> It took the combined forces of several agencies of the federal government more than five years to reverse ~$4.5 billion in Bitcoin transaction
Unlike the Bangladesh Bank hack, for example, which they were unable to reverse.
Taking any one scenario where it didn't work out that way is highly selective cherry picking. There is not functional equivalence between "almost always impossible" and "almost always possible".
For the actual topic, I don't have any respect for these ICOs/mints/[newest renaming], they're shameless cash grabs with 98% marketing and 2% upwork-tier code. However, you can burn a million quid; I don't think it's a big deal that you can burn 34 million in digital currency due to extreme negligence.
That's fair, I just see lots of discussions where single examples are used to (often literally) say "that's no different from other finance".
And I agree reversibility can be built for crypto, it's just that right now that is not the norm, and defi probably won't see wide adoption until that changes a bit.
KLF much?
Elaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31139114
And of that hack, I think something like 90% of the transactions for stolen money were reversed, but a significant portion got through because of the timing.
edit- and IIRC the whole thing was caught because of a typo?
A better summary might be "transactions are reversible in more cases than you would expect."
Also, transactions that aren't reversible at a low level are often reversible at a higher level in the stack.
Now try the same scenario when you’re an ordinary Schmoe who wired money to an obvious scammer, and then tell me whether you still believe Patrick’s model of the banking system as a giant kumbaya circle run on gentlemen’s agreements to Do The Right Thing.
<https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/no-payments-are-final/>
> Of course wires are reversible. They were not designed by children, but by professionals who live in a society which has systemically important institutions, and in the event of malfeasance or mistakes society does not tolerate a bank failing or a state missing payroll simply because someone said “no takesies-backsies” fast enough.
> Mistakes happen! By, conservatively, the hundreds of thousands daily across all payments systems, millions depending on your definition of mistake. Wire transfers, like almost all payment systems, explicitly contemplate them and have a sociolegal ritual to quickly reverse them.
> The ritual is called “hold harmless” and comes from a soft guarantee about the wire transfer ecosystem, which is that transactions are largely between sophisticated counterparties acting in good faith, intermediated by institutions whose probity is almost sacrosanct. Importantly, wires are in expectation worth having a human in the loop for; that is very not true of most payments.