I’ve been reading about the meltdown of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange in the mainstream media. It all sounds so Serious and Mysterious — Was it outside thieves or insider embezzlement? — What will this do to online finances? — And, whither the future of bitcoin and similar currencies?<\/p>\n
It’s not serious or mysterious, it’s actually stupidity. Charlie Stross, science fiction author and former computer programmer, points out that “MtGox” stands for “Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange.” Then he goes on to add:<\/a><\/p>\n “C’mon, folks. Mt. Gox was a trading card swap mart set up by an amateur coder and implemented in PHP! And you expected NSA-levels of trusted computing security, so you trusted your money to it?” <\/p>\n Now that I know all this, the whole story just seems Sad and Sordid. A few Magic card freaks move into amateur banking. A bunch of credulous people trust way too much money to the Magic card freaks. As happens all too often in human affairs, stupidity bred disaster.<\/p>\n I think there’s theology in here somewhere: Something about the essential fallibility of humans. And (more importantly) something about the way humans need to pretend that stupid human mistakes are actually Serious and Mysterious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been reading about the meltdown of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange in the mainstream media. It all sounds so Serious and Mysterious — Was it outside thieves or insider embezzlement? — What will this do to online finances? — And, whither the future of bitcoin and similar currencies? It’s not serious or mysterious, it’s … Continue reading “Oh, that explains it”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,11],"tags":[406,405],"class_list":["post-3749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-culture","category-theology","tag-bitcoin","tag-human-fallibility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3749"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3750,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3749\/revisions\/3750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}