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Comment by JofArnold | Hacker News Reader

My friend took a year, over 150 calls and legal intervention to get money back that HSBC stole. Obviously not the same but to say that banks are faultless just isn't true; their systems also have edge cases from which there is often little hope of return.

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The point is not that banks are faultless (no one claimed they were) but that remediation is possible, as you have just attested to: your friend got his/her money back. Your story shows the system is working—that's precisely what "legal intervention" is for.

The issue with banks is that the battle is legal/social, for example as someone who get paid by international wires often let me tell you that sometimes (rare cases but when it happens it happen to many) the money just disappears for months, and there is no way to troubleshoot it as a normal individual, you just go to the bank and ask about your money and either they just deny there is anything they can do and blame it on the sender, or just give you looks and question the legitimacy of what you are doing.

Sometimes banks freeze international wires until the government investigate the source of the funds to make sure they are not funding terrorism, this happen to any sum higher than $5k in my country for example. I just wish to never be in such a position.

Not to mention when doing large wires with countries that have to do exchanges through a national bank your third party can just forget to accept it. Then you get a wire reversed for a large amount in some cases and the bank freezes your assets because you just got a huge amount of money from some random place. The thin vail of freedom is quickly lifted whenever you want to do anything international from sending money to getting married.

This happened to me when purchasing a house in another country.

None of those issues are resolved by crypto.

If crypto is to be legitimized, the government isn’t simply gonna say, too bad, the stuff we think is absolutely necessary to the point we suspended civil liberties for, that stuff we will ignore for you.

Whether you agree with what the govt is doing or not, they aren’t gonna stop doing it because it’s crypto.

> as you have just attested to: your friend got his/her money back

Missing the point.

How so?

They didn’t get their money back. The bank lost money, but they have a lot so they don’t care. In cryptocurrency every sat or Wei is accounted for. You can’t make them up. A loss can never be undone.

People need to look at this as like chartering a 17th century galleon. It sank. Gold was lost at sea, unreachable by todays tech. Maybe in 200 years someone can crack ECDSA and recover it.

Ah yeah, thanks to 21st century tech, now you emulate 17th century risks when holding wealth! Progress!

It approximates a different risk game, and as such has a different reward schedule. Some people like to play games on hardcore mode (eg: permadeath, 1 life) too.

Not everything needs to be sanitized for one’s safety.

Well, are you advocating crypto for investing, or for the future of money? If the future of money, then you can't ask everyone in society to "well it's going to be more risky! But it's better!". If it's for investing, go ahead, I can also suggest putting all your money on black and have a 50-50 risk of doubling it or going home empty handed.

Only if you truly, and I mean truly, understand the depth of chaos that has been brought on by "progress".

What chaos? It’s all documented for all eternity, I don’t see chaos.

The problem you're describing with physical coinage is one of the reasons why paper money was invented in Europe, among other places

Right — however it was always an abstraction. Lose gold at sea? Well just because the bank ignores this event and issues more paper doesn’t mean the ship didn’t sink. I understand that the concept of reversibility is highly desirable, but that bank can not raise the sunken ship right now. It has to take the loss and not just pretend it didn’t happen. Reversibility is always an illusion. Most things in this universe are actually permanent.

You're right, there's enough irreversible things in this universe already. Let's make something better.

They didn't say it was faultless. A year & 150 phones calls is a significant improvement on "nope, nope, not ever ever ever ever".

Also the current system at least has the potential to be improved, maybe. While irreversibility is baked into the ideology of many (not all) proponents if crypto.

You can implement irreversibility in a blockchain or a smart contract easily, many coins can freeze funds and issue funds, that's defacto irreversibility.

Seems this is a counter example.

Only to the extent that the code doesn't have bugs and your algorithm has no design flaws. (All code has bugs and you should assume all algorithms have design flaws.)

>Irreversibility is both easy & often

Did you mean reversibility? Because otherwise you're agreeing with me: I'm saying irreversibility is easy, often the default with crypto Yes, that is what I am saying. In traditional banking reversibility is easier, and (mostly) the norm for situations of standard human error.

In the case of this particular contract a limited form of reversibility is even what was intended, but that doesn't matter. It's a system that doesn't allow for honest error.

For some, that's a feature. For the vast majority required to take smart contracts mainstream, that is not a feature. Better error resistant reversibility can be built, and that's when things may become attractive to more people. But, again, many proponents view irreversibility as a feature so it's not primary consideration when building things.

I think that the point is not that non-crypto systems are perfect, but at least they do not have flaws which could make the reversal of a transaction a mathematical impossibility. In non-crypto systems if you convince the right humans, things can be reversed.

And in those cases you escalate or you lawyer up.

You can't sue a typo.

That is the best Web3 quote I’ve heard all year.

But there is insurance for smart contract integrity already deployed and in use for a multitude of projects (see unslashed finance for example).

I don't need to sue as long as I get my money back.

it depends on the country u are in. in Brazil the law is a joke. I prefer to risk a typo then be entangle in any legal battle here. I know people that won cases 30 years ago, and are yet to see any money.

I didn’t say banks were faultless. I didn’t say that any aspect of a fiat currency based system is perfect. I just said that redress works often enough that people don’t give up on it.

But he got it back, right? P(recovery) = 0 is a whole different ball game than flip a coin and maybe the bank will relent

That's terrible. I've only heard bad things about HSBC, although that's true of most banks to be honest.

However, it's going to take more than 150 calls and a lawyer to hard fork the ethereum chain to roll back this contract.

Perhaps a class action lawsuit can force the auctioneers to pay back the money despite not having access to it themselves. Either way, there's literally no way for the misdirected cryptocurrency to ever return.

> to say that banks are faultless

You are replying to somebody who said literally the opposite: "They are not all perfect"

Hey, are you still using Keybase?

I am not! Once they got in bed with cryptocurrencies, I closed my account. But I forgot to delete it from my profile here, so thanks for mentioning it.

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