Re:153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack
by kccqzy on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @11:50PM
(#14809905)
I'm inclined to agree but I must say this traditional system is unscalable. Sure it can detect millions of dollars of fraudulent transactions, but what if it's a single person who's the victim of identity theft and lost just a few thousand dollars? A few thousand dollars is nothing in the grand scheme of things but they are a lot to a single individual.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack
by spiralx on Thursday July 20, 2017 @02:29AM
(#14810419)
I've had calls from my bank's fraud detection department about single transactions of less than fifty pounds that they were concerned weren't from me, so clearly the traditional system is plenty scalable enough.
Re:153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack
by kalleboo on Thursday July 20, 2017 @02:05AM
(#14810346)
Doesn't this happen every day, over trivially small sums? You've never heard of a credit card chargeback?
Re:153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack
by geofft on Thursday July 20, 2017 @11:45AM
(#14813479)
Right, and also, a good part of why credit cards have 2-3% overhead is essentially insurance against chargebacks. I'd rather pay $51 for groceries every week than $50 for groceries plus a risk of irrevocably losing tens of thousands of dollars at some point with no warning.
If cryptocurrencies think that they can provide this service for substantially cheaper than 2-3% (note that this is an additional service on top of simply making the transfer happen, so mining fees aren't the right thing to compare), that sounds awesome, but also I'd like to understand why it's possible.