Well banks generally refund stolen money, so you won't see a lot of noise from victims... but anyway:
How do you think banks got more secure? Trial and error, incremental progress. These repeated break-ins should make consumer-grade hosting environments more secure.
These repeated break-ins should make consumer-grade hosting environments more secure.
Not going to happen at the price points people are accustomed to - they'll simply become professional-grade hosting environments, with a price tag to match. See Amazon's recent cloud HSM announcements - $5000 set-up fee before you get started. Then people will whine about how expensive it all is, and some bright spark will come up with ways to make it cheaper by compromising here and there, and we're back to square one.
Honestly, the high tech industries are shocking at learning from history - "Oh, those constraints from 10 years ago don't apply to us anymore, technology has moved on." Sure, but people haven't, and most of the real problems are sociological problems - fraud, greed, stupidity, stubbornness. Companies that deal with money or payment processing come up against this faster than ones that don't, and they adapt (see PayPal's anti-fraud department, so successful they spun off Palantir) or die (80% of all Bitcoin exchanges to date).
It's just not that easy. People running these things completely lack the understanding of just how seriously security needs to be taken. Various sites handle millions of dollars worth of bitcoin with "patch all flaws" style security. People need to understand that millions of dollars of easily disposed of goods are worth killing people for.
It won't be long now until we'll hear the first case where some employee of a third-rate exchange or something will wake up with a barrel of a gun pointed at him, forcing him to go to work and turn over all the float at his company or have his family killed. It's been done in the USA, and for much less than what these exchanges and mining pools routinely manage.
Banks have security against this sort of thing. They manage it by making actually keeping that money after obtaining it without getting caught really hard. I have no idea how it can be protected against when it's bitcoin.
Banks have security against this sort of thing. They manage it by making actually keeping that money after obtaining it without getting caught really hard. I have no idea how it can be protected against when it's bitcoin.
Fiat currency has government buy-in, and government support for loss prevention. Bitcoin not so much. The general anti-government attitude that goes with BTC means there's little incentive for law enforcement to care. (Yes, a server break-in is cybercrime, but so is someone hacking your Wordpress or Facebook accounts, and that's the level of attention it will be paid)
>They manage it by making actually keeping that money after obtaining it without getting caught really hard. I have no idea how it can be protected against when it's bitcoin.
Well, you can trace bitcoin more easily than you can trace other currencies.
It looks like cryptocurrency brings an incentive to finally take computer security seriously for consumer grade software and hardware. It is the first time something is really at stake apart for intangible qualities such as "privacy" and "intellectual property". It is an interesting and unexpected(?) second-order effect of cryptocurrency.
It is impossible to predict the cost and/or gains from now to an undefined time in the future. But the good thing is that this will help non-cryptocurrency security as well.
How do you think banks got more secure? Trial and error, incremental progress. These repeated break-ins should make consumer-grade hosting environments more secure.