[ExI] lotta splainin to do

[spike at rainier66.com]

>… On Behalf Of Will Steinberg via extropy-chat

Subject: Re: [ExI] lotta splainin to do

 

>…Spike is referring to the subsequent 'hack' and draining of their remaining funds.

 

>…Short version: was 99% chance an inside job.  Attacker had access to the private keys of their digital currency reserves (like having your safe deposit box key) and used them to transfer all FTX's assets to his/her own wallet.  Nothing confusing here.  Some guy on the inside used the password to steal everything…  Will

 

 

Ja, so this makes it sound like we are back where we were 20 years ago, in a sub-group generated here on ExI.  Adrian I don’t recall, were you part of that?  

 

The notion of digital currency with blockchain security sounded cool, but I never bought into (damn) for two reasons: 

 

1.	the value of the stuff depends on control of the quantity (BitCoin does that, but there is no way to stop a dozen companies from starting their own competing digital currencies, dragging down the value of all of it)
2.	there is a weak link in the chain if we need to swap digital currency to fiat money and back, which looks to me like a demonstration of that weakness just happened with FTX.

 

Will, you were an early BitCoin guy ja?  Did you not worry about these two factors?  I was friends with Hal Finney back then, and he explained to me that each digital coin takes more calculation to mine, analogous to the Mersenne prime project, so that would keep the price moving up.  But those two reasons above stopped me from investing (damn), both of which appear to still be valid, and hand the whole money-printing business back to governments who do have the option of printing it in arbitrary quantities.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

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