Edited to add: So much for my beautiful observation. Charlie says quite plausibly that he thought security issues were too obvious to be worth mentioning.
A serious security breach was recently discovered at a bitcoin repository, and Charles Stross, who hates bitcoin engaged in some schadenfreude.
The schadenfreude link has an explanation of what it takes to do security programming for institutions that handle money-- something Charlie did for years. It's *hard*, even with the resources of a large organization.
He's entitled to gloat about the current mess, but since I'm not as convinced as he is that governments should be able to keep track of the whole economy, I remembered he'd been downright nasty about bitcoins, but I didn't think he'd mentioned anything about security problems. He hadn't.
Prediction is difficult, especially about the future, but this is an interesting case because Charlie is very smart, has spent a lot of time thinking about what's likely to happen, was looking for reasons to hate bitcoin, and had specific experience which would have given him another reason to hate bitcoin.... and he still didn't see the security problems coming. Alternate theory-- he did see the security problems, and didn't want to give a warning. I have no idea whether he's that sneaky.
I'm going with the honest mistake theory, and trying to figure out if there are ways to find out whether you've missed something important.
A serious security breach was recently discovered at a bitcoin repository, and Charles Stross, who hates bitcoin engaged in some schadenfreude.
The schadenfreude link has an explanation of what it takes to do security programming for institutions that handle money-- something Charlie did for years. It's *hard*, even with the resources of a large organization.
He's entitled to gloat about the current mess, but since I'm not as convinced as he is that governments should be able to keep track of the whole economy, I remembered he'd been downright nasty about bitcoins, but I didn't think he'd mentioned anything about security problems. He hadn't.
Prediction is difficult, especially about the future, but this is an interesting case because Charlie is very smart, has spent a lot of time thinking about what's likely to happen, was looking for reasons to hate bitcoin, and had specific experience which would have given him another reason to hate bitcoin.... and he still didn't see the security problems coming. Alternate theory-- he did see the security problems, and didn't want to give a warning. I have no idea whether he's that sneaky.
I'm going with the honest mistake theory, and trying to figure out if there are ways to find out whether you've missed something important.