Bitcoin was supposed to usher in a techno-utopian world through a decentralized network of trustless machines.
What we got was an exchange of trust from financial institutions to....new and less regulated financial institutions.
Now rather than trust that Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan is making sound investments with your deposit base, we need to trust than rando CEO doesn't a) fake his own death, or b) legitimately die but be too incompetent to plan for the fact that no one else has his laptop password.
The problem here is really an incompetent CEO/company that people trusted. The same thing could theoretically happen with any tech company that decides to use the CEO as the sole key custodian.
E-mail companies would lose access to your e-mail, websites would lose access to SSL certs, JP Morgan would have a similar issue if they were stupid enough to give Jamie Dimon sole control of their encrypted customer account and investment databases. JP's funds may be slightly more recoverable if there were hard copies but it would still be massively difficult to track down where the money was invested and who it belongs to if account data were lost.
Bitcoin was supposed to usher in a techno-utopian world through a decentralized network of trustless machines.
What we got was an exchange of trust from financial institutions to....new and less regulated financial institutions.
Now rather than trust that Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan is making sound investments with your deposit base, we need to trust than rando CEO doesn't a) fake his own death, or b) legitimately die but be too incompetent to plan for the fact that no one else has his laptop password.