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Beyond Bitcoin: How Business Can Capitalize On Blockchains
snydeq writes: Bitcoin's widely trusted ledger offers intriguing possibilities for business use beyond cryptocurrency, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner. "From the beginning, bitcoin has assumed a shadowy, almost outlaw mystique," Wayner writes. "Even the mathematics of the technology are inscrutable enough to believe the worst. The irony is that the mathematical foundations of bitcoin create a solid record of legitimate ownership that may be more ironclad against fraud than many of the systems employed by businesses today. Plus, the open, collaborative way in which bitcoin processes transactions ensures the kind of network of trust that is essential to any business agreement."
MTGOX failure has nothing to do with bitcoin but basic security common sense. Each user should have their own wallet and retain control of it. Putting all bitcoin into a single wallet that you along control clearly show the intent to fraud. The blame lie with the humans, not the technology.
Yes but the technology doesn't protest and it doesn't stand up and defend itself. So the tendency is to blame tech for not being "human-proof" against bad actors, rather than to tackle the much harder problems of how to deal with the reality that in this world there have been and will be bad actors. Perfectly secure tech that can always guard against all bad actors simply doesn't exist - in this case, a simple social engineering attack (convincing people to surrender control that they should never have given up) was all it took. To blame the Bitcoin design for the results of MTGOX is to attempt, yet again, to apply a technical solution to a social problem.
People generally don't blame the bank teller for handing over the money during a stick-up, but banks and bank tellers are something average people understand. What we have is a problem of technical education.