$500,000 Worth of Bitcoins Stolen 622
olsmeister writes "A Bitcoin user allegedly has had $500,000 worth of Bitcoins stolen from him. A hacker supposedly gained access to the user's home computer and managed to get the user's wallet.dat file, which contained the cryptographic keys that allowed him to drain the user's balance."
Anonymous payments (Score:3, Insightful)
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Bitcoins are not anonymous.
Re:Anonymous payments (Score:5, Interesting)
True. Sort of. The victim should know exactly what the recipient address of those ill gotten gains are.
Technically, if I understand the way that bitcoin confidence works, half the damn bitcoin network should know about the details of the transfer.
The problem of course is figuring out who the hell the address belongs to. That is the hard part.
As I understand the technology, each and every one of those bitcoins now contain their transaction history, so -in theory- they could be "flagged as stolen", IF there were a central authority that took care of that thing, but of course there isn't as that's the point of bitcoin, no central authority.
I honestly confused if bitcoin technology is for this though. Technically, this isn't all that different from the victim leaving his front door open, and a robber coming in to steal $500,000 worth of jewelry or the like. If your home gets broken in to, you can't blame the jewelry itself for being stolen, that's what thieves -do-, steal stuff. This thief just happened to break in to his computer instead of his house. So therefore you may not want to store $500,000 of bitcoin on your own home pc just like you probably don't want to store $500,000 of jewelry in your dresser drawer. Maybe you keep a few pieces at home, and keep the rest in your safety deposit box?
I know that bitcoin technology provides for cloud-based "banks" of a sort. If they have been implemented yet, I do not know.
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That should read: "I am honestly confused if bitcoin technology is to blame for this though". Need more caffeine.
Re:Anonymous payments (Score:5, Insightful)
It's relatively easy to make a new wallet unknown to anybody, copy the first address made by this fresh wallet, send that address most of your coins, then encrypt your "savings" wallet and delete the unencrypted copy. Heck, put the encrypted "savings" wallet on some USB keys and a few CDs/DVDs and put them in a safety deposit box if you want to. You can continue sending payments to that address as much as you want.
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Heck, put the encrypted "savings" wallet on some USB keys and a few CDs/DVDs and put them in a safety deposit box if you want to. You can continue sending payments to that address as much as you want.
That's fuckin brilliant.
If I had more than 0.1 BTC I'd do the same. hah.
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Technically, if I understand the way that bitcoin confidence works, half the damn bitcoin network should know about the details of the transfer.
Which is also probably why the thief knew where to go. It's a security hole.
Not that the user should have known this, but dontcha think if there was $500k involved that a little curiosity on how it works and how to encrypt it better (put the .dat file in TrueCrypt container and make copies)? Hell, I think carefully before putting an extra $100 in my pocket for
Re:Anonymous payments (Score:4, Interesting)
Technically, if I understand the way that bitcoin confidence works, half the damn bitcoin network should know about the details of the transfer.
Which is also probably why the thief knew where to go. It's a security hole.
Ok, parent was already wrong, and you are more wrong.
First, yes, they knew which account it went to, but without sniffing the traffic of the entire Bitcoin network, it's much harder to know which machine it went to. It seems unlikely that the Bitcoin network itself is vulnerable that someone could send an attack to a Bitcoin address without at least getting an IP address out of it first.
Maybe if you were a neighboring peer, you could notice a lot of transactions coming from one particular peer, but you still don't know if those transactions originated from that peer, and it also doesn't help you, since transactions originate from the sending peer (for obvious reasons), and are broadcast to pretty much the entire network. So even if you could track where a transaction originated from by sniffing traffic, that doesn't tell you where it went -- it could, in fact, be anywhere in the entire network, or in an account which is physically disconnected, or even in an account which doesn't exist (user mis-pasted the destination address).
To get anywhere close, you'd have to be able to sniff pretty much all of the originating peer's traffic, including other channels like web and IRC where the transaction was probably negotiated. Even that doesn't help you much, since you now have the problem of tracking a website, forum user, or IRC user back to the actual IP address where the coins are kept.
