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Comment by blamazon | Hacker News Reader

Mark Cuban recently lost $870k in crypto by a fake app scheme:

> “I’m pretty sure I downloaded a version of MetaMask with some shit in it,” Cuban told DL News. He said he had searched for Circle on Google, not MetaMask. [1]

[1]: https://www.dlnews.com/articles/people-culture/mark-cuban-lo...

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I don't know. But if you have $870K in crypto and don't use a hardwallet, I kind of don't feel bad for you.

To be fair, at Cuban scale that's your hot wallet.

Crypto aside, I have idly wondered how/where the mega rich keep their money.

Is there a money manager effectively controlling a Schwab account with $1+ billion dollars? How do you minimize the blast radius to prevent internal/external loss of control? Even sub-dividing a fortune across N investment managers still leaves enormous targets painted on those accounts.

Or is it the more implicit threat that you do not steal from these people or the full weight of the government will aid in recovering these funds?

At that level you typically set up what's referred to as a "family office"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office

The family office will manage the investment portfolio, typically across not only brokerages and banks but also direct investments / private equity/ vc / etc.

People who aren’t rich usually cannot understand how very little of it is typically liquid.

I sold some land, a guy sold me a Ferrari for it. I sold the Ferrari, never even saw it. He just couldn’t be bothered and wanted the land right then.

"Look, idiot, if you do not perfectly follow all of this op sec, your money could disappear at literally any moment. In which case, sucks to be you. Oh, and also those crypto exchanges where people leave their money - those also have a good chance of disappearing in the night. Best to keep it under the digital equivalent of your mattress."

I will stick with a bank which is regulated to protect my money, and heads will roll if funny business happens.

> heads will roll if funny business happens

To be fair, a lot of the crypto hype is predicated, if indirectly, on how few heads roll when (barely quasi-legal) funny business happens through official institutions.

A. "I lost my money while it was in my bank... I got it back, but nobody got in trouble!"

B. "I lost my money while it was in crypto... I didn't get it back and nobody got in trouble!"

I'm not really sure B sounds like much of an improvement over A.

I'm not saying they're right, just saying that "regulations will help" won't really be a big selling point for those who already have lost trust in such institutions.

> I will stick with a bank which is regulated to protect my money, and heads will roll if funny business happens.

When did that ever happen? Did even a single head roll for the bullshit with subprime mortgages? Some people get a bonus when the scam is big enough.

Well some banks went out of business.

I too love my bank which, like most others, is known for its lack of funny business, owing to the regulations that it definitely doesn't skirt at every opportunity (otherwise its execs would go to jail for doing crimes, obviously)

Like all those Wells Fargo execs? Uh huh.

Probably a poor choice of words, but with a bank I have strong assurances that my account will not be drained tomorrow without possibility of recourse.

The government went above and beyond (generating moral hazard) in protecting SVB clients.

870k is Cuban dipping his toes with a test account. Everyone has different risk profiles and adversity.

It's mind boggling how crypto people still trust hot wallets that run as fucking browser extensions.

The reality is that relying on a cold storage wallet for security is just too much overhead when it's competing against a biometric scanner to authorisar a transaction that can be reversed with a phone call.

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