5 ms·

>the problem of fraudulent business practices isn't specific to crypto at all The scale and the percentage of "legit" to "scam" definitely is.

dlkf 4y ago
”Lung cancer is not specific to smoking at all”
- autotune 4y ago
  "Jumping off a building is actually just flying if you don't worry about the landing. We should remember, the problem of landing isn't specific to jumping at all."
agumonkey 4y ago
And IMO, more than the scale, it's the immature bragging of being totally better than the old stuff. That said this aspect is not only in crypto, it's in the era.. lots of internet thingies are touted that way, your bluetooth connected balance that is not accurate and will fail in 6 monthes.
c7b 4y ago
Sure, that was not the point of my post. It seems that most people have reacted to this half-sentence, I think the technical discussion would have been far more interesting for this forum, especially when it comes to applications outside of blockchains. I could list more examples where substantial losses to real clients (of "normal" businesses) could have been avoided if there was a better way of proving simple facts like bank balances to auditors (it's in fact partly related to my work). The current process basically looks like this: an auditor will ask the bank to confirm that client X has such and such balance with them. Of course, the bank needs to be sure that the auditor is actually who they claim they are, so they get in touch with their client to confirm that they can tell the auditor their balance. Since this is a bit tricky if the auditor doesn't have a direct line of communication with the bank already, it is often facilitated by the client directly asking the bank to issue a balance confirmation to the auditor, and that's an entry point for impersonation attacks (in an overly simplified manner, that's also what happened at Wirecard). We probably don't need the exact fancy machinery of Merkle sum trees and zero knowledge proofs outlined in the OP, we also don't want to bring in blockchains, but I was wondering whether we could use some of those ideas to make the audit process for normal firms a bit safer.

dlkf 4y ago

”Lung cancer is not specific to smoking at all”

autotune 4y ago
"Jumping off a building is actually just flying if you don't worry about the landing. We should remember, the problem of landing isn't specific to jumping at all."

agumonkey 4y ago

And IMO, more than the scale, it's the immature bragging of being totally better than the old stuff. That said this aspect is not only in crypto, it's in the era.. lots of internet thingies are touted that way, your bluetooth connected balance that is not accurate and will fail in 6 monthes.

c7b 4y ago

Sure, that was not the point of my post. It seems that most people have reacted to this half-sentence, I think the technical discussion would have been far more interesting for this forum, especially when it comes to applications outside of blockchains. I could list more examples where substantial losses to real clients (of "normal" businesses) could have been avoided if there was a better way of proving simple facts like bank balances to auditors (it's in fact partly related to my work). The current process basically looks like this: an auditor will ask the bank to confirm that client X has such and such balance with them. Of course, the bank needs to be sure that the auditor is actually who they claim they are, so they get in touch with their client to confirm that they can tell the auditor their balance. Since this is a bit tricky if the auditor doesn't have a direct line of communication with the bank already, it is often facilitated by the client directly asking the bank to issue a balance confirmation to the auditor, and that's an entry point for impersonation attacks (in an overly simplified manner, that's also what happened at Wirecard). We probably don't need the exact fancy machinery of Merkle sum trees and zero knowledge proofs outlined in the OP, we also don't want to bring in blockchains, but I was wondering whether we could use some of those ideas to make the audit process for normal firms a bit safer.