Now, all of this stuff is possible, certainly, but none of it really has much to do with Bitcoin being anonymous or not. At least, it provides no new problems over traditional banking, and is actually somewhat safer. If I could somehow sniff your communication with your bank (though admittedly, Bitcoin IRC and forums aren't always encrypted, and are more often TORed), I could drain your account whether you're the sender or receiver, and I wouldn't need to break your machine if I could somehow intercept your credentials (MITM). Banks can use SSL, but you could also refuse to trade Bitcoins over any forum which doesn't.
So, TL;DR: There's no way that the entire Bitcoin network knowing about a transaction (or about every transaction) is going to lead to knowing which physical machine to attack.
Not that the user should have known this, but dontcha think if there was $500k involved that a little curiosity on how it works and how to encrypt it better (put the .dat file in TrueCrypt container and make copies)?
Um. Yes. And yes, the user absolutely should've known that. WTF were they doing putting $500k in Bitcoin if they didn't? It's certainly enough to afford some extra hardware so you can do air-gaps.
I mean, I don't know what sort of precautions I should take before carrying $500k around in my pocket (or in a briefcase), but I'd bloody well find out before I did so.
Re:Anonymous payments (Score:4, Insightful)
The victim should know exactly what the recipient address of those ill gotten gains are.
Assuming there's a single address.
Technically, if I understand the way that bitcoin confidence works, half the damn bitcoin network should know about the details of the transfer.
Sure.
But there's two problems here: First, addresses are trivial to create, and generally you create a new one per transaction. So it could've gone to dozens of accounts.
Second, you can't prove the person who claims to be robbed didn't transfer the money to another account they own (like the "savings" account I describe below), and even if you could track the account they went to, it's much harder to figure out who actually owns that account. And maybe they've already spent them -- in which case, you have similar problems again; did they actually buy this, or simply transfer the money to another account they own?
I know that bitcoin technology provides for cloud-based "banks" of a sort. If they have been implemented yet, I do not know.
I think the main idea of those is for people who don't want to install the software and manage it themselves. I don't think they give you any additional security. If anything, they reduce your security, since an attacker can either steal your username and password (with or without breaking into your machine) or attack the online bank in pretty much any way (including being the online bank).
By contrast, if you run your own security, you have options. If I had a significant amount of Bitcoins, I'd create a second wallet and keep it encrypted and probably offline, and use it as a "savings" account. I could trivially generate a few hundred accounts, then put the wallet on a flash drive or two, and then not need to plug it in until I need to withdraw, since I can send coins to it without it being on my or any machine.
Of course, you have to be equally careful to actually make backups, since if your wallet.dat is on a drive which fails, or even if there's just a bad sector in the middle of it, your money is just as gone as if someone stole it. I'd like to think that this sort of thing would be incentive for people to finally start giving a fuck about security. Unfortunately, it looks like it's instead going to be a disincentive for people to adopt Bitcoin.
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You can't track the money specifically, though. You can see what accounts it was sent to, but any money coming out of those accounts becomes suspect. There is no connection between the money coming into an account and the money coming out of an account. If the thief does his laundering right, eventually the money will fan out to accounts that also process legitimate transactions and you'll lose track of where it went. Once the money reaches an account that already has a balance, it becomes indistinguishable
Allinvain (Score:2)
So she collected those bitcoins all in vain?
Brilliant... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Brilliant... (Score:5, Funny)
What type of MORON keeps a balance of $500,000 in BTC?
What type of MORON keeps a balance of more than $0 in BTC?
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What type of MORON keeps a balance of $500,000 in BTC?
What type of MORON keeps a balance of more than $0 in BTC?
What type of GENIUS keeps a balance of LESS than $0 in BTC?
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You wouldn't happen to work for Goldline, would you?
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But if you sell your Bitcoin to a nerd for real money, and then spend that real money, you've bridged the gap between the "real world" and wherever it is that Bitcoin has value. Tada!
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That puts the total worth of the US Senate at 3000 florins.
Sounds about right.
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Someone who A) has the money to risk and B) is less risk averse than you?
Investing heavily in anything always looks stupid to anyone who doesn't think its worth it. If everyone agreed on what was a good idea, then wouldn't we all be investing in the same things all the time?
