I fully agree, and by trying to describe the supposed sophistication of the attack the article confirms your point as well. A breathless description, how they used a well known process name "and even the command line args looked legit!!!1!eleven!!", makes more fun of the hackers than pay them respect.

One other thing this bank should look at: why was it so easy for these hackers to own the mail server? This should be one of the best defended servers in the whole network, and the article makes it sound like that was the first bank server to fall flat on its face ...

Finite element approximation is a numerical method to calculate accurate solutions to partial differential equations. Most such equations will not have "closed solutions", but this doesn't diminish the accuracy of the solutions provided by FEM. You can not find a closed solution for the movement of a playground swing either, but you can calculate it to arbitrary precision numerically. Nobody would claim, though, that "we haven't found a solution to playground swing movements". The same thing applies to helium atom, which you can numerically calculate quite well.

If these people were experienced software developers, they wouldn't try to write their wares in vibe coding. Vibe coding was supposed to make coding work fool proof, and the fools just proved too creative in their foolhardiness. Vibe coding will eventually address this by introducing time lines and incremental rollbacks, and vibe coders will find yet another path towards self destruction. Whole thing reminds me of Visual Basic, where suddenly everyone could hack together a GUI, and it became visible at once, that "hacked together GUIs" were hideously bad most of the time.

It's our job to laugh at these people from the side lines, not interact with or be angry at them.

These AI vibe coding tools are specifically marketed to the type of person you describe. Hopefully not being one of these yourself, you should see these articles as part of the failblog series, where you laugh at imbeciles goofing up and acting indignantly afterwards, ideally with an angry letter to the manager or a public forum.

And she sure did. Being forced to verifiably tell all your other clients "I am a lazy shyster, who bills big bucks for submitting unchecked AI slop" is a pretty awesome form of punishment and seems to be pretty close to forced public self humiliation. This is going to hurt a lot more than petty fines.

Also, let's not forget, that the American Bar Association has also been informed, which may dish out their own sanctions, possibly quite painful ones. These folks have it coming to them ...

As far as I can tell, they still sell running shoes, regular bicycles, inline skates, boxing gloves and dumbbells to whoever looks for them. If you think, you need a room filling electronic gadget to move your rear end, then that's the problem right there. How did so many people arrive at the conclusion, that they have to buy such a thing?

I assume it chained only those devices to the mothership, which it could reach, i.e. those already on the leash. Should tell you how to proceed from now on:

• 1. buy device, prevent it from ever connecting to your network

• 2. if it doesn't work, send it right back while it's time to do so.

• 3. if it does work offline, keep it and make sure it stays offline forever.

It would be mutual assured bankruptcy. The minute Chinese start selling off their T bills, USA would cancel them in whole at once. Such a step would make it difficult to ever finance the US budget deficit again, but it would also tear a massive hole into Chinese budget and finances, which likely bankrupts them as well. This may well be the reason, why China never played that card.

What about Einstein's publications from 1905?

Like it or not, inflow to crypto is currently mostly from autists and institutional investors. Calling them delusional or claiming to know what they think says more about you than them. YOLO apes and retards got burned by NFTs and meme coins and are mostly out of the game.

IBM is still a large company, unlike those who thought "I'll stick with horses, because that Model T will be eventually replaced". Even if Bitcoin gets surpassed by Ethereum or some new coin next year: I'll have the skills to deal with it, while you won't. You'll be dancing at the grave of Bitcoin, while I enjoy the benefits and the profits of whatever comes next. "Damn I bought that Model T some years ago, and now there is a newer model on sale!" said no one ever. "Damn I stuck with horse carriages, and now trucks eat my lunch" was a lot more common ...

So we've finally landed with the tulips again. Sigh. You do realize, that there is a substantial difference between a perishable plant and a mathematical concept, right? I can list you the tulip situation with pretty much every other asset out there: companies may go bankrupt, bonds may fail, real estate can burn down or become uninhabitable, precious metal prices go up and down.

Somehow you make it appear, as if I described crypto currencies as something infallible, or something always profitable. I'd be the first to refute these claims and have enough personal experience to back this up with hard facts, not just abstract theories of pending doom. No, you will not get automatically rich if you invest in crypto, but just like with any asset: if go through the effort of research and then invest wisely, there's some money to be made. If you are like me, more a nerd than an investor, you can bring in your talent and earn money that way.

The short term risk for Bitcoin right now is that the USA would suddenly get a rational government and that as a result US$ denominated assets would suddenly become worthy investments again. You remember the times 15 years ago, when nobody wanted to invest in risky assets and everyone flocked into T bills? You remember that decade of negative interest? That money, which would be punished like this goes to Bitcoin now, and FED+EZB are scared shitless.

