News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Buttercoin – US-based Bitcoin exchange by danbruc on Friday February 28, 2014 @05:34PM (#7322004)
The security of your funds is our #1 priority. Our team goes above and beyond all banking security best practices to create the world's most secure Bitcoin trading platform.

And then they build their system using CoffeeScript, a dynamically typed language? They are kidding me?

EDIT: Another comment implies they rebuild the engine using Scala.

Re:Buttercoin – US-based Bitcoin exchange by tg3 on Friday February 28, 2014 @07:31PM (#7322475)
Excuse my ignorance, but what about a dynamically-typed language makes an application inherently less secure?
Re:Buttercoin – US-based Bitcoin exchange by danbruc on Saturday March 01, 2014 @04:28AM (#7323755)
Assuming your design is correct and secure - and that is already really hard to do - you still have to ensure that you implementation matches your design, i.e. contains no defects, and this is harder in a dynamically typed language, because there are classes of defects that the compiler of a statically typed language will catch while they go unnoticed using a dynamically typed language. So dynamically typed languages are not less correct or secure on their own, they just do not prevent you from writing incorrect or insecure code in the same way statically typed languages do.

One example I once read about are control systems for rockets and missiles - they use different data types for x, y and z coordinates. They are all just numbers but you really want to make sure that you do not accidentally swap two variables and the missile turns left while it should ascend. And you just can not enforce such constraints in dynamically typed languages.

Re:Buttercoin – US-based Bitcoin exchange by recursive on Friday February 28, 2014 @08:00PM (#7322594)
It's harder to reason about the behavior of a program running in an environment that allows monkey patching and eval().
Re:Buttercoin – US-based Bitcoin exchange by oh_sigh on Saturday March 01, 2014 @12:10AM (#7323189)
You can just have a style guide that disallows those constructs.
Re:Buttercoin – US-based Bitcoin exchange by meddlepal on Saturday March 01, 2014 @12:55AM (#7323305)
Which unlike a compiler has a higher chance of being improperly applied or ignored.
Re:Buttercoin – US-based Bitcoin exchange by cedricdahl on Saturday March 01, 2014 @03:44AM (#7323664)
Hi danbruc, yes, that's correct, we've rebuilt the engine using Scala.
Re:Buttercoin – US-based Bitcoin exchange by judk on Saturday March 01, 2014 @05:04PM (#7326358)
The claim about banking best practices is an obvious lie on its face.

Have they been audited?