So the real answer is C) Anyone who has the money and believes bitcoin value will rise.
I have been holding a nonzero bitcoin balance since december and, I am pretty happy with that decision so far.
But by all means, keep your money in wha
Re:Brilliant... (Score:5, Informative)
There are nowhere near $500,000 worth of asks on any of the BitCoin exchanges, selling anywhere near that amount would cause BitCoin's value to drop very quickly.
However I agree that it isn't the best idea to store $500,000 worth of BTC in one BitCoin account.
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He was an early adopter. When bitcoin value exploded what was little more than $20 worth of digital money exploded to $500,000. Effectively, he was exactly the type of person many expressed concerns about bring the real people who would benefit from bitcoins.
Re:Brilliant... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, he didn't, it got stolen before he could cash out.
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He didn't make anything until he could sell the BTC. Saying something is worth $500k and selling it for $500k are very different things. Every kid used to learn this lesson with baseball cards :)
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And doesn't keep a backup of the wallet?
Joking aside, please correct me if I'm wrong below, but this is my understanding of some of the principles behind bitcoins. I have tried to read the faq and the wikipedia page but I'm not expert enough on cryptography and so to actually understand much of what they're talking about. Yet I'm interested in the idea of having a digital currency around, which is what bitcoin could be.
There are now apparently two copies of a whole lot of bitcoins around (one on the victi
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As such all one would need to do is steal the wallet, either through a trojan or possibly even a browser exploit (which guessed the APPDATA path by trying someone's likely login id) and that is that. Their copy of the wallet can initiate th
Re:Brilliant... (Score:4, Informative)
You started being incorrect in the third paragraph.
The thief transferred the Bitcoins out of the user's account and into his or her own. At that point, it was too late for "allinvain" to do anything.
But to answer your other question.. what if two people spend Bitcoins at approximately the same time? Well, the "network" spreads the transactions pretty quickly. So the spending would have to be near instantaneous to be confusing to the network. Even a 2 second head start will likely have one transaction HIGHLY favored over the other. None the less, the network can hold two transactions, temporarily, that are in conflict.
And then the miner who solves the next puzzle is the tie-breaker. No miner will have two conflicting transactions. Each miner would reject the 2nd conflicting transaction, and, although different miners may consider different transactions as the "first" one, there will likely be one transaction that is highly favored over the other, and that's the one that is likely to be honored.
It's the same concept as if you have $100 in your checking account, and you mail two $100 checks to two different people. Who wins? Most likely (but not always) the one who receives your check first. Most likely (but not always) the one who cashes it first. And the bank will make an arbitrary decision if they both come in at approximately the same time.
The difference is, with a check you won't know for days. And even after a week, the bankers/government can come and reverse the transaction later. With Bitcoin, you will know within 10 minutes with some degree of certainty, and within an hour with almost absolute certainty.
Re:My Thought Was Similar But Different (Score:5, Insightful)
Those coins are only worth what someone will pay for them -- maybe some products online you could buy with them.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. That's pretty much the definition of money.
Re:My Thought Was Similar But Different (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of people assume that various objects (including paper or virtual money) have value outside of what you can get in exchange.
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BitCoins are closer to baseball cards than money right now.
Baseball cards have individual value that varies depending on what card you're talking about. Condition plays a major role in the determination of that value, and in general the value lies in the item itself.
Bitcoins have none of that. In every facet imaginable, they are a currency. They have no intrinsic value outside of being able to exchange them for something else.
Re:My Thought Was Similar But Different (Score:5, Informative)
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About $2 million is traded at mt gox every day. And it is always going up. You could get $500,000 in about a week without effecting prices much. No problem.
This whole system SCREAMS money laundering.
Why would you invest in this "currency" as opposed to any other fiat currency on earth backed by a central bank? ... because it's digital??1! Money laundering.
Re:My Thought Was Similar But Different (Score:4, Insightful)
You say that like it's a bad thing. I'm not into Bitcoins, but I don't think any government should be a party to every transaction I make. "Mony laundering" is just an elastic propaganda term for any kind of financial privacy.
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So perfect (Score:2, Funny)
The guy's handle is 'allinvain'. You couldn't make this stuff up.
