Chidozie Nwobilor (he/him)

@kneoghau@mastodon.social @toriver@mas.to @target@infosec.exchange @pluralistic@mamot.fr blockchains have built in weaknesses compared to the financial systems they plan to supplant. For example, if someone steals your mastercard and buys a bunch of stuff, you can get those transactions undone, but on blockchain those transactions are permanent barring you convince the *whole* community to fork the chain. That inflexibility extends to any of the smart contracts implemented on Ethereum. In Dan Olsen's Line Goes Up ( https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g?si=Bq-g1I6PjqskySZC) he mentions a game released that released with several bugs that couldn't be fixed without forking and it went very badly for them. Worse the smart contracts execute regardless of what the wallet owner wants ; the nft/crypto world has rediscovered the security bugs that plagued the early 2000s

@kneoghau@mastodon.social @toriver@mas.to @target@infosec.exchange @pluralistic@mamot.fr The ability to roll back isn't a feature of fiat currency; it's a feature of how modern banking works. Your bank balance isn't a count of all the pennies the bank has in a vault somewhere; it's the net sum of all the transactions in and out of your account. When a bank wants to roll back a transaction, it either adds a reverse transaction or (if they haven't sent it off to be reconciled by the rest of the banks) deletes it. That isn't a feature of fiat currency (you can't do this with a dollar bill for example) and it's not something that cryptocurrency can prevent. That's because one of the biggest weaknesses of our modern banking system is how much it incentivizes rent-seeking. Right now Fidelity sells cryptocurrency indexes which don't track who owns each individual bitcoin ( or ether, dogecoin , or what-have-you) but the owners of the buy/sell transactions. Fidelity does that for convenience because it and its customers want fast predictable transactions and fees