[Cryptography] Keeping Malware from Using Security Hardware

[Ray Dillinger]

On 3/5/25 16:56, Jon Callas wrote:
> The comments you made on the DPRK heist are spot on, and I only add one thing. It's a feature of cryptocurrency that a transfer is irrevocable. Some people think it's desirable, some think it's undesirable, some think it's just the way things are, and a core facet of that heist is that it happened on a financial network with irrevocable transactions because that was a necessary component of the heist.

It's a fundamental design flaw.

Systems based on an append-only ledger cannot revoke a transaction 
without revoking all subsequent transactions, and cannot make a reversal 
transaction without introducing a representation for debt. And debt 
cannot be represented in an anonymous or pseudonymous system.  If you 
give someone the key to a txOut representing a negative amount of coins, 
but nobody can ever know who it is, they will simply never "spend" those 
negative coins.

I think the irrevocable append-only ledger is a good idea, but reversal 
transactions are necessary, and therefore a way to represent debt is 
necessary, and therefore a way to access user identity (or at least link 
other assets held by the same human user) is necessary.

Bear