Quote:
NEW YORK (AP) -- A computerized selloff possibly caused by a simple typographical error triggered one of the most turbulent days in Wall Street history Thursday and sent the Dow Jones industrials to a loss of almost 1,000 points, nearly a tenth of their value, in less than half an hour. It was the biggest drop ever during a trading day.
I have never trusted computers. Not since I was a little kid trying to program my own video games and what seemed perfectly logical to me spat out a bunch of crap on the screen. I also used to play with word scanners and noticed some words would be missing. I recall being a part of the early wave of pseudo hackers, who would kick people off the internet using programs or dial thousands of numbers every hour looking for the right connection. I even spent some time learning how to remove acne for customers who wanted good photos.
Now you have to understand what the point of digital currency is. If you have digital currency, you can transport it thousands of miles in miliseconds. You can prevent a thief with a mack truck from stealing it because it doesn't actually exist.
Unfortunately, it also means the currency value can be tampered with, as can stocks, medical records, school records, and work history.
Aspiring teens and young adults will inevitably find ways of tampering with their records, or with the records of each other. Image the possible repercussions of a Fraternity for medical students who decide part of the test is doing "amusing" record swaps for surgery. Not that such data can't be forged now, but there's still a human element involved and most surgeries aren't botched. When the information creeps into the purely digital, however, it becomes accessible by whoever can get in the same grid. So if your medical or economic information becomes RFID based, someone will be able to use your data pin as a "mule" to store information, transfer bills, or otherwise cause serious problems.
There used to be a string of movies where people were effectively "erased" - their bank account information etc. disappeared.
Even read only data, like a digital pin number can lead to problems, because the read-writable database where the associated information is stored can be edited.
For these reasons - not to mention the facebook privacy failures, I prefer a hard copy of things, and would rather my financial and medical data be secured in the tangible world.