Allinvain? (Score:5, Insightful)
The victim's name was "allinvain"... Rather fitting, don't you think? Or maybe the story was made up.
The name says it (Score:2)
It's a oax (Score:2)
not a hoax, an oax. Meaning some idiot made it up to pull down the value of Bitcoin.
Nobody could be stupid enough to not protect the dat file or where ever $500,000 is stored. You ought to protect your file as you'd protect your money.
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You ought to protect your file as you'd protect your money...
...in a spread of FDIC/FSCS/etc.-insured banks.
</bitcoin>
Re:It's a oax (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody could be stupid enough to...
Any sentence beginning this way is automatically incorrect.
I'd imagine reporting it to police went like... (Score:5, Funny)
Officer - "Okay can you describe the wallet to me?"
Victim - "It was about 58KB and ended in
Officer - "Errrrr......so was it leather?"
Re:I'd imagine reporting it to police went like... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds phony? (Score:3)
I read the original forum thread yesterday. It didn't sound authentic, it sounded a little "off". It sounded like it was semi-scripted, the voice was all wrong. Did anybody else get that impression?
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I had it even worse (Score:2, Funny)
I lost $750,000 in Beenz.
Cue space pirate cowboys (Score:2)
Think of bitcoin like being out on the outer rim. Always keep a gun at your hip and always be prepared to get jacked.
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Actually, that's pretty accurate. Since it isn't a state-sanctioned currency, it doesn't really have any precedence in law, just like other virtual currencies. There really are thieves and conmen (aka hackers and phishers) trying to get your bitcoins.
It is very much Wild West/Outer Rim/etc.
This is not news! (Score:2)
I suggest (Score:2)
..he look in the folder called 'Recycle Bin'
Eh... (Score:3)
For PKI purposes, the use of specialized storage modules has(at least for very high value keys in setups run by the competent) been going on for years. For bitcoin, you'd need something somewhat similar; but cheaper, easier to use, and better adapted for transaction purposes.
Any desktop OS (and most home/casual server computers and backup schemes or lack thereof) Just Isn't Suitable for the storage of data that are worth much of anything. Even if the hackers don't get you(and for ~$500,000 a mere absence of remote holes attackable with off-the-shelf toolkits won't necessarily save you, that is getting well into personal-attention-from-one-or-more-competent-operators territory...) an HDD crash, corrupted backup, house fire, etc. might.
At a minimum, you really want your keystore to be a separate, small footprint, device that accepts bitcoin payments, and can listen to requests to issue payments; but allows the user to review the requested payment(size and target) on an independent display and confirm/deny it on an independent keypad.
Unfortunately, bitcoin's rather clever cryptographic architecture just isn't as secure as the math suggests so long as the private keys are being stored in pitifully insecure ways. On a large scale, we've seen goofy crap like MMORPG logins being stolen automatically by assorted malware. If bitcoins achieve some measure of popularity and value, it won't be long before wallet.dats are being cleaned out in the same way, with especially high-net-worth targets being attacked personally.
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From what little I know, the bitcoin system is decentralised and based on network consensus. Does that mean that bitcoin clients need to be online all the time in order to keep up to date on what's happening, and does that mean that your wallet.dat needs to be accessible to the client all the time? If so, storing it on a USB stick isn't going to work. Sounds like the network consensus model requires this element of vulnerability, in a similar way that a modern jet fighter can only manoeuvre because it is ae
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Inaccuracy in the article (Score:2, Insightful)
TFA says:
BitCoin is a form of fiat currency, meaning it only has value because people believe it has purchasing power.
The Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] says:
Fiat money is money that has value only because of government regulation or law.
That seems more in accordance with reality. As weak as the dollar has been lately, it would be very difficult for it to lose all or most of its value overnight, unless there was a major world catastrophe, because it is backed by the U.S. government. But (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) Bitcoin could crash any time because its value is given to it entirely by (gullible) people's beliefs. Heck, even stocks are backed by something, a company's performance, and those
Whoops (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoops--I meant to quote a bit more of TFA:
Like most major worldwide money systems, BitCoin is a form of fiat currency, meaning it only has value because people believe it has purchasing power.
