5 ms·

Exactly! if the experts can’t secure their accounts, what hope does anyone else have? Soon you will see people saying you should have done this or that complic

Exactly! if the experts can’t secure their accounts, what hope does anyone else have? Soon you will see people saying you should have done this or that complicated thing, or how somebody so smart could should have known better. No matter what they say it is never enough. This is why lack of consumer protections suck.

psychphysic 4y ago
That's why hardware based security is really the only way at this point. He might be a bitcoin core Dev but does he use ledger/trezor etc? Is his PGP key on his hardrive or a smartcard? In this day and age your computer not a bastion it once was. (It never really was but it's more of a problem in 2022 than 1982).
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This completely talks past what the person you're replying to is saying: it doesn't matter if "hardware based security is [...] the only way," because its conspicuous absence indicates that even the experts fail to meet the onerous requirements placed on them by cryptocurrency.
  - bena 4y ago
    Yeah, this only highlights how ridiculous the requirements are. The system needs to be tolerant of failures and faults of multiple natures. And cryptocurrency is very intolerant or many types of failures and faults.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    Well his PGP key was compromised too. So why is crypto the only thing getting attention?
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      My speculation there would be that PGP's usability weaknesses have been known for decades, and so there isn't all that much to be said about it.
- JW_00000 4y ago
  When someone writes: > Soon you will see people saying you should have done this or that complicated thing and you answer: > Is his PGP key on his hardrive or a smartcard? you're proving their point.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    But is it a reasonable point? I would assume that if you are a major player in the bitcoin world, you should do complicated things to secure yourself. Its sort of like if someone wins the lottery, and tells the world they are putting the money under their mattress in their home. Its not unreasonable to say that such a person faces more risk than an ordinary person and should install an alarm system or something.
    - psychphysic 4y ago
      Exactly they are ignoring that this is a solved problem. If you don't take up the easy convenient solution to your problem that's on you. Hopefully this is a starting red flag for the bitcoin Dev team to implement hardware wallet support.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      You would assume. But, empirically, users don't - even users who should know better. Users don't. If your model doesn't take that into account, your model is broken. The Bitcoin model is broken. It very intentionally got rid of all the institutions that regulate and control finance, and in doing so, it got rid of everything that protects regular people from the wolves. The regular people aren't up to the task of protecting themselves, and they regularly show it. The model is broken.
      - bawolff 4y ago
        So to be clear - i agree that bitcoin is a shitshow, haven for fraudsters and generally sucks. But to the specific point, there is no model that fully takes this into account. There is no model that puts risk to zero. There will always be adversaries that can attack you if the payoff is large enough. There will always be people with increased risk exposure who have to take special precautions because the effort/reward calculus makes sense for malicious people to attack them. The reason bitcoin sucks is not because its model includes such situations; it sucks because the bar for someone to be the type of person who has to care about such things in bitcoin is so much lower than in traditional banking.
- MrMan 4y ago
  a really obtuse and clueless response which literally makes the previous posters post for them by dint of its cluelessness
300bps 4y ago
This is why lack of consumer protections suck Agreed, and the problem is that this is a feature. Without that feature of a lack of central control, Bitcoin's main use case is invalid.
- hugs_vs_toph 4y ago
  [flagged]
- jshen 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - Psychoshy_bc1q 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 4y ago
      Please don't do this, even in response to a provocation - we have to ban such accounts. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
  - dang 4y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments.
bsder 4y ago
Give someone enough incentive and they will hack you. Internet security is 99% "nobody gives enough damn to do it".
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> if the experts can’t secure their accounts, what hope does anyone else have? This is my opinion of the entire software industry. Chrome exploits, iPhone hacks, etc. These are nearly trillion dollar companies. If they can't do it then nobody can. Something is fundamentally broken.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Something is fundamentally broken. "We can write perfect software to prevent all attacks" is fundamentally broken, because we have empirically proven that we can't. (The previous model, "we can trust people", is even more broken. But maybe it's the same breakage? "If this packet that came over the internet passes all of our filters of known bad things, then we should go ahead and process it.") People have touted capability-based security, but I don't think that's the answer, at least for consumer devices (phones and not-administered-by-IT computers). Users will give an app whatever permissions it asks for in order for it to shut up and start running, and those permissions will be used to gut their security. It may limit the damage somewhat, depending on how disciplined the app and the user are, but it will only reduce the damage. We need a completely different answer. I don't know what it is.
  - fsflover 4y ago
    The answer is security through isolation. See: https://qubes-os.org https://qubes-os.org. My daily driver for years.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
