Nick Szabo  🔑

How can ATT legally stop someone from porting their number to another carrier? They legally cannot block the port because of a forgotten password and it’s not very hard for somone to physically show up with forged ID.

Even if carriers could make it *more* secure I still cannot see security professionals recommending relying on carrier level security for banking level requirements.

Then take some basic measures to discourage 2FA like customer education and talking to major 2FA users! It's ok if they don't want to provide this service, but given the level of harm they have to put some effort into discouraging that.

They may've found phone numbers useful & benign (though it is very much not their expertise or business) in the reversible banking txs they are familiar with, but haven't studied consequences of use w/irreversible crypto. Ridiculous to expect them rather than Coinbase to do that.

They don't have to study this issue. They simply have to observe the obvious fact that lots of people are getting hurt in this way. That requires no special knowledge. And after all, this is an issue that extends to more than just cryptocurrency: e.g. stolen gmail accounts.

It's not at all obvious to them. They are in a completely different business and they don't keep track of vast majority of stats in the dizzying variety of other businesses including ours. Even experts in our own industry don't keep good track of these novel risks and losses.

Lol, that's just silly. A company the size of AT&T can figure that out by just reading the popular technical press, and listening to their customer's complaints. You're just making excuses at this point; that's not even remotely a valid argument.

Regardless of their size, they don't read stuff like Bitcoin Magazine et. al that is extremely far outside their business of providing phone service, and you can't seriously expect them to have learned this kind of thing from common mainstream media.