0 sats \ 6 replies \ @Lumor 24 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: Time Locked Multisig: A New Dimension In Self Custody bitcoin
Yes, one of the 4 dudes would come with you and wait outside the bank, reminding you of your wife's fingers and life as you enter.
While possible, the thieves now MUST allow you to go to a bank grade security level place.
Now you have the ability to (hopefully covertly) alert the authorities and have your house surrounded by police. Will you and your family end up 100% safe? Unsure. But safety is never 100% in real life and TLM wallets now mean it's significantly harder and more riskier for the thieves to get away with it. Now there's a serious possibility that they're going to have armed men and women surround them, before there was virtually zero chance of that.
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You can imagine a scenario like this, but consider how much the bar has been raised to get around the security measures: you've moved from one dipshit with a $5 wrench being all that is needed to steal someone's savings, and now require a criminal gang that can coordinate over time and keep its shit together while multiple parties execute a complex plan.
More importantly, you're also assuming that the other parties and institutions in this threat model -- including "the bank" in this example -- don't evolve at all, that their awareness of these kinds of attacks stay at zero, and their security measures are negligible. That's not how it will unfold.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the main job to be done right now is to evolve practices and norms that raise the bar for thieves much higher, and to ensure that that much higher bar becomes common knowledge.
There's no silver bullet that makes you safe against all attackers. If the government wants you dead, you're still dead. But as anyone in security will tell you, adding modest frictions provides an incredible ROI.
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I wasn't claiming things will not improve eventually.
4 masked men
These guys mentioned in the post, they are organized enough to spend the night torturing the couple. They have enough intelligence to target and extract crypto from victims. They know self-custodied crypto is easier to steal than doing a super-large bank transfer. Splitting up and having 1-2 guys follow you to the bank is not unthinkable. Banks don't have bitcoin transfer limits and you probably didn't tell them you have a bitcoin key in your deposit-box.
Present banks around where I live seem much more interested in keeping their employees safe rather than making it hard for robbers. Some even have policies of keeping vault doors open during office hours.
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These guys mentioned in the post, they are organized enough to spend the night torturing the couple.
I'm not disagreeing that criminals exist who can do this; nor am I claiming that it takes some kind of Ocean's 11 mastermind to follow someone to a bank and wait outside, while someone else waits at home with someone's wife.
I am saying that the scheme described is already quite a high bar vs most of the criminal activity that takes place; and that over time, as the implications of sovereign money really play out, a lot of other security measures will evolve, some in new institutions, some in old; and the sophistication required to rob someone will increase.
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I'm happy for our kids' sake then.
Many stackers who somehow leaked their interest in bitcoin will probably have to deal with a lot of pain before we get a better approach to cold storage.
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