Klarna users are being signed in to random accounts

Yes and we'll be screaming "please shut off your computer" because of all of the excess heat and insane power bills.

Why not separate concerns? Crypto currencies work without Proof of Work today.

Because it’s totally unrelated to the problem Klarna is facing. What does authentication / authorisation have to do with financial system...

Get your vocabulary right. Klarna is having an authorization problem not an authentication one.

Yeah, so basically use something like Chia instead and create tons of e-waste?

seems like you have issues with vocabulary - it clearly indicates that problems are with authentication, not authorization :D each time klarna identifies user as different user.

Because crypto exchanges and smart contracts are such a shining beacon of bugfree code?

People can't use bitcoin without offloading transactions outside of the blockchain, which means entrusting an exchange, which could and probably has the same issues as Klarna.

It's more about incentive alignment, and lack of free get out of jail cards -- people tend to assume you can just roll back fraudulent fiat transactions. Fuck up in crypto? Poof, the money is gone...

Compared to legacy finance, the exchanges are indeed bugfree. I would sooner trust Binance security team than people who think SMS is enough of a second factor. Never mind all the 'European unicorn' challenger 'banks'.

With Klarna, any fraud that results from this incident can and will be reversed thanks to both company and government regulations.

With crypto, anything but perfect opsec on the entire stack through which your money travels means potentially losing all your money irreversibly. I’ll take “just use a database” thanks.

This is probably the most pointless comment I have seen on HN for a long time...

Its not like BitCoin and other Coins are free of scams/fraud because they are not regulated...

Most blockchains startups need to create problems which nobody has to sell it to people who don't know better...

> Why not separate concerns? Crypto currencies work without Proof of Work today.

You mean through proof of stake instead? Yay, now all the people who wanted to avoid having a competent central bank in a free democracy control the money supply get to have the people with the most money control the supply instead.

Jesus fucking christ, you cryptocurrency lunatics have lost it.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but HN guidelines demand more constructive disagreements.

"you can just roll back fraudulent fiat transactions. Fuck up in crypto? Poof, the money is gone..."

Do you know why Ethereum Classic exists?

If I can see another user's balance as is shown in the tweet of the original poster, that to me is an authorization problem as its concerned with access. Why? Because as user A I should not be able to read information of users B to Z.

I don't think it's an authentication problem as there's no confirmed problem with proving an assertion as in e.g. (sha3("hello") === "0xabc") in the original post.

Why not separate concerns? Crypto currencies work without central banking or democracies today.

OK, then let us take the German Wirecard case. It's real. Not just a hypothetical. Will all the money that has disappeared through this fraudulent and corrupt company all be "reversed thanks to both company and government regulations?"

Sorry to spoiler you but the answer is: no.

What OP has posted is neither a fraud or scam. It points to a safety problem in Klarna's system.

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate on that?

They work poorly (if at all) as currencies:

(1) They're way too volatile.

(2) Even if they weren't, the popular cryptocurrencies today have fixed money supplies. A central bank cannot increase it to target moderate inflation.

I'm sorry about my second paragraph. I'm getting a bit antsy from losing an otherwise intelligent friend to this nonsense.

Central banks use PID controllers to control stability [1]. Stable coin systems can use PID controller systems too [2]. Stable coins are as volatile as their fiat counterparts.

Crypto currencies are run by people as much as central banks are. People can have opinions and values. People forked of Ethereum into Ethereum Classic because they had an issue with the main chain's policy. ETC community is alive.

Building crypto currencies is all about optimizing for legitimacy [3]. We can build what we want, we just need to want it in the first place. No need to discount a whole field of computer science with a comment.

- 1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11403-014-0127-3

- 2: https://github.com/reflexer-labs/whitepapers/blob/master/Eng...

- 3: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

Sure. We can probably build a sane cryptocurrency. I'm talking about the ones that people are sinking tens of bn into and hyping the hell out of today.

Fair enough, I'm against the on-going hype in the space.

If you mean me, I've been lost since 2014 to this stuff: Check my CV on my blog: https://timdaub.github.io

I'm well aware of ETC. It's not going to happen again on Ethereum, with any level of certainty, anyway. So crypto exchanges and similar won't be able to count on that.

I've used Binance, and as far as I can tell, their stuff works as well as Stripe or better. They are an order of magnitude bigger than Coinbase.

Whether they are likely to have a competent security team with sufficient budget is an exercise left to the reader.

My interactions with Klarna have so far failed to inspire similar confidence.

10 transactions/sec means you are trading somewhere off-chain, meaning you entrust someone else with verification on your transaction until all those transactions are cleared on-chain. Meaning you are just trusting a bank (or non-bank) anyways, but with bitcoin buzzwords on top.

No. I don't know you.