      Qubes, as great as it may be, is still another abstraction on top of an insecure base. The fact that things like spectre and meltdown are even possible is worrying. How does Qubes solve this? As another poster said, we need some other computing paradigm, but I don't know what that would look like. All I know is something is broken if these behemoth companies with limitless resources still get it wrong.
      - 4y ago
willnonya 4y ago
"This is why lack of consumer protections suck" So, rather than the consumer being responsible for their actions you support consumers engaging in whatever risky behavior they like as long as someone else is there to protect them or give them a do-over?
- sp332 4y ago
  Consumer protections protect against fraud. Not "risky behaviors".
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  Well the "trust me bro" marketers (and developers) have told them this is all good. Is it responsible, idk, probably not. Then again, the point the GP seems to make is that this kind of platform should not be adopted for anything important, let the gamblers gamble if they want but don't try to sell it to the general public.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > So, rather than the consumer being responsible for their actions you support consumers engaging in whatever risky behavior they like as long as someone else is there to protect them or give them a do-over? Yes. Every time you make a foolproof system the world brings us a bigger fool. I'd rather a few irresponsible people get a do-over than otherwise responsible people getting rekt like this.
- ilyt 4y ago
  The consumer in this case needs to be world class security expert (as "just" being good enough to be core bitcoin developer is clearly not enough) to just not lose money. That's unreasonable for something that's supposed to be used as money
- danaris 4y ago
  This is a false dichotomy. There is a big middle ground between "cover for users engaging in whatever risky behavior they like" and "cover for nothing whatsoever". In this case, the problem is expecting users to be perfectly diligent, and either discard all convenience or all security. Cryptocurrency continues to be a case study demonstrating why so many of the systems it's trying (unsuccessfully) to replace operate in ways that it doesn't.
bawolff 4y ago
Experts are also bigger targets and face more risks than ordinary people. Like in the non-crypto world, banks are the experts on storing money securely, but people still try and rob banks despite ordinary people being much easier targets.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  except this wasn't a targeted attack, it was just a run of the mill shotgun approach to capture wallets. cryptocurrency is stupid. regulation around banks is there for many very good reasons. https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1609655629903265795 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1609655629903265795 you won’t trust highly regulated banks, but you will trust random strangers on the internet whom you know want your wallet and all the coins in it, without any guarantees whatsoever that any security is in place. you only need to trust yourself, which is already 8-10 orders of magnitude less trustworthy than a bank, AT BEST. even in the rare event that an established bank does go under, and it holds some of your money when it does, FDIC insurance will get you at least some of that money back. cryptocurrency has zero recourse if you are harmed. i laugh when cryptobros and NFTbros lose money, because anyone with any critical thinking skills whatsoever saw these things as shams at the outset, and we tried to speak up, but none of those who have lost money even considered listening at the time. it is hilarious to me when these things happen. i actually, literally, laugh out loud, without a single hint of remorse.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    > except this wasn't a targeted attack, it was just a run of the mill shotgun approach to capture wallets. Do we know that? The tweet you linked to basically says, we have no idea what happened so we have no idea if it was targeted or not. But i do agree generally that i have no idea why "imagine the financial system but with no regulation or oversight" is considered a selling point.
gruez 4y ago
> Exactly! if the experts can’t secure their accounts, what hope does anyone else have? A lot of hope, actually. If he followed the simple and oft repeated advice of using a cold wallet and/or offline computer, this attacked would have been mitigated. Hell, if some of the comments/speculation in this thread is true (ie. he kept his wallet.dat on a server connected to the internet), then this hack wouldn't have affected the user with the most basic setup of a software wallet running on a computer behind a NAT firewall.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  If it was that simple and easy why wasn't he doing it. It's simply a ridiculous failure mode that you can lose your entire life savings with no recourse if you make a silly mistake. What a dreadful idea to foist upon ordinary people as the future of finance. We've never accepted this before and let's never accept this again. Every random walk down the timeline results in 100% of coins lost or stolen. [edit] You can only blame the user so many times before you have to really look inward haha.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Who is foisting anything here? I'm not aware of anyone who has been forced to use crypto
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      Anyone with a direct or indirect stake in one of the few companies silly enough to throw it on their balance sheet. Since TSLA made the S&P that's basically everyone with a market investment, an IRA, a 401(k), a pension. CPPIB invested in FTX. CDPQ in Celsius. Everyone in El Salvador. It's a bit of a cancer. Anyways those doing the foisting also includes all the shills, the laser-eyed, the influencers. [edit] It's not enough to say because they weren't forced at gunpoint, it's not coercive or immoral. We don't accept that behavior from people shilling penny stocks. And of course Salvadoran shopowners were in fact coerced with force.
      - 4y ago
DoItToMe81 4y ago
He left his keys on an insecure server exposed to the internet. This is the equivalent of "LOCKSMITH LEAVES KEYS IN LETTERBOX EVERY DAY AND THEY GET STOLEN, HOW CAN U TRUST PEOPLE 2 LOCK HOME?????"

