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French police free kidnapped Ledger executive

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Re: French police free kidnapped Ledger executive

#41

Post by lukan »

petesergeant wrote: post #30

I think I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often. Maybe I underestimate how good the police are at prevention of this crime.

Or you overestimate how many competent psychos are out there scheming to do anything to make money.

Doing a kidnapping and getting a ransom is probably not too hard, but being on the run forever afterwards might not be worth it to most. People with money can hire their own bounty hunters/or plain criminals to go after them afterwards. Or just announce a bounty high enough (in dark channels, your high profile security company has access to) so people will do the hunt for free.

Most people like to boast about their action - so competent here means keeping quiet about it forever and coming up with a good excuse for why they have that money.

Re: French police free kidnapped Ledger executive

#42

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

pieix wrote: post #6
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #2

Crypto will not be ready for mainstream until effective game-theoretic countermeasures for this kind of thing are built into the protocols.

This shows another of the many ways in which a having a trusted third party involved in your finances is actually a good thing.

I guess is comes down to whether you think it's possible to prevent this kind of thing with nothing more than cleverly aligned incentives and cleverly applied cryptography.

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.

Re: French police free kidnapped Ledger executive

#43

Post by krisoft »

Uptrenda wrote: post #22

I've been thinking for a while that the current security methodology for wallets is not great. YES, that statement is extremely obvious on the face of it. But, I mean, think of some of the basic measures people take. This hardware wallet crap, okay great, your keys are kept somewhere safe and there's offline signing, but so what? Boop the users head until they give up the wallet. H4xt funds. We should be able to desi…

But how would any of that help in this case? They didn’t break his wallet, they didn’t force him to transfer money personaly. They kidnapped him and his wife and then cut off his finger and sent the finger to his associates asking for money.

The transfer would be initiated by the associates who are free. What would a panic code help there?

The only thing which might change things is the ability to reverse transactions. That would make the kidnappers keep them longer. At the cost of making every transaction on the blockchain less trustworthy. Not really a clear win.

Re: French police free kidnapped Ledger executive

#44

Post by heresie-dabord »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #2

Crypto will not be ready for mainstream until effective game-theoretic countermeasures for this kind of thing are built into the protocols.

When cryptocurrency comes to depend on all the trust anchors of the fiat monetary system, the naive reimplementation will be feature-complete.

Re: French police free kidnapped Ledger executive

#45

Post by lxgr »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #34
chatmasta wrote: post #18

How does the government of France decide whether your kidnapping is worth sending military tactical teams to rescue you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#European_Union

The "statistical value of a life" doesn't mean what you think it does. It's essentially a measurement of how much, on average, people value their own live at the margin (i.e. how much are they willing to pay for a slightly safer car, how much more does a slightly more dangerous job have to pay for people to still apply etc.)

It's not a political "cap on how much to spend on saving somebody's life". There have of course been rescue operations more expensive than that per person, and some medical expenditures exceed that cap as well.

Re: French police free kidnapped Ledger executive

#46

Post by galleywest200 »

function_seven wrote: post #10

So the article says, “[authorities] have also not confirmed whether any payment was made” and also says they’re looking for the kidnappers. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that ransom was paid and that’s how they were able to locate the Ballands.

This article claims part the ransom was paid but a majority of the sum frozen after: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/david-balland-...

Re: French police free kidnapped Ledger executive

#48

Post by rnotaro »

petesergeant wrote: post #30

I think I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often. Maybe I underestimate how good the police are at prevention of this crime.

I believe that's happening more often than before but it's probably not always documented.

Last summer, a 25 year old crypto influencer got kidnapped and his body was found in my neighborhood a few months ago. [1]

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/kevin-mirshahi-ident...

Re: French police free kidnapped Ledger executive

#50

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

throw101010 wrote: post #9
bpodgursky wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only newer currencies you could lock your money into a smart contract, or just stake it, such that you literally could not transfer your money for a year (or more). Lower liquidity but would de-fang ransom like this. 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 t…

> Only newer currencies you could lock your money into a smart contract, Bitcoin literally has timelockS (multiple kinds) built-in in its scripting since its first release...

I'd believe that necessary primitives are out there, but it's not really enough to have a solution in theory. A crypto project will have to stop such things in practice before they can legitimately claim to have obsoleted the banks.
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