Three Tales of Rogue Developers
History lesson in the knowledge session. In a session back in January 2019, we took the then recent coinmetrics blog about inconsistencies in the Bitcoin Private monetary supply (https://coinmetrics.io/bitcoin-private/) as an opportunity to review that and two more prior hacks. The origin story of Monero (https://soundcloud.com/the-bitcoin-game/the-bitcoin-game-42-riccardo-fluffypony-spagni) and the hack of Cryptsy (since the original source is now down, here's the internet wayback machine archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20160115053621/http://blog.cryptsy.com/). What all three incidents had in common is that actions of individual developers got by far not the scrutiny that they should have prior to being entrusted with projects and having their code deployed in production systems. It's a lesson in recent history and a call to caution.