psychphysic 4y ago

That's why hardware based security is really the only way at this point. He might be a bitcoin core Dev but does he use ledger/trezor etc? Is his PGP key on his hardrive or a smartcard? In this day and age your computer not a bastion it once was. (It never really was but it's more of a problem in 2022 than 1982).

woodruffw 4y ago
This completely talks past what the person you're replying to is saying: it doesn't matter if "hardware based security is [...] the only way," because its conspicuous absence indicates that even the experts fail to meet the onerous requirements placed on them by cryptocurrency.
- bena 4y ago
  Yeah, this only highlights how ridiculous the requirements are. The system needs to be tolerant of failures and faults of multiple natures. And cryptocurrency is very intolerant or many types of failures and faults.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  Well his PGP key was compromised too. So why is crypto the only thing getting attention?
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    My speculation there would be that PGP's usability weaknesses have been known for decades, and so there isn't all that much to be said about it.
JW_00000 4y ago
When someone writes: > Soon you will see people saying you should have done this or that complicated thing and you answer: > Is his PGP key on his hardrive or a smartcard? you're proving their point.
- bawolff 4y ago
  But is it a reasonable point? I would assume that if you are a major player in the bitcoin world, you should do complicated things to secure yourself. Its sort of like if someone wins the lottery, and tells the world they are putting the money under their mattress in their home. Its not unreasonable to say that such a person faces more risk than an ordinary person and should install an alarm system or something.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    Exactly they are ignoring that this is a solved problem. If you don't take up the easy convenient solution to your problem that's on you. Hopefully this is a starting red flag for the bitcoin Dev team to implement hardware wallet support.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    You would assume. But, empirically, users don't - even users who should know better. Users don't. If your model doesn't take that into account, your model is broken. The Bitcoin model is broken. It very intentionally got rid of all the institutions that regulate and control finance, and in doing so, it got rid of everything that protects regular people from the wolves. The regular people aren't up to the task of protecting themselves, and they regularly show it. The model is broken.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      So to be clear - i agree that bitcoin is a shitshow, haven for fraudsters and generally sucks. But to the specific point, there is no model that fully takes this into account. There is no model that puts risk to zero. There will always be adversaries that can attack you if the payoff is large enough. There will always be people with increased risk exposure who have to take special precautions because the effort/reward calculus makes sense for malicious people to attack them. The reason bitcoin sucks is not because its model includes such situations; it sucks because the bar for someone to be the type of person who has to care about such things in bitcoin is so much lower than in traditional banking.
MrMan 4y ago
a really obtuse and clueless response which literally makes the previous posters post for them by dint of its cluelessness

300bps 4y ago

This is why lack of consumer protections suck Agreed, and the problem is that this is a feature. Without that feature of a lack of central control, Bitcoin's main use case is invalid.

hugs_vs_toph 4y ago
[flagged]
jshen 4y ago
[flagged]
- Psychoshy_bc1q 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 4y ago
    Please don't do this, even in response to a provocation - we have to ban such accounts. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments.

bsder 4y ago

Give someone enough incentive and they will hack you. Internet security is 99% "nobody gives enough damn to do it".

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> if the experts can’t secure their accounts, what hope does anyone else have? This is my opinion of the entire software industry. Chrome exploits, iPhone hacks, etc. These are nearly trillion dollar companies. If they can't do it then nobody can. Something is fundamentally broken.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Something is fundamentally broken. "We can write perfect software to prevent all attacks" is fundamentally broken, because we have empirically proven that we can't. (The previous model, "we can trust people", is even more broken. But maybe it's the same breakage? "If this packet that came over the internet passes all of our filters of known bad things, then we should go ahead and process it.") People have touted capability-based security, but I don't think that's the answer, at least for consumer devices (phones and not-administered-by-IT computers). Users will give an app whatever permissions it asks for in order for it to shut up and start running, and those permissions will be used to gut their security. It may limit the damage somewhat, depending on how disciplined the app and the user are, but it will only reduce the damage. We need a completely different answer. I don't know what it is.
- fsflover 4y ago
  The answer is security through isolation. See: https://qubes-os.org https://qubes-os.org. My daily driver for years.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    Qubes, as great as it may be, is still another abstraction on top of an insecure base. The fact that things like spectre and meltdown are even possible is worrying. How does Qubes solve this? As another poster said, we need some other computing paradigm, but I don't know what that would look like. All I know is something is broken if these behemoth companies with limitless resources still get it wrong.
    - 4y ago

willnonya 4y ago

"This is why lack of consumer protections suck" So, rather than the consumer being responsible for their actions you support consumers engaging in whatever risky behavior they like as long as someone else is there to protect them or give them a do-over?

