81–90 of 154 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This shows another of the many ways in which a having a trusted third party involved in your finances is actually a good thing.
Arguably the feature that makes kidnappings for ransom unattractive isn't necessarily traditional banks being trusted, but rather that traditional bank transfers are usually reversible (e.g. due to a court order).
> Under his leadership, the company has sold more than seven million hardware wallets worldwide, maintaining a perfect security record with no successful breaches of their devices. yeah uhhhhhh, what about all of their newsletter subs and device sales shipping data though? I wonder if he got one of the threatening ransom letters in the mail and didn't pay because they said it was a scam? https://www.bitdefender.com/e…
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> 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.
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.
good point, but you're not taking into account the deflationary spiral
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...
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.
How does the government of France decide whether your kidnapping is worth sending military tactical teams to rescue you?
How does the government of France decide whether your kidnapping is worth sending military tactical teams to rescue you?
In any case, if there is any sort of kidnapping or hostage taking they send the tactical units.
To foreigners, GIGN is perhaps best known for being one of the counter-terrorist teams in the Counter Strike game.
Here's an example of an intervention, a video where they shoot in a guy's leg (long distance, with a submachine gun...), to prevent him from shooting himself:
Crypto will not be ready for mainstream until effective game-theoretic countermeasures for this kind of thing are built into the protocols.
How does a game theoretic protocol stop someone extorting your friends into paying a ransom for your life? They weren't trying to get into his wallets, but getting his rich friends and relations to pay.
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.
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> If you don't trust Ledger – how much do you trust your VPN provider? They know both your original IP and what you're doing on the Internet (or at least to which services you're connecting). Well, the big difference (for what OP is worried about) is that two distinct companies would need to be compromised instead of just the one.
Exactly, and ip address does not give precise location (unless a third company, the ISP, is also compromised).