Fraud: bitcoin versus traditional banking

[zby]

I was just reading the notes from Peter Thiel lectures (http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-11-notes-essay):

The fraud problems that PayPal ran into were also a big secret. Fraud was endemic in finance and banking, but no one ever talked about it. Banks don’t like to come out and say, “We have hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from us every year and we have no idea how to stop it.” So they don’t say it. Instead they build in loss budgets and reserves and just try to keep things quiet.

And it struck me - there is a lot of grilling the bigcoin ecosystem about the attacks - there have been quite a few of them - but how many attacks there are on the traditional banking system that you never hear about?  Just a case in point: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14Hacker-t.html?pagewanted=all

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[Boussac]

What makes things worse is the fact that companies keeping credit card records typically do not disclose it if and when their database is compromised (unless their are forced to do it by regulations: such regulation does not exist in Europe for instance).

[arklan]

an interesting question. watching.

[Gabi]

Nice thread