sum627u

There's essentially no legitimate use case for crypto-currency. Cypherpunks have been at it for decades and all they have to show for it is drugs, ponzis, assassination markets, and conspiracy theories.

It would be nice to see some sort of casual hawala-type federated micropayments system based on real national currency, with instant settlement, low fees, and no fake money value store. But, that would be a pre-9/11 idea. Nowadays that's basically illegal and useless.

Paypal is more or less good enough, and hopefully regulators and market forces will control the fees and abuses.

> The meatspace system seems very stable until you realize that it's highly brittle. It's impossible to meaningfully measure firm solvency risk, because the behavior of the "VM" is so unpredictable.

Actually, it's not. Regulators and ratings companies do a pretty good job of it, and in extraordinary Great Recession type events there is usually concerted response to keep consumers from incurring any losses. Insured not getting paid due to counterparty issues is a blue moon, black swan risk for business, virtual never happens to consumers.

re: sillysaurus3, the "core" wallet is possibly even worse than parity. Why wouldn't you be as safe using the most popular one with the most eyeballs?

If someone steals your coins from the "core" wallet, they're just as gone, correct?

The real moral, as always, is don't keep wealth in a crypto-currency. You'll lose it and have no recourse.

Safety-critical software, for flight in particular, is required to meet rigorous certification standards and processes specified by law that include independent engineering review. You can't just slap in something from github, write some tests and call it a day.

This is nonsense. Ethereum is uninsurable. The turtles-all-the-way-down notion that you can wrap a bad "smart contract" in a bad "smart insurance contract" and buy Ethereum insurance from an Ethereum insurer and prove that there will be enough Ethereum there to make everyone whole economically should everything go to shit because a fundamental problem in Solidity lets anyone unilaterally blow the whole thing up...

I honestly don't know what to say about that. It's ludicrous.

And there's more Ethereum now. The DAO was a ~$50 million fraud. This was a ~$30 million fraud. Obviously this is totally different and there's nothing we can do about it and it's just fine. People should have known better than to use parity with this bug in it.