Crime, whether we like it or not, is a driving force behind a large proportion of technological ‘progress’. In 1817, a burglary at a British dockyard led the government to start a competition, challenging locksmiths to invent an unpickable lock. The result was the Chubb detector lock, and it remained ‘unpicked’ for 33 years.
In the past, adding another lock, or increasing the wall thickness of a safe was the obvious solution to deter theft. However, money is no longer physical, it is now predominantly a data set shared via telecommunications, secured via encryption, transacted via smartphone or