That's the important part. Bitcoin is not like most major worldwide money systems.
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Depends on what's going on in said country.
US currency lost half its theoretical purchasing power in one day in (I believe) 1938 when the US government re-assigned the dollar-to-gold exchange ratio to be nearly half what it was before... which was of course was sort of a thumbed noise at the populace at that point anyway as they had outlawed private gold ownership 6 months beforehand (no, really. look it up. private gold ownership didn't come back until the 1970s).
Then of course you've got 1930s Germany whe
LulzSec Connection (Score:2, Interesting)
bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
While I didn't check timezones/hours on some timestamps, I think it's still fairly reasonable to call this bullshit. Please check your sources next time.
Market liquidity? (Score:2)
"And nothing of value was lost" (Score:2)
Bitcoin is unofficial currency. In many respects, it is essentially the same as WoW money. We have seen cases and claims of theft and other issues surrounding the use, abuse and exchange of World of Warcraft items, assets and cash for real world money. Law enforcement has, in those cases, abstained from much if any intervention in those matters. At the moment, I suspect that Bitcoin is viewed as similar. This may change but at the moment, I'm thinking that this $500,000 burglary will not be recognized
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ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp (Score:2)
QUICK! What's the exchange rate of WOW gold to Elbonian Dingbats! I must know!
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The value of WOW gold -or Elbonian Dingbats - is more relevant to the vast majority of humanity, or even the subsection that infests Slashdot.
QUICK! What's the exchange rate of WOW gold to Elbonian Dingbats! I must know!
42 WoW gold per Elbonian Dingbat.
Unless it's an Elbonian Vampire Dingbat, in which case, it's worth far more WoW gold because they're rarer.
Honor Among Thieves (Score:2)
I don't believe it ... (Score:2)
a) who would want to collect half a million $ worth of experimental currency that can't really be used widely?
b) why would you want to keep that much money as a virtual currency?
c) why would you want to keep that wallet accessible on your PC and not on some external, removable media, or at the very least under tight lock e.g. via encrypted file?
and finally,
d) if it really did happen, he deserved losing it for being and idiot, see points a-c ...
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Why would you want to hoard it? you ask.
Why would you want to hoard stocks and shares?
Historically, the value of Bitcoins has climbed. If it was "worth" $500K today, it might be worth $600K in a couple of years' time.
The right time to sell, and whether it's a bubble waiting to burst -- these are classic questions investors have to face.
Time for hardware security. (Score:3)
I've long longed for a USB hardware device containing a small crypto-processor, a public/private keypair, and a button. Given a standardized interface (as standardized as USB block-devices) it would make a perfect key-solution to keep in my physical keychain to identify myself in all kinds of circumstances.
* Need to sign a bitcoin-transaction? Let the software queue a request and press the button.
* Need to identify yourself on the web? Again, let the site send a challenge, the browser forward it to the key, and press the button. (Possibly already possible through SSL?)
As an extension, the key could hold two keys of different "level". A common key, not requiring the button to identify me to less-sensitive services, and a button-locked key for more important purposes.
For online banking, extend the key with a small display to show exactly what you're signing, and you get rid of all the manual transactions.
Is there at least something less-standardized for this?
Re:Time for hardware security. (Score:4, Insightful)
I've long longed for a USB hardware device containing a small crypto-processor, a public/private keypair, and a button. Given a standardized interface (as standardized as USB block-devices) it would make a perfect key-solution to keep in my physical keychain to identify myself in all kinds of circumstances.
What happens when your keychain is lost or stolen?
Oh /. (Score:5, Informative)
This thread was on Reddit 2 days ago. Here's the link: http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/hzrcc/bitcoin_user_loses_25k_bitcoins_when_his_machine/
To summarise:
* it could've never been $500k, that's purely theoretical. In practise it would be worth far less.
* "allinvain" is a true idiot. He was keeping the coins on his main computer which had a virus on it. He was browsing the web and IRCing with it. He found the trojan the night before, had seen that his payout address was changed to another and then to fix this he "changed it back" and went to sleep. He then "moved [his wallet] to a Ubuntu linux vmware install. On the same machine."
