My concern is that “the law” is incompetent in this domain.
“Maybe I’m out of touch with the rest of the developed world? Impossible, it’s everyone else demanding the enforcement of laws and regulations around value transfer, storage, and ownership who are the problem.” (Not you personally, crypto folks in general)
The prior owners were hodling it wrong.
Tangentially, I support my tax dollars being spent pursuing these threat actors for as long as it takes, with sentencing guidelines in line with the value stolen.
It's just that it doesn't trump contract law and it's not generally a barrier for implementing contracts digitally.
I’ll try again: I would like my taxpayer dollars going to smart contract development, auditing, and promulgating industry standards in a collaborate way. Just an additional signer for industry participants to consider or lean on the opinion of. Conditional execution on a distributed ledger with standardized conditions could easily get its own legal carveout to trump the analogous contract law, no different than someone someone agreeing to arbitration, but even as far as the local law invalidating private sector legalise when a parallel smart contracts is involved to limit possible behaviors already.
Governments can be a collaborative coding participant as we use this technology to re-evaluate the concept of governance and what redundancies the world actual needs to handle disputes or control behaviors with the pooled capital of taxpayers and the credit markets.
Right now this conversation has been limited to “adversary or not”, and that’s also shortsighted. Fortunately they’ve all moved too slow and there is enough capital within the crypto ecosystem to capture them. So I dont think it will be an organic growth from here to this reality, just consensus flippenings as wealthy backers direct public agencies and legislatures to “do the needful”.
As you might imagine, this was a much more extreme position to publicly have 6 years ago. But less absurd now, still not something to say on TV or in a web 2.0 office setting but at a bar or conference its understandable by people now, yay speculation driving innovation.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/11/30/houston-man-spent-ppp...
Decade old best practices for using crypto assets circumvents all of this. Ignoring the best practices leads to the assets being seized in the first place as well as persecution of the thief.
Using the best practices prevents seizure from an independent private thief or the state actor thief, so you see its not even about the government and its inflated sense of relevance.
Here is one comparable hack[0] I remember which followed another series of SWIFT hacks. Further, people lose money all the time to more minor exploits that target just specific accounts, credit cards are always sold (less of a fault of the banks directly but tied to how the system is set up), Robinhood had a data breach recently, etc.
>also I’m sure all the people with money in that exchange would be loving from FDIC insurance right now
Plenty of big exchanges like Binance and Coinbase do have similar insurance and have made users whole after a hack[1]..
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
1. https://www.wired.com/story/hack-binance-cryptocurrency-exch...
Yeah, I wouldn't want to rely on the Federal Reserve Bank noticing a misspelled instruction before my billion dollars were released, but at least there's someone with a brain looking at the transfer before it happens!
>The RCBC bank branch in Manila to which the hackers tried to transfer $951m was in Jupiter Street. There are hundreds of banks in Manila that the hackers could have used, but they chose this one - and the decision cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.
>"The transactions… were held up at the Fed because the address used in one of the orders included the word 'Jupiter', which is also the name of a sanctioned Iranian shipping vessel," says Carolyn Maloney.
>Just the mention of the word "Jupiter" was enough to set alarm bells ringing in the Fed's automated computer systems. The payments were reviewed, and most were stopped. But not all. Five transactions, worth $101m, crossed this hurdle.
Not to mention the billions lost to BEC schemes.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-heist-swift-special...
Yes, actually. If I had to trust one entity to safeguard something digital, I'd trust the security team at a major crypto exchange, than the police department at a major city. The problem isn't really that they're incompetent, it's that they're the juiciest targets.
Short story:
I had a job offer from one of these financial law enforcement agencies, specifically focused on preventing and tracking crypto hackers. It was rescinded by the new administration due to a mission change in the organization, refocusing on revenue through regulatory enforcement and surveillance rather than protecting Americans from theft and violence.
In reality, calling them incompetent may be charitable. The simplest explanation is that they are profit-driven, and frankly don’t care about any actual harm.
The money from these hacks often goes toward torturing the North Korean people, funding terror against American interests, or supporting violent drug cartels. One of the few things that angers me is that the only thing they are doing about it, is using it to further their surveillance agenda against Americans.
That’s the measure I use.