The interesting thing to me about this is watching how we've changed over the past 40 years. As a kid, it was impressed up on kids to not talk to strangers. You don't tell people where you live. You don't tell people anything more than necessary. Now, people share the most intimate details of their daily lives. People share/invite random strangers to their accounts without any concerns about who they are or what they might do. People just do not think about how the most benign of posts can be used for nefarious purposes by someone else. So we've gone from share nothing to over sharing everything.
During covid some SWEs had pretty sweet gigs due to lowered expectations and a rush on talent. And what do a small fraction of SWEs do? Make “life in the day of” videos that glamorize how cushy and easy-going it is, painting the whole group of SWEs as spoiled and entitled who make too much money. Point is they could’ve just realized they had it good and kept quiet.
But, no, they had to hustle for internet points, even risking their job inadvertently. It’s unbelievable to me how fast we flipped from the internet being an accessory to life to it being a surrogate for actual social interaction.
Pretending you're rich has been happening for a long time. Conversely, pretending you're poor though might make you a bit of a miser as you wouldn't use what you have to help anyone else. It seems wise to be discrete about your wealth if you have it, or you're just inviting trouble for little real gain.
Sure it'd take longer than pulling up directions on your phone does now but if you're planning a cross-country trip to kidnap someone and beat their passphrases out of them or demand a ransom from their family or whatever then you've probably got some other plans to make. If it's a total impulse then you just grab your duct tape, chainsaw, masks, and continental-scale road atlas and hit the road; when you get to your target's state you can pick up maps that'll get you to their place at the first gas station you hit. Don't make jokes about why you're on a road trip when you stop at the whimsical roadside attraction shaped like a dinosaur, someone will come forwards when your case makes the news.
If I needed a direction addresses for another city I'd just go there (had a full highway map of the country) and buy the local map - they were typically for sale near the front of basically every store (gas station, pharmacy, etc.).
And I think it all boils down to the fact that some humans need to make noise about their successes so they feel validated. Much like the cryptocurrency evangelists, they probably can’t help themselves because they want to ensure they defend “the mission” even if it comes at great personal cost in the long run.
It's worth worrying about in the general case, too. There are subtler and much more noxious failure modes here than merely getting beaned with a Swedish nut rounder.
Everything you do to keep keys safe from some risks weakens your posture against other risks. Making sure most people don't know about your holdings is nice and all, but ultimately key management is a really hard problem. It's hard enough for companies, but I'd argue it's even worse for individuals.
If the person who kidnaps you believes you have the necessary keys on you, or remember them or whatever, they aren't going to let you go because you genuinely do not have the ability to provide them.
With events like the recent Coinbase breach, is this even enough?
Of course it would be easy to say one's never touched crypto, and not so easy to prove, as with any negative. I don't care. If I ever get bounced with a King Dick, it'll far more likely be because I said something someone didn't like - which seems to happen about as often as I open my mouth, these days.
In any case they better not let me hear them coming. Wiser to spin the block in a car, really. I've never been hit with a wrench before, but it did once take more than a hammer to get me off my feet.
Matt Levine had a recent article about this. Another part of the problem is that some BTC repositories* got hacked and the hackers got people's names and addresses and maybe quantity of BTC
So, even if you keep your mouth shut, if people can get your address, you're a potential target.
*(I can't recall the details and I don't know enough about crypto to know if I'm using the proper terminology)
* edit: here's the article. skip down to "$5 wrench attack"
No, all those trying to normalize the wild-west and those who try to prosper from the wild west- they have to go. Now. Wherever they came from. Take your low-thrust, non-working societies with you. The enablers too, if you want to co-exist with this, you are wrong here. You need to go. Now.
While I agree that we are seeing a shift towards lower trust societies in the west, I can think of plenty of potential domestic causes.
But if you push for a lowtrust society, because these "upvalue" security providers in daily life and you think you must re-educate your fellow man away from "stupidity" towards being eternally paranoid on the lookout, you are a detriment.
If you plan to actively prosper from pushing the scam parasitism and decay on "suckers" or just poisoning a high-trust society with low-trust fabrications - you are the economic equivalent to a lethal parasite or contagion.
The Jordan Belforts and P.T. Barnums (and many more) have been a part of US society since the beginning.
You’re just able to see the snake oil salesman parting the rubes from their coin remotely, instead of only being able to see it if you’re standing right next to the rube.
Even with that happening, there are still plenty of rubes - and just like before, people who are trying to run the snake oil salesman out of town (but generally being ineffective at it).
This leads to the outcome that it is hard to find good security advice. I'm from New Zealand and too many in the crypto community here are far too trusting (unsafely so - so why would I wish to learn from them).
I was (past tense) interested in investing in crypto however I wanted to learn how to manage security before I invested more than I could afford to lose (say more than a month's salary). I have never felt I could trust my own security so I have never invested much in crypto (one exception has been a little money in crypto correlated stocks).
I was in South America and I thought that might be a good place to learn crypto security since the people there need to be a lot more careful about their security. I couldn't find anybody I trusted to teach me, even if offering a good professional hourly rate. Easy to find people with opinions on security: however they were somewhat ignorant because they lacked real risk (because their amounts at risk were small enough that they would never be spear targeted).
When basic security is silence, then it is difficult to find anyone clueful who would teach.
Edit: an interesting adventure in trying to understand trust. Smart people won't share the details of their own security because it puts their security at risk (how can they trust me?) And why would I trust anybody who isn't at risk?
It’s truly exhausting in the long run, which is why I prefer the old fashioned, tried and true financial vehicles instead.
Because they are very knowledgeable.
A critical aspect of crypto-currencies is sales. They have to sell a story so that investors keep pouring money into the system. Otherwise the whole thing would collapse very quickly.
One of them was defrauded of their entire savings, and only discovered at the point where they needed it as a deposit on a house. The person had spent over a year worming their way into their confidence (not just online), and was regarded as a good friend. They managed to convince them over a long period of time that it was safer for them (as a financial advisor) to manage their funds for them. Once the wallet was out of her control, the 'friend' disappeared entirely.
Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.
Pseudo-anonymity, with the emphasis on the pseudo part, is only as good as you. If you truly believe in Bitcoin and all that implies, it really is in your best interest to be quiet and keep it to yourself, and this knife cuts in more ways than you might expect. You don’t have layers of security like at a traditional bank. You are the weakest link wrt private keys and storage.
Also, even talking about it amongst folks you think are your friends, like fellow Bitcoin users, isn’t wise either. Hypothetically, if you became exceedingly wealthy on paper, it would be in the interest of others to take you out of the equation so you can’t cash out. If that means a five dollar (or whatever they cost these days) wrench to the head so you stop moving… now that value is locked up in the blockchain! Could this happen to any given bitcoin users with just a few satoshi or whatnot? Very unlikely, but don’t forget that a decade and a half ago, a handful of bitcoins could cost you very little money. Now it has gone up exponentially in value and would make you a big fat target.
There are those on /r/bitcoin that think a wrench won’t ever break their wills and spirits. That math is invincible. Don’t think they’ve ever been on the wrong side of one before. Math might be bulletproof, but wetware is very fragile.