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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

,, Originally, Sky Mavis chose the five out of nine threshold as some nodes didn’t catch up with the chain, or were stuck in syncing state’’

Sounds like a great plan for storing half billion dollars. I’m not blaming the developers, as they are incentivized to move fast and break things, I’m just sorry for all the people who trust new protocols so easily without any knowledge in safe software security practices.

Personally I’m a Bitcoin only person, because I respect the amount of work that the software authors do to minimize the attack surface, but at the end the free market will select the winners and losers.

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I am blaming the developers.

Perhaps this is not a popular view, but this "blameless" culture is fine and good when it's a random service going down for 15 minutes and you're trying to collaborate and prevent it from happening again.

There must be limits though. If you're handling that amount of money in a bank and you fuck it up like this, your ass is on the line, together with the ones who incentivized you to move fast and break things. This should be no different.

I have been to a few crypto meetups and seen people just talk about buying and selling tokens/cryptocurrencies without knowing more than the name of the currencies.

They are betting on software in alpha phase without knowing anything about it, or any detail about the cryptography, concensus mechanism or coding practices they use.

There are valid concerns with any asset where people want to store their wealth (which is at the same time a basic human need), but it's hard to reason with peope who are not interested in discussing those concerns.

Even developers who work on smart contracts don't understand the intricacies of the consensus algorithms and cryptography.

These are hard subjects your average developers rarely work on, and is usually smart enough to know not to roll their own.

Everyone in the market just is gambling on what other people think. Like playing poker only by guessing what everyone else does, knowing the rules.

Stock market is no different the subset who read annual reports and make projections or trust people who do are limited

I'm not surprised since a large percentage of crypto buyers are millennials that grew up during the great meme boom of the 2000's.

This is like the contractors working on the Death Star when it was blown up.[1] They knew what they were working on. They knew the dangers. Can't cry for them when they're blown to smithereens.

I've been asked on two separate occasions to work on some crypto startup idea. Aside from my skepticism that they were even worthwhile projects, I declined because hell no I'm not writing code that touches other people's money.

[1] https://youtu.be/iQdDRrcAOjA

In the real world a lot of army is conscription. Typically it not freelance mercenaries it can also be prisoners or threatened/coereced labour. Star wars actually highlights this in Rogue one.

Also in many economies this is literally only job available, same reason why syrian fighters are ready to go to Ukraine.

While death star attack wasn't a war crime, they weren't civies after all, it wasn't a simple as they knew the dangers

"I'm not blaming the developers.."

I mean, I think it's time to put that on the table...

If I was betting, I'd put my money on VC pressure.

"Our software has some sort of race condition, it gets stuck every few hours, should we debug it? Could be difficult to find."

"No, just write a cron job to restart it every few hours, and we'll increase the error tolerances. Nobody wastes time debugging stability issues anymore!"

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