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My concern is that “the law” is incompetent in this domain.

• jspaetzel 5y ago
  The concern should be about how "the law" can't be applied here
• thehappypm 5y ago
  And possibly incompatible.
• toomuchtodo 5y ago
  That’s sort of humorous that the law is the problem after $10 billion+ has been lost to crypto theft and fraud. Maybe the tech is the problem? “Maybe I’m out of touch with the rest of the developed world? Impossible, it’s everyone else demanding the enforcement of laws and regulations around value transfer, storage, and ownership who are the problem.” (Not you personally, crypto folks in general)
  • vmception 5y ago
    Then its not lost and isn't a problem, to the current owners. The prior owners were hodling it wrong.
    • toomuchtodo 5y ago
      That’s not how common and property law work, and the enforcement of the law is catching up. I think that’s the real problem crypto proponents have; that the law is recognizing digital assets as assets, and the property rights that go along with that. Tangentially, I support my tax dollars being spent pursuing these threat actors for as long as it takes, with sentencing guidelines in line with the value stolen.
      • wincy 5y ago
        So for $800 they go to prison for 3 years, and for anything over $50,000,000 they get a commuted sentence and parole? That’s generally how it works in the US legal system.
        • voakbasda 5y ago
          I wish this was more of a joke, but this is exactly how the US “justice” system works. You must buy your freedom, or you will suffer a disproportionate and unjust sentence. Remember, they are not courts of “truth” and “justice”; they are Courts of Law.
        • toomuchtodo 5y ago
          This person below stole $1.6 million in PPP loans and is going to jail for 9 years. The system can and does work, although outliers can be unfortunate. Overall, arguably, the US justice system functions and rule of law is needed for a functioning society. https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/11/30/houston-man-spent-ppp-money-on-a-lambo-and-got-9-years/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/11/30/houston-man-spent-ppp...
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • vmception 5y ago
        I would support my tax dollars being spent on standardized smart contract development and standardized authentication and custodial relationships, analogous to the IETF which started out with US federal government funding and laid the frameworks for internet usefulness.
        • Daishiman 5y ago
          There's nothing in contract law preventing parties to agree on the automated execution of software when certain criteria are met. It's just that it doesn't trump contract law and it's not generally a barrier for implementing contracts digitally.
          • vmception 5y ago
            Right, insightful for some but I don’t think it disagrees or adds to anything I wrote? I’ll try again: I would like my taxpayer dollars going to smart contract development, auditing, and promulgating industry standards in a collaborate way. Just an additional signer for industry participants to consider or lean on the opinion of. Conditional execution on a distributed ledger with standardized conditions could easily get its own legal carveout to trump the analogous contract law, no different than someone someone agreeing to arbitration, but even as far as the local law invalidating private sector legalise when a parallel smart contracts is involved to limit possible behaviors already.
        • jl2718 5y ago
          The standard smart contracts are published by OpenZeppelin. Looking into these hacks, however, there are shockingly vulnerable unexpected and otherwise useless “features” in them. I don’t think that the government could standardize contracts, but they could and really ought to be in the lead over threat prevention, incident response, and notification, because they are the only entity that can link on-chain to off-chain data.
          • vmception 5y ago
            I’ve held this opinion from before OpenZeppelin existed, and I am glad they have helped tremendously. Governments can be a collaborative coding participant as we use this technology to re-evaluate the concept of governance and what redundancies the world actual needs to handle disputes or control behaviors with the pooled capital of taxpayers and the credit markets. Right now this conversation has been limited to “adversary or not”, and that’s also shortsighted. Fortunately they’ve all moved too slow and there is enough capital within the crypto ecosystem to capture them. So I dont think it will be an organic growth from here to this reality, just consensus flippenings as wealthy backers direct public agencies and legislatures to “do the needful”. As you might imagine, this was a much more extreme position to publicly have 6 years ago. But less absurd now, still not something to say on TV or in a web 2.0 office setting but at a bar or conference its understandable by people now, yay speculation driving innovation.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • vmception 5y ago
        Common and property law rely on locating the assets and the owner and then establishing jurisdiction to sanction and recover the assets. Decade old best practices for using crypto assets circumvents all of this. Ignoring the best practices leads to the assets being seized in the first place as well as persecution of the thief. Using the best practices prevents seizure from an independent private thief or the state actor thief, so you see its not even about the government and its inflated sense of relevance.
