pull down to refresh
Sure it can. A zero day bug can wipe us all out! Sometimes things happen that are beyond the control of humans.
This bug with cold card sat in the open for 5 years.
While everyone was dunking on shitcoins and calling out Saylor calling folks who thought they were untouchable ended up getting rekt because everyone trusted NVK and Peter the owners of Coinkite.
A few of us got lucky but things happen that go against your best wishes. And since all of us don’t have time to learn the code base we rely on trust of others to keep us somewhat secure. May it be a false sense of security but it gives people confidence to buy bitcoin and store it off an exchange.
Part of the bitcoin ethos is radical accountability. There have been people voicing concerns about HWW's the whole time and arguing for generating external entropy. Given the availability of that knowledge "no fault of our own" just doesn't resonate with me. That doesn't mean I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the victims of this heist, though.
My model for thinking about this comes from growing up doing dangerous wilderness type stuff. People die climbing mountains and whitewater rafting and the like, sometimes very careful people. Seldom do we say it was to no fault of their own. Rather, we try to understand what lapse in precautions led to their tragic demises, so that the same is less likely to happen to us or someone we care about. That's not the same as blaming them, but it also respects and acknowledges that they made the choices that put them in the position they were in.
All of us are out on a frontier. It has real perils and requires real diligence. I find it both unhelpful and disingenuous to avoid acknowledging that people made mistakes that led to their downfall.
My model for thinking about this comes from growing up doing dangerous wilderness type stuff.
When people buy and store bitcoin we don’t think it’s dangerous nor wild. We are often told it’s a boring dumb protocol that does a few things really well. An oversight of a script of code you don’t have any clue of can absolutely fall into not having fault in your own demise.
Like babies are born through no fault of their own and experience both good and bad things that come with life. Or airplane crashes. It’s the safest way to travel on planet earth and yet every so often one goes down and people die. Are they at fault because they trusted the safest way to travel?
I understand your position of trying to mitigate risk to the lowest possible but I always think risk is unavoidable.
Risk is absolutely unavoidable. That's not my point.
My point is that it's important to respect the choices other people make and not infantilize them by denying their agency. These weren't babies. These were grown ups who decided to trust their savings to a new technology and decided who to listen to about that technology and how much research to do into understanding it.
The whole world, except for a bunch of internet weirdos, was telling them it was risky. If they drew the conclusion that it wasn't, then that was their conclusion and to some degree they have to own it.
I agree. When I say “No fault of their own” I’m not absolving them from of responsibility. No one forced them to listen to podcasts use a single signature cold card and send bitcoin to it that has a weak seed.. They made rational decisions given the best data and information they had access to and their own technical expertise. If something happens that was outside of their purview it is possible fault is not on the victim. But it doesn’t absolve them from responsibility.
No fault accidents are a thing in the insurance industry which tries to mitigate risk.
Saying no fault is not infantilizing them but giving an explanation to a situation that even top security experts have missed.
I like using no fault accidents as the comparison.
The difference I see is that we don’t have the same kind of clearly established rules of conduct, so it’s not as obvious what “doing everything you should have done” means.
This is the sentiment that I'm not really comfortable with in this whole discussion. We do choose what to trust and how far to dig. It can't be "no fault of our own" and "bitcoin is the best savings technology".