I was often amused how there is a group of cryptocurrency people who hyperfocus on some part of security and then not take the whole risk situation into account. People who brag on how secure they store their seed phrase, how many bits of encryption they just and gush about how great the bitcoin security all works and prevents the evil gov from hyperinflating their dollarinos or local equivalent.

And then also post stuff like ‘hey fellow coiners, I’m going on vacation to Portugal next week, I will be arriving at airport X at monday at 20:00, anybody want to meet up? You can recognize me by my bitcoin propellor hat.’ It is like they want to be rubberhosed.

Say what you want about John McAfee (no really he wasn’t a great person, so say what you want), but he at least he was the only one smart enough to bring private security to a cruise filled with cryptocurrency libertarians. https://lauriepenny.substack.com/p/ship-of-fools (I wonder how many of them got the hint and implied threat and realized that next time they should bring their own).

E: related to that, while im talking about threats to cryptocurrencies. Note that criminal hackers (I assume they are not state backed, could be), could pull off this complicated hack at a security company, filled with security people who spend their days securing this kind of stuff. The idea that a state backed hacker group (one of the stated(*) risks of cryptocurrencies, is that a state would go ‘yeah, this shit does not allow us to control the supply of doubloons, lets attack it’) could not/would not do it and be quite successful and destructive is wishful thinking. Look at how Dutch cops wreck crypto phones by pushing malicious (for the criminals) updates (with the correct applications of laws and a bit of police force you might net even to need to do that much hacking).

*: I think it is highly likely that this risk is not real and that govs see cryptocurrencies for what they are, not a valid replacement for real money, and even if they ever think it is a risk they could simply roll out their own. People will use StateCoin over WeirdNerdCoin.

Monahan said she’d concluded that the common thread among nearly every victim was that they’d previously used LastPass to store their “seed phrase,” the private key needed to unlock access to their cryptocurrency investments.

All that ideological effort to continue relying on a cloud-based password system.