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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

The crypto currency world is hyper focused on stopping this, considering it is one of the main avenues that statists attack crypto with now that the environmental nag is gone since the switch to Proof of Stake.

I would say, conservatively, the traditional banking and real estate markets are 10,000x worse than crypto markets, but are un-policed because it's hidden, unlike the public blockchain networks. The few scams that are exposed, like the HSBC money laundering scandal, dwarf all of the crime every committed via crypto. But we didn't even put HSBC out of business or put a single employee in jail!

Here is the Danish money laundering fraud that just concluded with $2 billion in fines on $160 billion in laundered money https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/danske-bank-pleads-guilty-fra...

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Money laundering is a crime, but not a scam. Besides, there's some nuance here: HSBC were fined for not doing enough to prevent it as required by law. You know, the kind of laws that don't even apply to crypto. "They are breaking rules but we are not!" is an easy claim to make if you have no rules but the others do.

I like the use of “statists” to negatively refer to people who use facts to support their arguments.

Those wild and crazy people in favor of any form of government!

That 10,000x worth sounds like its using specific numbers as opposed to hand wavy arguments for which crypto is predicated on. Glad you brought real numbers to the table.

> The crypto currency world is hyper focused on stopping this

Can you explain how?

I'm super curious because the whole point of crypto is you can't reverse transactions, and therefore crypto is only ever as secure as computer security generally, and there's nothing crypto can do about computer security generally.

Or are people coming up with some new paradigm here that fixes this somehow?

Why 'generally'? Why can't crypto systems be designed to be more secure than other software given what is at stake (e.g. by making the effort to formally verify systems/applications). Not saying it will happen but don't see why it is impossible.

Because ultimately it all comes down to the security of your keys. Which are just information.

Keeping keys secure is no different from keeping anything else secure. That's why 'generally'.

And crypto doesn't do anything about key security. That's up to each person/org to figure out for themselves.

(North Korea didn't hack the blockchain. They hacked however people/orgs kept their keys.)

There's a fair amount of work on key security, such as via multi-party computation, Shamir's secret sharing, etc. These let multiple parties combine to give access to a key. Some cool stuff here are companies like https://web3auth.io/ and https://magic.link/.

This stuff is useful outside of blockchain as well.

The state of user protection in crypto right now is definitely bad, but there is a lot of work and research being done to improve it.

EDIT: I think I'm actually making the same point you made, but anyways here's a couple cool links and things to google for secret security :)

> Can you explain how?

By posting long tirades on Internet forums that surmise: "We have top men working on it right now. Top... men.."

Did Bitcoin switch to proof of stake while I wasn't looking?

Eth did.

Bitcoin is slowly losing dominance - its legacy technology, and bitcoin maxis/satoshi purists refuse to recognise that tech must evolve over time.

Its fucking insane to me how "The White paper" has become a holy text among Bitcoiners. Its made it almost fucking impossible to make any improvements to the protocol - hence forks, altcoins, etc.

Ordinals.

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