Their fix was to put a piece of paper over the passwords.
What a time.
Bitcoin, and really fintech as a whole, are beyond reckless.
With Bitcoin you do not get government bailouts like what happened with the beyond reckless banks in 2008.
It's breathtaking how frequent these are.
It is not beyond imagination that the most popular Bitcoin blockchain (and thus, the label of being the "real" Bitcoin) could change at some point in the future.
"Bitcoin" is not immune from the implications of political fuckery.
Governments around the world are 100% attempting different plans to destabilize or destroy Bitcoin because it harms their interests and ability to print money from thin air. But at the end of the day it's a distributed ledger, so even if they do find a way to manipulate or damage or takeover the network the Bitcoin users can just fork it from before they did their damage and continue from there. That is the ultimate power of a decentralized blockchain, nobody has ultimate power and everyone votes with their resources.
The government of Ethereum is not the US government.
Bitcoin is not an immutable law of nature. If the coin minting cap is reached, all that needs to happen is for miners to start running a fork with a higher cap. Tada, more coins conjured out of the ether, just like all the previous ones. If you want enforced scarcity, you need to be tied to something physically scarce.
I don't know what the specific mechanism would be, but I would bet that it relates to the billions of dollars backing the current ecosystem, and the interests of the people behind them. If the right event or crisis comes along, then people could be compelled to switch over to something else.
I'm sure there's someone out there still mining blocks on that chain with the exploit from 2010, but that's not where the mining power is. If the right series of events occurs, the miners will switch.
The node operators play just as critical of a role in Bitcoin as the miners.
all that needs to happen is for governments to stop burning fossil fuels
all that needs to happen is for researchers to publish boring papers replicating others results
all that needs to happen is for fishermen to stop overfishing
Coordination problems seem easy but never really are. The chance of all the miners just suddenly agreeing to do something all at once is pretty low to impossible.
We're right on the corner of that very day that you're talking about.
But if, say, a mere 99% of miners switch, it’s far from a given that people would follow. Having more mining capacity makes the chain more secure, but it’s not that big of a deal.
Hahahaha
I have seen some toe curling shit in fintech.
In fact they already have. There are 10s of thousands of forks of Bitcoin. Only a handful ever got significant attention. And, the original is still much larger than all of the forks combined.
It's that everything you do on the blockchain is there forever, so if a government needs you in jail for using it, they can show you were involved in a financial crime and the blockchain proves it... And if you are unwilling to give up your public wallet they can keep you in jail indefinitely until you do.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Every activity on the network is encoded into a perpetual auditable dataset, by design.
No such mechanisms in Bitcoin, so hacks have longer-term impact.
Billing for random things outside of the agreed upon scope of work is actually unreasonable. It’s something covered in every contracting agreement I’ve ever been a part of.
Maybe they could point to some contract that maybe would have covered it, but when your contractors start billing you for sending quick emails about unrelated things you didn’t ask them to look into, it’s not a good sign. When contractors bill for quick emails they don’t bill for the 3.7 minutes it took to write, they round up to some bigger number like an hour.
Anecdotally, every time I’ve encountered contractors who started billing per individual communication that they initiated (not something requested) or started finding new things to bill us for that we didn’t ask, it was a sign that we were a target being milked for billable hours. Some contractors have a lightbulb moment when they think nobody is scrutinizing their billing and think they discovered an almost infinite money glitch by initiating new things that they can bill for. None of the good contractors I’ve worked with over the years would even think to bill for an individual short email.
First thing that comes to mind off the top of my head as a US-Govt option here would be something like: bail out US people/companies of bitcoin holdings in USD in conjunction with banning bitcoin in the US going forward. So that would be quite the string of events at that point for non-US bitcoin holders: first a crash that caused all these US bitcoin holders to go screaming to the government for help. Then the overnight removal of a huge chunk of the bitcoin market, coupled with either a firesale to comply with the ban or US gov seizure of a bunch of the coins, which will push the price lower for anyone who hasn't sold yet since their buyer pool is now much lower.
The government in the US has far bigger guns than the citizenry these days.
The only thing that will ever prevent a government from abusing its populace is the willingness of actors of the state - police and soldiers - to say no to abusive orders. Independent thinking coupled with believing in the people more than the executive is the only thing that will ever keep us safe. Guns are not defensive tools. The state can shoot you before you shoot them if they decide they don't like what you're doing.
Put guns in the hands of the people you're policing and you just make it that much easier for the police/soldiers/govt sympathizers to make it us-against-them and side with the totalitarians.
"Let's defend Coinbase, that small little startup!"
Maybe just stop being a boot licker? It seems pathetic from the outside.
Not saying it is untrue, but it is definitely true that Coinbase has never lost customer funds while operating in an environment with 0 safety nets and being one of the most lucrative targets.
This leak over customer data suggests that they should treat that with as much obsession as they do with their private keys.
