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Comment by kevinmchugh | Hacker News Reader

My aunt worked for Simon Marketing for many years. She was a designer. My cousin was pictured on a fry box once. All of their drinking glasses were McDonald's promos, much like a software developer's swag t-shirt collection. They had these Mickey Mouse glasses I loved but that had a habit of shattering into a million pieces under the slightest thermal shock or bump. She had a full collection of the 101 Dalmatians Happy Meals toys. We were all sure that'd be worth a lot of money some day. Looks like it's worth 50-100 USD on ebay now.

She lost her job, since this racket destroyed Simon Marketing.

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Too bad for Simon Marketing. It raises an interesting question from a business's point of view. Who can you trust in a situation like this. Personally I would only trust a security expert to provide expert guidance but not have them do any execution. They would seem to me to be the least trustworthy, simply because they have had a professional lifetime of temptation and rumination.

You setup internal controls to separate duties and have different organizational silos and discourage fraternization.

Then you audit the process and the work often.

Also, you force people to take a break. It's pretty common in finance to require a 2 week consecutive holiday every so often: one justification being that if someone was cooking the books, the person taking over their role would probably stumble across it.

Or for the Sarbanes Oxley rules. We often run into headaches at my office because our second check signer is a general manager based in Canada 75% of the time which ends up holding up any checks over $1k.

Also, you fire people who're assholes.

The complete lack of internal audits was something that struck me about this story. Million dollar game pieces constantly disappearing, and no one in the company was in a position to notice anything was wrong.

They didn't disappear, it appeared that he'd put them on the packages as expected and then people won the prizes as expected.

They were not security pros. Everything was left to trusted people. They didnt have people witness the opening of envelopes and installation of game pieces. So nobody saw that he was stealing. Today we know better.

this is correct. power corrupt, absolute power corrupt absolutely. simple fact. it's actually one of the most basic aspects of security. This is why you need to split up responsibilities, and in some cases even obfuscate an end-goal to someone in the middle. That helps them not to see opportunities to corrupt. you can be very ethical, and say you wouldn't go for those millions. but probarbly in that case, ou already have millions (perhaps gathered similarly) or no opportunity ever present itself to you in such fashion because your employers take good care to prevent that.

simple example: what if you are the person to take, process and finalize orders at a company? You can take all their money. If you split these into 3 separate tasks, none of them can do anything. (because social factors will have more chance to keep the 3 in normal working order, where only 1 is easily to corrupt without 2 other holding them steady.)

It's unbeleivable such large coorporations still have these kind of issues. over complicated structures in my opinion, where people stop seeing the forest through the trees so to speak, and lose sight of these important matters.

Yes! The really serious organizations are very diligent about dividing the responsibilities/opportunities.

While working at IBM, there was a bit of fanfare for someone in my dept who got a very big promotion (iirc, he skipped a couple levels up at once). The promotion was because he'd noticed a flaw in the system that could have allowed four people to collectively conspire and get away with maybe $6 million. He reported it and the managers were all suitably impressed. I never managed to get enough details to understand the potential scam, or the solution implemented.

Contrast this with the much larger amounts at stake with this sweepstakes & fast food org, and they aren't putting in any such multi-party controls. No surprise they were scammed.

This seems very dependent indeed on the top of the organization being absolutely trustworthy. And, uh, to say that's not the case is an understatement.

True about that org top being untrustworthy, but I think it is more about the specifically designed structure of the org,

Design the org so that power is separated, no one has the opportunity to steal at scale.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Divide the power and you remove the impetus for corruption. I don't think that cop would have done anything but an ordinary good job, had that multi-million dollar temptation not just showed up in his lap...

Similar stories happened to Bennie Beans on ebay. Everyone jumped on the tilip mania hoping to make good buck skyrocketing the price of beannies and making owner millionaire. Then it all crashed. You can still buy original beanies with very low serial number for less than $10, all the way from $4,000 people used to originally pay.

Artificial scarcity can be a fickle mistress.

We talking about beanie babies or bitcoin here?

BTC is north of $8000. Probably could choose a better "tulip" to make fun of.

People said the same things about their $4000 BB’s, until they were worthless. That’s sort of the point of an intrinsically worthless object of speculation and artificial scarcity, it seems like it can’t lose, until it loses.

This is not at all a fair comparison. For one thing, the scarcity of bitcoin is not really all that artificial. You can't forge BTC and there's no central organization that can suddenly print more.

The other thing is that bitcoin actually solves a need in the world - the ability to transfer wealth from one person to another anywhere in the world without intermediaries. Folks can argue about how necessary this is for the average person, but it's certainly something that beanie babies (or any other physical collectible good) cannot provide.

>The other thing is that bitcoin actually solves a need in the world - the ability to transfer wealth from one person to another anywhere in the world without intermediaries.

See, the only people for whom this is an actual “need” are crazy libertarians (questionable) and criminals (absolutely). Nobody else in the world considers this an unmet need.

What good is a solution in search of a problem?

Nobody else in the world considers this an unmet need.

Pretty much the entire population of Venezuela and Zimbabwe would beg to differ... and that's just recent history.

And most people here calling BTC a tulip don't have the balls to short it. Easy to say a lot of stuff with zero skin in the game.

Or those people understand that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. That doesn’t change the inevitable result.

And most people hyping BTC are bagholders who have a vested interest in shilling their useless product. How about you divest your cryptocurrencies before we believe anything you have to say about them?

>BTC is north of $8000.

currently. I hope for the sake of the investors that it stays so, but I have a feeling it will not.

(This feeling is not at all informed by my bitterness at not buying in when 1BTC was 20 bucks.)

I have some awesome tulips in my garden that I’ll sell you for $8000 a pop. I’ll call it my Initial Cultivar Offering. It has massive appreciation potential.

do millions of people think they're worth $8000 each?

Do millions of suckers exist on Earth?

Last week 604 BTC were traded using Localbitcoin Venezuela, a country where the typical monthly salary is far less than 5 US dollars. If that's not enough to convince you that Bitcoin has a good use-case, I don't know what will.

Dystopian hyperinflation. So basically it’s electronic gold. Congrats.

I doubt you do. I also doubt you are short BTC at 8000, or at any price.

Do you want in on my Initial Cultivar Offering or not? It's gonna go to the moon!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

This is beautifully written. Thank you.

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