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Comment by mablap | Hacker News Reader

In that regard, they're not at all different from the regular banking system.

edit: The Ethereum Foundation and devs have issued a new client that enables a soft fork, effectively freezing the DAO. The only difference with the traditional banking system here is that the decision to fork is upon the miners, and not a single entity (central bank). The spirit is the same.

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A critical difference being that the traditional banking system insulates depositors from theft whereas cyptocurrency theft leaves depositors victimized without any legal recourse.

Also, in the traditional banking system the thieves are usually caught (for all the glamor and romance, bank robbery has a very low success rate), whereas in cryptocurrency thefts, the perps are never identified, and even if they were they'd probably be in a country that doesn't give a damn.

This a million times over. This is one of the main reasons why I am sceptical about crypto currencies that promise anonymity. Sooner or later someone is going to find a way in and once enough people are effected by these problems they are going to get governments involved in regulating these things..... and we are back to square one.

Except that the Ethereum Foundation and developers have just issued a patched client that does just that: miners can now choose to prevent the thief from spending his/her coins. So in this sense it's really not so different.

So who decides who can prevent another person from getting his/her coins? I thought the whole purpose of cryptocurrency was to prevent that sort of thing.

The miners have the authority. Nothing forces them to accept a transaction.

> miners can now choose to prevent the thief from spending his/her coins.

While that sounds like a very useful feature, I think there is still a stark difference between having to update your money with security patches vs just not even worrying about any of that.

Users don't have to worry. Here the miners are akin to the banks. They process payments and thus they get to decide if the money is spent or not. For the end user, there is no difference. The fork only happens if over 51% of miners update.

How often does someone steal 10% of all the money in those systems? Even if it's backed out, the fact that it happened in the first place is pretty extreme.

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