We Need Regulation and #SAFU for Every Company who Trades Cryptocurrency

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Governments of the world need to wake up, and start to realise that we live in a world of digital signatures, and understand the benefits and risks that this world brings. The days of wet signatures, periodical auditing, and pushing paper are gone, and replaced by faster and more trustworthy methods. Unfortunately there is little in way of proper regulation within financial transactions. Many governments thus just hope that cryptocurrencies will go away, and the whole digital signing thing will just disappear.

The risks of this new world were highlight when on Tuesday, Binance reported that 7,074 bitcoins (around £32 million) had been stolen from their exchange. They found that someone used API keys and two factor authentication code to perform a hack [here]:

After this, the exchange was shutdown:

It is thought that the hack from Binance’s hot wallet, and which has around 2% of all the bitcoins held by them. This means that “possibly” there is no affect on customer wallets. With Bitcoin, there is virtually no chance of stopping the transaction going forward, once it has been picked up by the miners. In…

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Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.