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and-bitfinex
As I said, they have never lost customer funds in their custody.
How do you know?
The miners do not control the network. The people transacting on the network control the network and decides who is rich and who is not; and whether the miners get paid or not.
Not one (I last checked about a month ago!)
Security, while pretty good, is still lacking imo!
It was a fun time. They eventually fixed it in the app to show my true balance and fixed my statements back to what it was. But holy shit, the fact that an engineer would think that would be the proper fix is wild... this is pre-llms, otherwise, I'd think they'd been vibe-coding.
I guess arresting ten thousand people a year for grevious hurting of the feefees with assault tweets is a recently prevented overstep that the citizens of some other countries have not been able to prevent.
The point of a hypothetical suggestion is to direct a specific course of action. I am simultaneously amazed at how complex the 'hypothetical' construct is, and also how many people aren't able to reason around them... since this is basically what our big brains are for.
If you assume everybody involved just stops responding to their current incentives, you can solve any coordination problem, in a manner of speaking. But it's useless as a battle plan. Operationalizing a change demands that you pick a party you're talking to, and with full view of their capabilities and limitations, modify their current course of action in the smallest possible way that accomplishes a change.
One place that they basically force you to use it, is my local drug store (big chain, that I won't call out by name).
Their auto-cashier absolutely sucks. It's almost impossible to avoid having an issue that requires you waiting around for the poor schulb to come over and fix.
They recently set up touchscreens, at the prescription counter.
I have not once had success with the touchscreen. It can never find me, or my wife. They always have to just take my information manually.
I suspect that the backend (the algorithm and main engine) is good. I think almost all the problems are with shoddy frontend stuff. For example, I think the touchscreen issue is capitalization, and the old system cut off our surnames, so I actually have to type in about half my name, in all caps, to have it find my prescription.
I feel personally offended, when I encounter stuff like that.
Oh, and here real cashiers usually scam you by scanning the items twice and so forth (not sure if intentionally or not), it happened a couple of times to my parents (not considered elderly yet) in the past few months I would say.
In any case, I feel your pain.
A lot of it is about setting boundaries with the client. If I have a conversation with you a handful of times to remove password from a whiteboard and you don't do it, that's a big deal and would professionally impact me if something bad happened. Cause like, your client's clients includes Coinbase. Like another person commented -- I really should have just dropped them as a client because the professional risk was too high.
The other is an organization body that you freely choose to associate with, eg: using Etherium.
I don't understand how you can conflate the two.
Vitalik did not print billions of dollars out of thin air and then force every citizen of the US to bear that cost through the inflation of the US dollar eating away at their savings and investments.
That’s not what I’m talking about.
Responding to a company is responding to a request they made for your time.
That said, most contractors I’ve worked with would not bill for a short email saying they’re unable or unwilling to do some work as a professional courtesy. The contractors who literally bill and round up for every email are usually going out of their way to maximize billing, which is eventually accounted for in the rates we’re willing to pay for them. We learn quickly that certain contractors will bill and round up for everything, so the most we’re willing to entertain as an hourly rate for them is lower as we know they’re going to send arbitrarily higher amounts of hours over.
I've been oncall for long enough in my career to know that a "quick email" is not, really, a "quick" email. It can completely derail everything you do for the day. If on-request work takes five minutes to write an email, then that time includes reading the email, thinking about the email, responding to the email, the cost of derailment of other contract work, the cost of getting back into that other contract work, the research needed to tell them "no". Again, it's about setting boundaries with the client.
Somehow I think Nathaniel Popper would have been able to put that fact directly in his NYT article instead of a throw away tweet if there was a material impact. Heck he wasted a paragraph quoting one of Coinbase's board of directors on the risks of unregulated exchanges like bitfinex versus Coinbase.
The fact that lax security has never caused them to loose billions of dollars of customer funds is just luck and paper covering passwords on a whiteboard.
If you give me $5, and then I pass it on to Bob for you, how many licenses and how much paper work do you think I should need to do that if I did that as a business? If you give me some money and I am a business, how much paperwork should that incur?
From what I was told, the issue for the exchange was that if they were found out to not enforce their self regulation then it'd be the precipitous event to the hammer coming down on them from regulatory bodies.
So yeah. Regulation's kinda shite here.
I use the one with the better self service checkout, that doesnt reliably make me wait for the schlub.
If miners suddenly fled en masse, it’s possible for the chain to be left stranded where the small number of miners remaining couldn’t realistically get to the next 2016-block interval to adjust the difficulty down to match the drastically decreased mining capacity. If mining capacity dropped by a factor of 1000 and it happened right after an adjustment, then bitcoin would be producing about one block every week, and it would take about 40 years (if mining capacity stayed constant) to reach the next adjustment.
Even leaving your laptop unlocked for seconds in the office would have someone /pwn it in slack and get flagged by security.
If there’s one thing they took extremely seriously it was data security.