Any IT shop would have seen this coming

[bill_schubert]

In an article collected by The Hustle here is a piece talking about what is happening with bitcoin right now.  It is actually not a small thing.  Here is one piece of the puzzle I completely understand:

The NYT writes about one German-born programmer living in SF who has a disk drive with $220m of Bitcoin on it.

Unfortunately, he’s forgotten the password to the drive (called IronKey), which locks forever after 10 failed attempts. The programmer only has 2 attempts left to unlock the drive…otherwise the Bitcoin keys are gone forever.

After watching how people lose things and lock them up and corrupt them and end up ransomed this does not even a little bit surprise me.

There is a guy in San Francisco that has 220 million dollars of other people's money on an encrypted hard drive that he knew would lock up forever (didn't I see that movie?) if the password was lost AND, of course, he lost the password.

Got to be the dumbest system in the world for safeguarding $220m (trusting a person with a password).  So, of course, this is not the only place it is happening.  Now the cat is out of the bag turns out this  (and other similar screwups) is an issue throughout the Bitcoin world.  "In a truly astounding stat, 20% of existing Bitcoin (worth ~$140B) is either lost or stranded in digital wallets, according to Chainalysis "

On the flip side of tech is this summary of what is interesting in CES this year.  CES has gotten boring since the salad days of the early 2000's.  But this is a good selection of innovation in the works.

Comments

[stainsteelrat.livejournal.com]

I just read about a guy who's trying to recover a hard drive from a rubbish tip in the UK. He has a similar amount of bitcoin on it, but the council aren't biting https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55658942

[susandennis]

leo laporte can't remember his bitcoin wallet password. fortunately, he has infinite guesses left.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Oh, excellent. That is pretty amazing.

[maju01.livejournal.com]

The companion to the companion robot: the companion cat. (Not listed in the top 12.) How creepy is that?

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.... I wouldn't have considered that the companion robot would get lonely. Good thinking.

[mairi-dubh.livejournal.com]

How insensitive of humans not to have realizes robots have feelings and the need of companionship, too.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

If androids dream of electric sheep, what do android cats leave in the litter box?

[mairi-dubh.livejournal.com]

Discharge?

[mairi-dubh.livejournal.com]

I don't understand this whole concept of Bitcoin, anyway.

What is Bitcoin?

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

It is a block chain processed promissory note. I've read about block chain more times than I can count and finally decided I'm too old to really grok it. But the bottom line is it is an amount of money you have invested in the BitCoin system and it gains and loses value pretty randomly and in wild swings. In Las Vegas they call it gambling. In the BitCoin world they call it investing. But the whole system actually is vapor contained in a series of computers which contain hard drives rightfully so encrypted by unbreakable encryption. Actual people have the passwords and there is the rub.
Beyond that you're on your own in Wikipedia.

[mairi-dubh.livejournal.com]

Haven't been yet to Wikipedia for this one and I am a total techno-Luddite, but if I've understood you correctly, a person invests actual money in order to maybe see that money pay cyber- or theoretical dividends?
But if the Bitcoin System (h'mm: perhaps i'm impossibly cynical, but I just looked at those initials...) loses cyber-money, the "investor" actually loses actual money?

Is this actually good for anything, useful or productive?

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Real money in, real money out. In between is a gamble. Just like any investment. It is like buying dollars. But more volitile.

[mairi-dubh.livejournal.com]

*shakes head in the negative, frowning*

Sounds crazy.
And can you, on a "bad" transaction, end up owing money you can't pay?

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

No, you just lose it. No short selling.

[amw.livejournal.com]

Bitcoin is so stupid. I mean, the idea of an independent currency that exists outside of the state, that is some kind of cool anarcho libertarian fantasy. I see the appeal of it in theory. But in reality most of these cryptocurrencies just ended up subsumed by the existing finance system as yet another thing to speculate on, so they're too volatile to be useful as a real currency. And then the fact people can lose their password and the money just vanishes... That even undermines the trickliest of trickle-down economic theory.

There is probably a place for an electronic equivalent to cash, by which i mean a mechanism to do financial transactions between individuals that isn't tracked on any banking or government systems. Back in the old cyberpunk days we thought that was going to be some kind of "money stick" that you could tap to someone else's "money stick" and the cash would be transferred anonymously, but tech evolved in a different way and now there is always an internet paper trail. I think the only way for a cryptocurrency to actually become mainstream would be if Google and Apple got onboard, but they don't really have an incentive to do it because not enough people care.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm a government man. Not looking for ways around it. Bitcoin is just gambling as is most investing. There is safer gambling and more on the edge gambling but it is still gambling.

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

Butbut....why didn't he write the password on a Post-It and stick it to the drive like everybody else?

(For the avoidance of doubt, I have never done this. I don't even trust online password managers. If I have to record a password it's offline and in a format only understood by me. Like you, I've seen enough corporate password idiocy to last a lifetime. Fascinating stats though.)

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I've got my life in LastPass. Used to use Roboform in my business. I like them both and love 16 character random passwords different on every account. And only having to remember one. So far, so good.