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Comment by Radle | Hacker News Reader

" I also argue that banks have much, much better security than anything most of us have ever touched, because they handle billions of dollars moving around routinely and manage not to lose it. Meanwhile, half of the internet can't manage not to lose the email addresses of everyone who signed up for their cat picture website. If they're trying that hard to steal something of little value like that, how hard to you think people are trying to steal the billions of dollars that banks handle?"

Exactly this is the reason why I don't think Troy is being gullible here.

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There's a logical fallacy here that I don't know the name of:

"Because it's so important, surely they must be competent."

Which does not follow.

I do not argue that they're competent because they're important. I argue that they are competent because there is a multi-billion dollar pile of cash that they're guarding. If they aren't competent, how come nobody has stolen it all yet?

Look at the efforts spent hacking Bitcoin exchanges and identified large holders. Lots and lots of money being taken there. Look at the efforts made to hack much less important things. How come no big banks have suffered a serious compromise leading to the loss of 9-figure plus amounts of money yet?

Banks normally don't actually transfer any money. There's a funny story from the 1920s of the Bank of England pushing money across the vault floor to indicate a transfer to France, who held an account with them. The money doesn't actually go anywhere, it just says so on the balance sheet. If someone "steals" 1 billion dollars by making the system think they took it, someone will eventually notice, then they'll send somebody down to the vault to push it back to the other side.

Bitcoin is very different: when the bitcoin blockchain says someone else has your money, they have it. Imagine someone had heard that Ethereum had suffered no major attacks on exchanges, but hadn't heard of the DAO attack. They must think that Ethereum is extremely secure. Actually, Ethereum is very insecure, but a large enough target will get special treatment. Bitcoin doesn't have the same tendency as Ethereum (and real life) towards hard forks, so of course it will have more attacks on it. But this doesn't imply that anyone will hard fork when you get hacked, nor will the banks necessarily reverse the transaction when someone guesses your password.

The argument made was "Because they're successful at something very hard, surely they must be competent."

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