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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I made a comment on an earlier thread about the security properties of hot/cold wallet and the security properties of separating the matching and settlement systems. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7340505) This incident is an example of the Bitcoin community's best practices "working." They lost 12.3% rather than 100%. That's actually a considerable accomplishment in Bitcoin, but not a success condition for most people who deal with money.

If they had the settlement processed asynchronously on a different system, likely with human interaction, they'd be able to say "Hmm, it seems like account #944325 has convinced us to schedule a withdraw of $250,000 more money than he has on deposit. Well that would be a really bad idea, now wouldn't it. Denied. Now I think I'll sip a cocoa while leisurely planning my review of our withdraw scheduling code."

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This is the most fascinating part of the Bitcoin story: watching a group of people who are philosophically opposed to most elements of the modern economy discover, one by one, why all those elements exist.

Perhaps "all" is an overstatement. An overhaul starting from zero may not be a very realistic or efficient answer, but it seems a little optimistic to suggest that there is nothing our financial systems do that couldn't be changed or dropped.

I wish I could upvote this comment more than once.

Many complex systems are complex because they solve complex problems, not just because they have evolved over time from different simple conditions. You can't always (if ever) replace a complex system with a simple one. You can't escape complexity by coding around it. This is the attitude that killed Netscape and kills many Enterprise projects.

I wonder if perhaps a similar thing is going to happen to the meal replacement products, such as Soylent and Ambro and others. Maybe in their attempt to "hack" human nutrition they, too, will rediscover why human nutrition research exists. Except perhaps with more serious consequences involving health issues.

I can't wait for the marketing copy that will go out when Uber starts a jitney or a city bus line.

> This is the most fascinating part of the USA story: watching a group of people who are philosophically opposed to most elements of the modern social-democracy discover, one by one, why all those elements exist.

The people who are interested in cryptocurrencies come from all walks of life and share different views on many topics, just like the citizens of a country. Nothing's ever black or white.

I hear this a lot, but I don't see much (if any) evidence this was ever a prevailing view. The impression I get is a general distrust of any centralised service, whether it's a traditional bank or a Bitcoin web-wallet.

In technical terms, we are witnessing the transition from a circle jerk of libertarian ideolgy to a clusterfuck of libertarian ideology.

When are they going to rediscover double-entry bookkeeping?

Totally agree, but would also add this general concept applies to many non-bitcoin startups (especially those that deal in "real world" services as opposed to pure software) as well, eg. Airbnb, Uber, etc.

The natural path of these "disruptive" startups is to start small and lean, ignoring a lot of the complexity of whatever market they are disrupting, and then a slow and steady snowballing as they begin to re-accumulate a lot of the baggage of the industry they came in to disrupt. In the end if you're lucky you wind up with something that is still better than the old thing, but not nearly as much better as the original hype around the new thing would suggest.

To be fair, most people rallying against fraud, over-regulation, corruption, <insert-pet-issue-here> in the financial industry generally aren't really hoping that they'll replace all of that with poorly written software.

So you think we should never tear down anything because there's no possible way we could ever rebuild it better than it is? Our financial system couldn't ever be any better than right now?

And I thought I was a pessimist.

Those are two different propositions. Tearing things down inevitably breaks vital things and should only be a last resort. But that says nothing about whether incremental improvement is possible.

However, nobody wants to put the effort into organising politically to cause improvements to the existing system. Because they don't trust anyone, and only care for the increase of their own wallet.

> This incident is an example of the Bitcoin community's best practices "working."

It's also an example of all the best engineering practices missing.

I thought that checking the account balances and wrapping the withdrawal in a transaction was an introductory example of concurrency issues. What were they thinking, handling money while allowing negative balances?!

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