* It's probably a hoax
Massive transfers (Score:5, Interesting)
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If it does, that'll be my cue to buy $100 worth and hope the price climbs back up again. And since I probably won't be the only one, it probably will.
And (Score:5, Insightful)
Still an ad. Again and again. (Score:3)
Yes, it's an actual PC World article, but it still serves as an ad. I don't know whether the article was written by a shill, or whether PC World got duped, or whether the submitter is being the shill, or whether there's just an overeager fan somewhere in the chain, but this article has the same effect as an ad. What makes it an ad is not the statement that $500000 was stolen, but the implication that it could be worth $500000 in the first place. The story is selling the idea that Bitcoin is real and that when someone steals it that's as meaningful as someone actually stealing real money. So in the guise of reporting a theft of Bitcoins, it's pushing Bitcoins.
Consider how anyone would behave if it was really worth $500000. If you suddenly got $500000 in cash tomorrow, would you put it all into Bitcoins? Of course not. You'd bank it, maybe invest some, and only put a small portion into Bitcoins. Then logically, if your Bitcoins suddenly became worth $500000, you'd take *out* as cash the amount that you'd leave out if it started as cash in the first place. The fact that he had $500000 of Bitcoins in the first place and didn't convert into $490000 of cash and $10000 of Bitcoins shows that it wasn't ever really worth $500000.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep hyping that ponzi scheme.
Now you need to give the editors some credit here. If they were financially invested in pumping Bitcoins up, this article certainly would not help.
I mean people wouldn't imagine this is good publicity for Bitcoin, would they? Unless someone would go under the logic of, "Wow, people have so much of these things, I should get in on this game." I would like to think the reasoning here is. "Wow, digital property on a computer is so easy to steal."
Maybe I give people too much credit...
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe I give people too much credit...
So long as that credit is not in Bitcoin, it's probably okay.
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Any publicity is good publicity. Don't rule out invested interest, yet. There's been way too many articles..
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There is money to be made on both sides of just about any financial fluctuation.
And although I'm sure the staff here happily accepts paid stories, it would suprise me that they were sharp enough to manipulate the bitcoin market in this way. If you can't sell geek news, then you can't sell servers, then you can't sell generic software, then you can't sell Sourceforge, then you can't sell "The Online Network for the Global Geek Community"....what else are you going to do?
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I don't understand why people call Bitcoin a ponzi scheme, but fail to do so for the Federal Reserve Note.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What the hell is a bitcoin? (Score:5, Insightful)
Check the FAQ on the website. it's too long to explain here.
The short and dirty version is "If you asked a bunch of libertarians to design a digital currency, this is what you'd get". Which isn't a wholely bad idea of course, but obviously has some issues that need to be worked out.
Re:What the hell is a bitcoin? (Score:5, Insightful)
The short and dirty version is "If you asked a bunch of libertarians to design a digital currency, this is what you'd get". Which isn't a wholely bad idea of course, but obviously has some issues that need to be worked out.
Much like most libertarians. /rimshot
Re:What the hell is a bitcoin? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd amend that to "If you asked a bunch of libertarians who wanted to put the world's economies back on the gold standard ...". Because really, when you think about it, that's what bitcoin is supposed to be - digital gold.
Consider the parallels to gold coinage: a finite worldwide supply, "mining" becomes more difficult as time goes by, and the amount of money in circulation can be reduced by coins being hidden or lost, but never artificially increased. Furthermore, the statements you'll hear from the BTC crowd are exactly like the statements from the gold money crowd - bitcoins will herald in a new era of economic prosperity, bitcoins cannot be manipulated by governments creating more of them, etc. In effect, you've got a community of speculators who are trying to make their own "gold", and get rich by doing it, provided they can make the rest of us buy into the idea. (The historical failure of gold-backed currency in modern economies seems to completely escape all of them.)
However, there is a very big difference between BTC and gold. While it is true that you cannot create more BTC, anyone (or any government) can certainly create a competing digital currency that has as much "value" as bitcoins. Who is to say that a bitcoin has more or less value than any other cryptographically-signed digital coinage? Nothing more than public opinion, and that can be manipulated.
