Privacy, Transparency & Coercion-Resistance
Privacy, Transparency & Coercion-Resistance
https://www.blockhead.co/2026/06/26/privacy-transparency-coercion-resistance-kelp-dao/
Publish Date: 2026-06-26 05:33:00
Source Domain: www.blockhead.co
We now know the Kelp DAO incident began, yet again, with social engineering. This is the Nth in a long long line of “hacks” that attacked people rather than systems. It has been more than 25 years since Bruce Schneier wrote “Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people” and all the empirical evidence points to people still being the weakest link. For anyone that deals with people on a daily, or even annual, basis this is hardly news.
Then add in self-custody and this gets difficult quickly. If you can attack a person and get total control over their assets there is obviously a bigger incentive to attempt a heist than if you just get the keys to, say, a safe or online banking account. Sure you might be able to raid the safe or account. But there is a lot more work post-theft to secure the loot. When the theft itself gives unilateral control that is at the margin better for the thief. All else equal self-custodied digital assets are about the best imaginable thing to steal because there is little to no cost or hassle realizing value from what you stole once you have the keys. To the extent it might be difficult to sell the loot because transactions are publicly visible then, again, it is strictly better for you the more private the stolen digital assets are. This is not hard to understand.
But we can find interesting emerging themes on adjacent fronts that raise more complex questions. First: safety. As wrench attacks increase there are more calls for privacy tools as a defense. The logic goes, it seems, that if criminals cannot identify who has money then they will not have anyone to attack. Certainly it is in everyone’s interest to make crime more difficult. But, this is always going to involve some trade-off and it is far less clear what sorts of compromises or inconveniences are reasonable to expect for the general population.
Now consider specialists that opt-in to operate services. If a protocol has a safety mechanism, or really any kind of…
