Thread by @patio11

Novel breach announcement which has ~$40 million in losses plus "Although this is the only identified transaction so far, the company warns that additional accounts may be affected as well.", which might seem to be a good thing to have clarity on for a financial institution.

https://twitter.com/fintechfrank/status/1125912751409369090

Bitcoin enthusiasts: Let's wax rhapsodic about how our ledger is going to transform the world with trustless, programmable money. Can you even math with your money, bro?

Also Bitcoin enthusiasts: No, we can't subtract authorized transactions from total transactions.

They've also suspended deposits and withdraws for a week, which as an engineering matter is probably a good idea because they're probably hopelessly owned right now and as a business matter should be company-ending.

"You're being mean."

Look, if eTrade got cut off from the grown up financial world for a week, and said "We're leaving trades up if you want to make any but are unsure which of our customers' accounts are currently in the hands of the enemy" I would say "Yep, you're done."

A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later we should start taking claims that one is operating a responsible financial institution at face value.

I would be remiss if I didn't say "This could be a particular inopportune week for customers to have their money stuck in a custodian which is extremely exposed to Tether" but every week is an inopportune week to shut down a financial institution.

Also to beat a drum I have beat many, many times before: hot wallets are observationally an inadequate control. They lost 2% of their AUM because they have no process which would stop 2% of their AUM leaving.

Postmortem can be titled "Roadmap += accounting controls from 1500s."