sp332 4y ago
Consumer protections protect against fraud. Not "risky behaviors".
jnsaff2 4y ago
Well the "trust me bro" marketers (and developers) have told them this is all good. Is it responsible, idk, probably not. Then again, the point the GP seems to make is that this kind of platform should not be adopted for anything important, let the gamblers gamble if they want but don't try to sell it to the general public.
arcticbull 4y ago
> So, rather than the consumer being responsible for their actions you support consumers engaging in whatever risky behavior they like as long as someone else is there to protect them or give them a do-over? Yes. Every time you make a foolproof system the world brings us a bigger fool. I'd rather a few irresponsible people get a do-over than otherwise responsible people getting rekt like this.
ilyt 4y ago
The consumer in this case needs to be world class security expert (as "just" being good enough to be core bitcoin developer is clearly not enough) to just not lose money. That's unreasonable for something that's supposed to be used as money
danaris 4y ago
This is a false dichotomy. There is a big middle ground between "cover for users engaging in whatever risky behavior they like" and "cover for nothing whatsoever". In this case, the problem is expecting users to be perfectly diligent, and either discard all convenience or all security. Cryptocurrency continues to be a case study demonstrating why so many of the systems it's trying (unsuccessfully) to replace operate in ways that it doesn't.

bawolff 4y ago

Experts are also bigger targets and face more risks than ordinary people. Like in the non-crypto world, banks are the experts on storing money securely, but people still try and rob banks despite ordinary people being much easier targets.

naikrovek 4y ago
except this wasn't a targeted attack, it was just a run of the mill shotgun approach to capture wallets. cryptocurrency is stupid. regulation around banks is there for many very good reasons. https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1609655629903265795 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1609655629903265795 you won’t trust highly regulated banks, but you will trust random strangers on the internet whom you know want your wallet and all the coins in it, without any guarantees whatsoever that any security is in place. you only need to trust yourself, which is already 8-10 orders of magnitude less trustworthy than a bank, AT BEST. even in the rare event that an established bank does go under, and it holds some of your money when it does, FDIC insurance will get you at least some of that money back. cryptocurrency has zero recourse if you are harmed. i laugh when cryptobros and NFTbros lose money, because anyone with any critical thinking skills whatsoever saw these things as shams at the outset, and we tried to speak up, but none of those who have lost money even considered listening at the time. it is hilarious to me when these things happen. i actually, literally, laugh out loud, without a single hint of remorse.
- bawolff 4y ago
  > except this wasn't a targeted attack, it was just a run of the mill shotgun approach to capture wallets. Do we know that? The tweet you linked to basically says, we have no idea what happened so we have no idea if it was targeted or not. But i do agree generally that i have no idea why "imagine the financial system but with no regulation or oversight" is considered a selling point.

gruez 4y ago

> Exactly! if the experts can’t secure their accounts, what hope does anyone else have? A lot of hope, actually. If he followed the simple and oft repeated advice of using a cold wallet and/or offline computer, this attacked would have been mitigated. Hell, if some of the comments/speculation in this thread is true (ie. he kept his wallet.dat on a server connected to the internet), then this hack wouldn't have affected the user with the most basic setup of a software wallet running on a computer behind a NAT firewall.

arcticbull 4y ago
If it was that simple and easy why wasn't he doing it. It's simply a ridiculous failure mode that you can lose your entire life savings with no recourse if you make a silly mistake. What a dreadful idea to foist upon ordinary people as the future of finance. We've never accepted this before and let's never accept this again. Every random walk down the timeline results in 100% of coins lost or stolen. [edit] You can only blame the user so many times before you have to really look inward haha.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Who is foisting anything here? I'm not aware of anyone who has been forced to use crypto
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Anyone with a direct or indirect stake in one of the few companies silly enough to throw it on their balance sheet. Since TSLA made the S&P that's basically everyone with a market investment, an IRA, a 401(k), a pension. CPPIB invested in FTX. CDPQ in Celsius. Everyone in El Salvador. It's a bit of a cancer. Anyways those doing the foisting also includes all the shills, the laser-eyed, the influencers. [edit] It's not enough to say because they weren't forced at gunpoint, it's not coercive or immoral. We don't accept that behavior from people shilling penny stocks. And of course Salvadoran shopowners were in fact coerced with force.
    - 4y ago

DoItToMe81 4y ago

He left his keys on an insecure server exposed to the internet. This is the equivalent of "LOCKSMITH LEAVES KEYS IN LETTERBOX EVERY DAY AND THEY GET STOLEN, HOW CAN U TRUST PEOPLE 2 LOCK HOME?????"