Security quotes of the week

Posted Mar 1, 2019 10:02 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Security quotes of the week by mina86
Parent article: Security quotes of the week

This week he ignores countries whose citizens have no trust in their national currency

Ah yes. Venezuela, every crypto enthusiast's dream example. Venezuela, where all the citizens have switched to cryptocurrency because of the country's spiralling inflation. Except they didn't, because you can't actually spend cryptocurrency anywhere, and it's utterly impractical even to try because if by some astonishing chance you find somewhere that accepts Bitcoin you still have to wait literally hours or pay insane fees (often in fiat currency!) to jam your transaction into Bitcoin's overflowing blocks. $70 for a cup of coffee, anyone? Hope you don't mind waiting six hours. It appears becoming a penniless refugee is a more practical option.

But this is Venezuela, where the (widely abhorred) government started a cryptocurrency, the Petro! Maybe the citizens could use that, since Bitcoin is unusable as currency! What happened to it after its 'release' a year ago? Oh yeah, you can't buy it, it's 'backed' by 'proven' oil reserves in a desolate backwater with no oil-related activity, its 'price', if that's the word for a number attached to something you can't buy, is a confected invention... as Henke puts it, "the whole thing is a sham, a fraud". Which makes it a pretty good fit for the rest of the vapourware-and-scam-filled cryptocurrency world, really.

And have we already forgotten all the bonuses executives got after the financial crisis?

Ah yes, yes, because crypto exchange operators (the closest cryptocurrency equivalent I can think of) have no record of not just getting exorbitant bonuses but stealing all their customers' money en masse and vanishing, leaving their customers with no recourse because the currency is so secure that you can't get it back when your own bank turns out to be a brazen thief. (The banks that you don't need to trust in the Bitcoin world! But it turns out everyone does: they're unregulated, incompetent, and utterly untrustworthy, but running your own bank and being your own bank's security officer is an even worse choice for most people.)