This aspect of crypto is a 1960s paranoid computer fear come to life, and somehow it’s often presented as an improvement over the existing system of human checks and balances.
Where do you think your income and bank balances are tracked and stored? On pieces of paper?
Your bank analogy is silly and nowhere near analogous.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-15/citi-sues...
You can say that's an edge case today but I and OP are saying, the future will look more like crypto looks today. Not a bright future.
Given it was an accidental early repayment of a loan, this isn't quite the slam dunk you think it is. If they had paid a company they didn't owe money to, they could get the money back through the courts.
Crypto is meant to evade those courts.
> “To believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake that had never happened before, to the tune of nearly $1 billion, would have been borderline irrational,” he wrote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-...
That's as close to "code is law" and other nonsense of the crypto libertarians as you can get.
> Recipients of cash wired in error are typically required to return it.
I don’t agree. I trust that loopholes like that will be slowly rectified with legislation if not present today.
In fact, it’s likely that crypto will (problematically?) be heading the same way. There was a recent case of a crypto buff who found a bug in some project and made off with a few $Million and I think the courts said he could be arrested and expected to return it, just as if he made off with cash. Importantly, they basically said “blockchain isn’t the source of truth to the courts” which was the guys defense. IMO a bright future for people, but not for a crypto venture.
You have cash in your house and someone breaks in to steal everything. The insurance will _maybe_ cover your loss given that you secured it with basic security. _Maybe_ the police will investigate and arrest the burglar.
But even in this situation, you were better off putting your savings in any bank account where any fraudulent transaction can be reverted with a button.
Now, you have your crypto wallet. It gets emptied by some random bot. Well, you are as fucked than with your cash, except that nobody will cover your loss and nobody will investigate your case since the burglar is probably from another country.
You can insure the crypto you have. It’s probs expensive to the point of being not worth it.
People investigate crypto hacks though. And if the perpetrators are in a jurisdiction that you have some legal availability to you can totally use legal means. Basically any western nation will allow such a suit.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/12/22/teenage-suspect-i...
You can strike out "financial" and that's already the realty we're living in. We got lucky that Y2K was not an issue today. We wouldn't probably be able to fix enough code and nowadays much more is under direct computer control than back then.
Nobody "wants" that but it happens gradually. With crypto, it didn't happen organically but crypto blasted onto the scene from the side of complete digitization. Looking at that, it's easy to say that nobody would want that but while you're looking this way, traditional finance is creeping towards complete digitization as well, just behind your back.
> This aspect of crypto is a 1960s paranoid computer fear come to life, and somehow it’s often presented as an improvement over the existing system of human checks and balances.
I'm not saying that crypto is an improvement as it is now. Nor that it will ever be (it might but I have my doubts). But what you're missing is that crypto is complete wild west, like traditional finance was maybe in 1900. The whole history of finance is a sequence of fuckups and laws and regulations that were imposed to prevent similar fuckups to occur and we still got the 2007 financial crisis, after 150 years of improvements.
I can try to stay as far away from crypto as possible but as I said in my previous post, there are aspects that are interesting even if most of it is completely nuts.