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Comment by yftsui | Hacker News Reader

Cash is a superior technology for security -> Huh? The bullet proof glass cage protecting the cashiers is the “technology”.

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The problem of space of physically securing cash is more stable over time and better understood by non experts than the problem space of securing electronic payments: For example, the costs and benefits of "There is a new innovation in theft, people yank ATMs out of walls with trucks, which you can mitigate by putting up bollards" are easier to understand than "there is a buffer overflow in your logging software that is used everywhere".

So yes, a bulletproof cage is security technology, it works sufficiently well most of the time, there aren't many low-effort innovations to break it (bombs and such have been around forever but aren't used to rob convenience stores often), and if it does get broken it's obvious. Whereas a software exploits can be harder to detect and can be much easier to replicate and scale

Edit - Innovations in physical theft: That Kia/Hyundai car trend, which is really software. The trick bums use to steal blue bikes from docks. Writing threatening notes to bank tellers without any way of making good on the threat because tellers are directed to not fight back. Any more examples?

Innovations in defense from physical theft: "time locks" in bank branches, where the safes and vaults take a fixed delay on the order of minutes to open, without any way for anyone in the bank to speed this up. This fact is advertised explicitly using stickers and posters around the bank, starting at the entrance. The point is to protect the staff, by making it clear there's nothing that can be achieved by coercion, and to deter robberies by making the criminals wait, vastly increasing their risk of being caught.

(And to add a cherry on top, this is usually not disturbing to actual customers, because they're busy doing usual bullshit paperwork while the safe is unlocking.)

That's too literal a view. In security thinking we have to consider the safety of all stakeholders, and the whole ecosystem/collective/society at large.

From a security point of view, you have no actual control over whether plenty of merchants and customers trade using counterfeit money, and so you have to maintain a large set of infrastructure around finding and punishing people who use or accept counterfeits.

You can have all the tech for proving that a dollar is legit, but it nobody cares if the dollar is legit, then it doesn't matter

Don't forget privacy is a very important part of security.

Well at least it limits people to stealing from the building they're currently inside rather than from anywhere with an internet connection.

You are misquoting, they said "From an operational and strategic security POV".

This is about money being able to function with crippled infrastructure, not about someone stealing dollars stashed inside a mattress.

that's right

and it's superior because it usually cannot be circumvented with math or will accumulate known insecurities over time.

that i can't steal from the other side of the planet.

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