throwaway2274

Professional auditing and security testing should be necessary for any piece of software from which it's possible to drain large sums of money, regardless of who's running the software or holding the money. In fact, I'd argue anything less constitutes an ethical breach on the part of the lead engineer(s).

Would you include web browsers, OSs, system libraries and such in that definition? All those can steal users money if compromised. If so, who do you suggest be responsible for that in an open source project?

One problem with the current system that the article did not mention is that having a central party handle all the global financial transfers creates a big handle for nation states to put leverage on.

We saw this very clearly when the US government put pressure on VISA and mastercard to reject donations going to WikiLeaks. I remember watching that whole episode in disgust. With bitcoin, this is pretty much impossible.