Crypto will not be ready for mainstream until effective game-theoretic countermeasures for this kind of thing are built into the protocols.
If you have a bank account in the same country, you also have an owner.
Though doing a kidnapping in the middle of France is pretty ballsy anyway.
If it is, then we'd be fools not to try, and having the trusted third party is just the better of several bad alternatives.
But it is a pretty audacious claim. I wish there were more radical optimists among us pursuing such things. Pity that that's not what most crypto is these days.
I draw a pretty thick line between what we're seeing out of it today and what we should be demanding of it.
That seemed to rely more on good policing than the second amendment.
The cryptocurrency proposition is that that solution can be improved upon without implicitly trusting the state. I don't have that solution myself, but I'm not convinced that it can't exist. We'll know they've found it when these things stop happening, and it starts feeling like the riskier thing is to keep your money in a bank. Or maybe what they come up with doesn't feel like money at all, who knows.
When I try to imagine such a protocol, it involves a web of trust and crowd-sourced metadata such that people can refuse to accept coins which don't also come with proof that they're involved in activity that those people consent to. (A deficiency of dollars being that when I accept one I have no idea whether the loan that created it is for a venture that helps me or harms me, or whether the previous owner got it as a kidnapping ransom).
In such a scenario, the ransomed coins become useless without a backstory that identifies them to the recipient as non-harmful. If that backstory becomes prohibitively difficult to fabricate, then perhaps the crime doesn't happen.
Except that having achieved feature parity, we'll then be in a position to consider new features which may not have been possible on the previous architecture.
good point, but you're not taking into account the deflationary spiral
in this case most of the ransom has been blocked which isn't new. many of the major crypto heists ended with arrests due to traceability of the funds or unusable funds due to blacklists.
It's nice that there are tools available to prevent such things in theory, and it seems like there's some traction in the right direction, but what matters is whether it's safer in practice. I'd love it if that happened soon, but it doesn't seem likely.
In the real world the ultimate countermeasure is bullets. All the rest is to avoid reaching this last resort.
But its not bitcoin, so somehow its the shitcoin and the glacially frozen development environment that is bitcoin is what all the get rich quick cryptobros obsess about. I will never understand.
Also it's not clear that that would work. If I got a call:
> They're gonna kill me if you don't sign this transaction.
I'd probably sign it rather than let my friend die to prove a point to the bad guys that you don't kidnap people on FooChain.
Or at least that's the only way I can see it working. It's gotta be based on consent, not scarcity.
Alternatively, a smart contract could require large transfers to escrow for X months, and could have a secret poison pill such that it would abort after 30 days if you used a trap password.
Edit: Given the downvotes I guess people just wanted to snark? I interpreted this as a technical question but maybe I misread.
Bitcoin literally has timelockS (multiple kinds) built-in in its scripting since its first release...
The point was not that this alone would make bank obsolete, but rather that this isn't just something "new" cryptocurrencies feature.
Oh I see, and I agree with you. Sorry, my mistake.