I’m not suggesting it isn’t a crime. The hackers definitely committed a crime. The question is which of the two (relatively) innocent parties, Green or DarkWing84, is left holding the bag for it. My argument is that if you hold property in notoriously hackable form, then you’re careless enough to get hacked, it’s not right to make a completely innocent third party make whole your losses.
It’s a little like bearer bonds. If someone steals your bearer bonds, and an innocent third party shows up with your bearer bonds later, you don’t get them back. Bearer bonds are basically engineered to be super-stealable, so if you’re careless enough to allow your bearer bonds to be stolen, we’re not sympathetic enough to make a random innocent person hold the bag.
thanks, I thought it was a helpful discussion of possession vs. ownership, and whether ownership can ever be entirely determined by the blockchain or if you will also need some governmental judicial process to determine ownership.
Thanks for the link. There’s a mention in there of proposed changes to the UCC to address digital assets, which would ahem essentially adopt the position I’ve been arguing (see 12-104 and the commentary):
EDIT: Also, in a seriously way, the similarity between apes and bearer bonds kind of is that they have no apparent purpose other than being stolen. If you come up with some exotic way to transfer ownership of things, and that new thing allows your stuff to get exotically stolen, you are not entirely blameless!
Investors piled into TerraUSD because of the opportunity to make money in Anchor Protocol, a sort of crypto bank that offered annual yields of nearly 20% on deposits of the coin.
Keith Baldwin, a 44-year-old surgeon who lives outside New Bedford, Mass., saved $177,000 during the past decade. Last year he took his savings and bought USD Coin, putting it in a crypto account that paid a 9% annual yield.
In April, he moved it into a pseudo-savings account powered by TerraUSD that offered 15%. More than 90% of his savings vanished in a few days when TerraUSD lost its peg to the dollar.
“Now its investors are reeling from painful losses and asking if it was all a get-rich-quick scheme.”
It sure seems like they all were trying to get rich quick, so I’d say yes. And GMAFB with the arguments they thought it would be safe. Safe investments don’t pay 20% in an environment where treasuries pay 2%.
How was I supposed to know that this thing paying an impossibility high yield would have any risk?!
Moving money around to earn that juicy “15%” interest.
If it cannot be explained how the systems earns revenue to pay out the 15% interest, it means the depositors are the ones paying previous depositors that 15%.
Eh. I mean I don’t know, I try to stay sympathetic, but I’m inclined to show this surgeon who thought a 20% return was risk free the same level of sympathy he’d show a patient who thought a juice cleanse would cure their cancer. Sometimes you have to throw your hands up and be like people are stupid, what can you do.
The suicide stories are the unfortunately sad ones. Imagine creating a ponzi coin that leads to people committing suicide. And 2 weeks later forking a new coin.
Peoples desire to always have more money blows my mind. If I somehow luckboxed my way into $10m+ then I’m out. I’ll gladly reap the dividends off that for the next 60 years at 5%.
The victims of scams are always really greedy and stupid, because greed and stupidity are the main recruitment criteria for bagholders. The reason to crack down on scams is to push smart greedy people to start/invest in profitable ventures rather than starting scams/hiding their money under the mattress.
It’s not literally true, in that smart, honest people can sometimes get scammed, but I definitely think most scams target people who are greedy and dumb. “You can’t cheat an honest man.”
