution is less clear. The law is pretty good at handling theft and fraud, though, so I suspect a reasonable solution can be worked out in short order.
- sneak 8y agoThen why call him God?
- mrep 8y ago> The tokens would be tainted, unspendable, and worthless. No they wouldn't because the whole "decentralized system" makes it so you have to get EVERYONE to agree to blacklist those tokens BEFORE THEY ARE TRADED or else it fails because the hacker can tumble those tokens across dozens of different cryptocurrencies on every exchange across thousands of accounts. You will never be able to hard fork every cryptocurrency for 1 mistake. The only hack that I have ever heard of that was successfully reversed was the DOA and that was because they had 30 days to work out a hard fork on 1 wallet! Cryptocurrencies are good for one thing only and that is blackhats.
- ISL 8y agoIt only takes a few countries imprisoning people who trade in tainted coins/tokens before they become untouchable. Public ledgers are public. If the US IRS, perhaps coordinated with Interpol, publishes a blacklist of coins, those coins are toast.
- Felz 8y agoUh, so wait. If the IRS/Interpol becomes an effective source of truth on which coins may be legally transferred and who rightfully owns them, what was the point of the blockchain?
- ISL 8y agoWe are all going to find out. At the very least, the blockchain provides a degree of global immutability that was previously impossible.