Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ckastner 3199 days ago
> Because this supposed "law and accountability" led to things like the 2008 financial crisis. Didn't seem like there was much accountability then, so why should I trust that money supply?

As someone working in the financial industry, the amount of regulations, internal audits, external audits, reporting requirements, etc. that financial institutions have to comply with is truly staggering.

Sure, they 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that all of this was no silver bullet, but I still consider that system many orders of magnitude more trustworthy than a system that allowed for the shit-show that was MTGOX, and other failed exchanges.

2 comments

I've hear a lot has changed in terms of regulation since 2008. However we shouldn't compare Mt.Gox to BTC, Gox was a centralized institution, so the failure was with it, not with bitcoin. If the people had held their bitcoin privately, which is arguably the "correct" way to hold bitcoin, they would have been fine.

Bitcoin itself is completely auditable in transparent. The system will behave exactly as the code is written.

Trust... someone typed in instead of copy pasting an Ethereum address, made a typo and lost five figures.
Addresses have a checksum for just that reason. It would be remarkably difficult to acccidentally mistype an address that had happened to have the correct checksum, and also be a valid address.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4yru3h/scared_and...

tl;dr: Neither Ethereum nor Bitcoin have address checksums on the protocol level (remember this HN thread here is about trust) but by now all Bitcoin clients decided to implement it. In this case, the exchange used an Ethereum client which didn't.