The long term risk of most crypto currencies is their inability to change their underlying cryptographic algorithms, which will become devastating once secp256k1 or sha3 are broken, either through mathematical advances or through quantum computers. Even if some brand new block chains can survive that, they'll probably burn to the ground together with all the big ones. This is, what keeps me awake at night, not your poorly researched standard phrases of tulips and Model T.

It's also possible to random guess Satoshi's private keys and loot his/her wallet. You'd make billions doing this!

It is considered a safe heaven right now, because the "oh so well backed US $" is going down the shitter. Stable genius isn't doing all that well despite his constant diatribes of being the "greatest deal maker". Investors flock to BTC because it at least held its value over the last six months. Compared to serious currencies BTC stayed more or less flat.

So what? One more network effect is mind share, i.e. depending on market volume you will attract more or less talent to run the show. If push comes to shove, Ethereum will have the better lawyers and the better engineers/mathematicians than Shiba Inu coin.

IBM was replaced by better performing tech stock like Google and Apple, yet neither did the stock market fail over this, nor did IBM end up in the gutter. What you describe as catastrophic scenario is a nothing burger with no extra toppings.

Feel free to invest in Turkish lira while I stay invested in BTC.

Again, this is not new and has - until now - not materialized. Big fat ASIC miners have dominated the field for 10 years now, private mining is, if it even still exists, done at minuscule scale with no realistic expectation of profit or validation impact. The foundation of your argument for collapse has been laid 10 years ago and never bore fruit. Time to search for a better theory of everything.

Institutionals are flocking to BTC, and above all BTC like there is no tomorrow. You can call these folks all stupid, but you probably know the room mate rule.

Well, despite your educated guess it hasn't done this. Experimental coins have come and gone, but BTC is pretty stable at the top, right? Something must be utterly wrong about your conclusions. We're not just talking statement vs. statement: a lot of money backs up the statement opposing your stance. Think about it.

Look at Turkish lira, backed by the mighty country of Turkey. Right?

And that caused bitcoin to become unstable and unreliable?

ASIC mining has been going on for over a decade, and has been mostly out of private hands for close to a decade. You present this as this was a completely new situation now and use this to predict imminent doom. Even if your fears come to fruition one day, you have voiced them for long enough to fall into the "stopped clock" category.

What Bitcoin is right now: a safe haven from the precipitously dropping US Dollar. As it just so happens, S&P 500 also peaked. So has gold. It's not Bitcoin, which goes up and up right now, it's the mighty US Dollar going down. Anyone trading Bitcoin for other credible currencies will be able to confirm that. BTC/EUR hasn't really gone up since last November.

There is also no such thing as a network effect in other asset classes. You can switch from AAPL to MSFT at near zero cost, you can sell gold for silver at near zero cost. What little network effect exists for these assets is their liquidity: it's a lot easier to buy and sell Bitcoin than some obscure shit coin.

What about US Dollar bills?

Bitcoin's security model is based on game theory, and it has proven to hold for 15 years now, despite massive pressures from all sides. As it turns out, this game theory has already prevented a 50+% scenario like the one you tried to predict here. Sorry, you're just the next one in line here. Stop it already, it's getting pathetic.

Bitcoin has made many people rich by pure luck. They bought some 10 years ago just for the heck of it, and now they're worth a lot. They never read the white paper, they never studied economy, but thanks to their new wealth they think they've experts in both. This is where these statements "Bitcoin is a currency!" come from. I tend to ignore them.

If you go on a crypto exchange, you see trading pairs, e.g. BTC/USD, BTC/EUR and so on. You also see order books and trading volume.

I kindly assume you never heard of any of this and asked this question in earnest.

PS: last time I shaved I saw someone who would fit your description.

This is not some Nostradamus like prediction, it's a mere statement of things already happening. Every larger financial institution of the US has issued Bitcoin ETFs or similar products, you can buy stocks of companies engaging in crypto mining or which just hold cryptos. What you describe as harbinger of a pending catastrophe has already happened and it's clearly not a catastrophe.

I've been reading crypto currency related comments for many years now on Slashdot, and they all pretty much sound like your comments here. "It's a ponzi scheme", "It's backed by thin air", "It will bankrupt our economy", the doomsday predictions keep coming in and nothing of the kind happened. Bitcoin went through massive boom and bust cycles throughout its history, and the world and the economy and Bitcoin just kept humming along.

Anyone listening to this ongoing "expert" drivel, how bad and baseless Bitcoin is, lost out on opportunities to make massive amounts of money in the last 10 years. Do you really expect people will continue listening to you about this? Will Jim Cramer and you reimburse those whom you led astray with your ongoing narrative?