  • jl2718 5y ago
    Both can be true.
• joenathanone 5y ago
  The law isn’t perfect but we aren’t seeing banks getting robbed or hacked and people losing their money, also I’m sure all the people with money in that exchange would be loving from FDIC insurance right now, sure it’s only $100k but a whole lot better than nothing.
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    We aren't seeing banks being hacked and people losing money? Sorry, what? Here is one comparable hack[0] I remember which followed another series of SWIFT hacks. Further, people lose money all the time to more minor exploits that target just specific accounts, credit cards are always sold (less of a fault of the banks directly but tied to how the system is set up), Robinhood had a data breach recently, etc. >also I’m sure all the people with money in that exchange would be loving from FDIC insurance right now Plenty of big exchanges like Binance and Coinbase do have similar insurance and have made users whole after a hack[1].. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery 1. https://www.wired.com/story/hack-binance-cryptocurrency-exchange/amp https://www.wired.com/story/hack-binance-cryptocurrency-exch...
    • roywiggins 5y ago
      The Bangladesh hack would have been much worse if the Fed hadn't been custodian of much of the money: "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York blocked the remaining thirty transactions, amounting to US$850 million, due to suspicions raised by a misspelled instruction" and much of the other money was recovered: "All the money transferred to Sri Lanka has since been recovered. However, as of 2018 only around US$18 million of the US$81 million transferred to the Philippines has been recovered" Yeah, I wouldn't want to rely on the Federal Reserve Bank noticing a misspelled instruction before my billion dollars were released, but at least there's someone with a brain looking at the transfer before it happens!
      • ryanlol 5y ago
        From the BBC: >The RCBC bank branch in Manila to which the hackers tried to transfer $951m was in Jupiter Street. There are hundreds of banks in Manila that the hackers could have used, but they chose this one - and the decision cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. >"The transactions… were held up at the Fed because the address used in one of the orders included the word 'Jupiter', which is also the name of a sanctioned Iranian shipping vessel," says Carolyn Maloney. >Just the mention of the word "Jupiter" was enough to set alarm bells ringing in the Fed's automated computer systems. The payments were reviewed, and most were stopped. But not all. Five transactions, worth $101m, crossed this hurdle.
• agency 5y ago
  Unlike the crypto exchanges, which are paragons of competence.
  • gruez 5y ago
    >which are paragons of competence. Yes, actually. If I had to trust one entity to safeguard something digital, I'd trust the security team at a major crypto exchange, than the police department at a major city. The problem isn't really that they're incompetent, it's that they're the juiciest targets.
• emerged 5y ago
  Yea, the law should be programmed by random front end devs using house of card custom scripting engines instead.
• rco8786 5y ago
  By what measure??
  • jl2718 5y ago
    As in, they could have easily stopped many of these hacks, even after they were discovered, but they have zero clue about what to do about them, so they let the money escape, which means crypto to cash through the normal banking system. Short story: I had a job offer from one of these financial law enforcement agencies, specifically focused on preventing and tracking crypto hackers. It was rescinded by the new administration due to a mission change in the organization, refocusing on revenue through regulatory enforcement and surveillance rather than protecting Americans from theft and violence. In reality, calling them incompetent may be charitable. The simplest explanation is that they are profit-driven, and frankly don’t care about any actual harm. The money from these hacks often goes toward torturing the North Korean people, funding terror against American interests, or supporting violent drug cartels. One of the few things that angers me is that the only thing they are doing about it, is using it to further their surveillance agenda against Americans. That’s the measure I use.