Ultimately, I expect the BTC standard to fail, and when it does, you'll hear exactly the same claims of government / commercial manipulation / sabotage that you hear from believers in gold currency. In that respect, there will be no difference in BTC and gold at all.
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Which is itself silly in the first place anyway, because aside from a money sink in jewelry, and some uses in electronics and space vehicles, Gold isn't all that valuable. I don't understand why libertarians (and society in general) hold it in such high esteem.
Its main draws seem to be:
1. it's pretty.
2. it doesn't react with much so it tends to stay pretty.
3. other people say it's always been valuable so I guess I'll agree with them that it's always going to be.
It's one of those self-fulfilling economic cyc
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1. it's pretty.
2. it doesn't react with much so it tends to stay pretty.
3. other people say it's always been valuable so I guess I'll agree with them that it's always going to be.
4. It can be used to impress the other sex and get you laid.
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The last time I talked to a bunch of libertarians, they were more of a legalize pot mindset...
So their currency would be nice fatties, 10 jamacan fatties equal to 1 california fattie... 2 blunts to a fatty, and 4 roaches to a blunt.
traded some magic beans for it... (Score:2)
What law says it's illegal? (Score:2)
It very well might be illegal in the US but what law makes it illegal?
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That said, while I doubt that the feds have much interest in bitcoins qua currency, it is hardly the case that "hackers stealing data that possess value based more or less on people's belief that they do" isn't something you can interest the feds in. It would be a fun test case, for instance, t
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On a side note, I believe it is still illegal to make your own currency in the US. I don't see the government spending too many man hours solving this. If the claim is real, I think that person will never see that cash again.
As far as I can tell, the person didn't actually lose any real money. They lost BitCoins, which if they were converted into real money would allegedly be worth $500,000. In reality, the only thing that was actually "lost" was the time and energy used to "create" the BitCoins.
Re:"the end" (Score:4, Insightful)
How on earth is pointing out a major security breach "shilling" for BitCoin?
Next up: Articles about Sony's security breaches are secretly paid for by Sony!
Re:"the end" (Score:4, Insightful)
There was no security breach in terms of Bitcoin.
Some idiot had his computer open to abuse and lost private data that correlates to money (and the 000,000$ figure is nothing but guesswork - he didn't "invest" that amount of money in Bitcoin only to lose it - that's what he *estimates* his stuff was worth if he had tried to sell it and all he "spent" was various amount of CPU cycles amounting nowhere close to that figure). Basically, he has his "credit card" number stolen. That's not a breach of the system, just a breach of his inadequate security procedures surrounding something he considered to have a value of several years earnings.
Basically: Pillock.
Having said that, I have to agree with the OP. In the last year, I've come closer to never returning to this site again than I ever have in the past. I don't even know why I have it on my "always open" list of sites, probably force-of-habit more than actual interest.
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I'm hoping it's the company that owns that new chinese supercomputer built out of GPUs that is secretly mining for bitcoins?
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If it was just stolen, can't the owner take a backup copy and immediately convert them all to real cash?
How exactly is he going to immediately convert it all to cash when there aren't enough askers for that much bitcoin? Despite claims of how much all this bitcoin is worth if no one is going to pay the exchange it is nothing but worthless bits.
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If I understand the technology, if he were to try to sell bitcoins from a backup .dat, the bitcoin network would reject the transaction as fraudulent saying that he no longer owned the coins he is trying to transfer.
The immediate transfer would go through, and over the next 10 minutes both parties would recieve thousands of "I don't agree that this transfer is valid, invalidate it" messages from other nodes on the bitcoin p2p network.
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Re:STOP POSTING BITCOIN STORIES (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin is used by drug addicts and drug dealers to buy narcotics.
So are dollars.
Now, you could have slipped in the word "exclusively", and you'd have had a point, but a point that was factually incorrect.
You could have slipped in the word "primarily", and you'd have had an uncorroborated claim to back up.
Even if it *is* primarily used for criminal purposes, Bitcoin is *fascinating*, and geeky. So it belongs here.
Re:STOP POSTING BITCOIN STORIES (Score:5, Informative)
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Who said it was safe? The idea was to emulate real cash as closely as possible, and one of the consequences of this is that it is possible to steal it.