BitFloor Joins List of Compromised BitCoin Exchanges 232
hypnosec writes "An attacker managed to access an unencrypted backup of wallet keys and steal 24,000 BTC (worth more than a quarter million USD), following which Bitcoin exchange Bitfloor has been shut down while the investigation of the theft is going on. The attack was carried out sometime last night. In a forum post, Shtylman pleads with Bitcoin users that BitFloor needs their help."
Aaaaaand It's Gone!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Customer: Well, I had heard a lot about this new currency called BitCoin and I was hoping to transfer this $100 in my account to
BitFloor Operator: Oh I completely understand, sir, in today's economy one can't rely solely on the faulty fiat currencies backed by governments like the United States dollar AAAAAAND IT'S GONE! [southparkstudios.com] Please log out of this site sir, this is for customers with a positive balance in their accounts.
Customer: What?!
BitFloor Operator: It's gone, it's all gone, sir, our system's been compromised, you now have zero dollars in your account please log off or deposit more money, thank you!
Bitcoinica Operator: Good afternoon sir, welcome to Bitcoinica! How can I help you today?
Customer: Well, uh, I don't know how to, uh, say this but
Bitcoinica Operator: Oh completely sir, we don't have any logs or even backups for that matter!
Customer: Good, good, well, uh, you see I have this "sickness" and I need to transfer this $5,500 for this stuff from this silk road retailer and I
Bitcoinica Operator: Woah woah woah, that's more than enough information to get us started here. So let's see you now have $5,500 in BitCoin balance on your account and the wallet is being updated and written to our single hard drive on a Windows 98 computer connected to the internet with no firewall AAAAAAND IT'S GONE! Please leave this site sir, your account has no balance in it!
Customer: ??? Um, what?
Bitcoinica Operator: It's gone, it's all gone. All of it, something happened, we were hacked or that 8 year old spinning disk crashed or something but it's all gone, thank you sir, thank you for using Bitcoinica now please leave this site or put more money into your account.
Customer: But you don't understand
Bitcoinica Operator: That's wonderful sir, we here at Bitcoinica like to keep our transactions anonymous so please stop relaying me identifying details of this account. Now you have a nice day, sir!
Re:Aaaaaand It's Gone!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
These assets can only appreciate in value after the economy collapses
Toilet paper, aka the alpha plan. You can survive without ammo, without beans (I hate beans) but one way or another you're buying TP. And due to inflation prices only go up. So store as much guaranteed consumables as physically possible purchased as early as possible.
Even if you buy gold at the ridiculously inflated prices and get gold in your hands, someone's going to find out you have $50000 worth of gold under your mattresses and rob your house.
Unless its in the $9/month safe deposit box at the bank, or you bought GLD ETF aka "paper gold" which has all kinds of annoying income tax implications BTW.
Re: (Score:3)
You've obviously not spent much time with the 50% of humanity who don't use it. Left hand, jug of water, attention to handwashing, job done, and more money to spend on frivolous stuff like your staple diet. Most of the world is already living the Zombie Plan lifestyle.
Re: (Score:3)
Left hand, jug of water, attention to handwashing
It's the Roman wet-sponge-on-a-stick or nothing, for me.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Aaaaaand It's Gone!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me of a friend who was of a similar mind. He stored hundreds of rolls of toilet paper in a storage area cleverly located in the ceiling of his covered deck. Basically wasted space until he decided it would be a perfect place for that bulky but absolutely essential aspect of modern life.
His plan worked fine until a windstorm tore the roof off said deck and scattered the hundreds of rolls of toilet paper over a huge swath of scrub pine and chaparral downwind to the cabin. You know, it's damn hard to pick up hundreds of rolls of TP stuck in the brush. Would have made a great little picture on Google Earth, had it existed back then.
Moral of the story: Although TP is important to modern sensibilities, it's not something most people can safely store for extended periods of time. Leaves, OTOH just grow on trees although winter tends to be a bit harder concept to deal with.
Re: (Score:2)
I once went on a tour of Wind Cave in South Carolina, which is unusually dry for a cave - so much so that they only allow in a few people at a time because they found that the water vapor in people's breaths affected the caves. In one of the caverns there were pallets filled with toilet paper, rations and other stuff that had clearly been there for some times. The guide said that the supplies were put there by the U.S. Government in the 1950's. The cave was deep enough and far enough away from population ce
Re: (Score:2)
I sure my paranoid friend would have just loved a dry, limestone cave in which to store his survival supplies. Unfortunately, the idea doesn't scale well.
Re:Aaaaaand It's Gone!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
You've clearly never gone camping in the winter. Winter is much easier to deal with; just grab a snowball. Cleaner than toilet paper.
I don't think you know what "easier to deal with" means.
Re:Aaaaaand It's Gone!!! (Score:5, Funny)
OTOH, few things wake you up faster than sticking a bunch of ice up your ass in the AM.
Re: (Score:2)
I invest in ammo. Ammo is cheaper than gold, more useful that anything and is a limited resource so it's value will improve over time.
I can use ammo to 'buy' food, tp, water, more ammo, etc. And by buy I mean take by force by using said ammo.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't ammo expire and/or become 'less trustworthy' over time ?
The Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of my friends had similar experiences with their 401K plans.
401k Operator: Hello there welcome to your 401k how can I help you today? ... ... ... and ...
Customer: Well, I was calling about my Vanguard mutual funds that I had a diversified portfolio in but with the recent housing and financial crisis I
401k Operator: AAAAAAND IT'S GONE!
Customer: What? No, actually, I mean the worth is very low at this point -- not even a third of what it was before the crisis but I'm logged into your site right now and I still have the same number of stocks in this mutual fund.
401k Operator: There must be something wrong, sir, all of your money is supposed to be gone.
Customer: Well, I mean actually I was thinking about taking another $10,000 I have of liquid assets and investing in a post tax fund of these same stocks since they're so low right now.
401k Operator: Why on Earth would you do that? These are worthless and your money is all gone.
Customer: No, I mean, I haven't realized these losses yet, the number of shares is still the same and I'd like to buy more of them with some of my savings. I mean, if these things are truly worthless -- they represent huge cross sections of the biggest companies and industries in America. If these things are worthless, this $10,000 isn't going to be of any value to me anyway. Price anarchy will take hold and the economy will grind to a halt. The only people this is really bad for are those that are retiring between now and when/if the price rebounds.
401k Operator: Listen sir, if you're not going to let me say AAAAAAND IT'S GONE, I'm going to use your address here to find you and
Customer: Okay okay, jeez, um, oh, I just drank the last of my coffee and
401k Operator: *long sigh* It's not the same. I need to be alone now, goodbye.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. Cheap lighters, take up less room per lit fire, lights more fires than a box of matches, and works when wet. Much more efficient. And as a backup, regardless of what you choose, a firesteel.
Re: (Score:2)
You have to survive a trip to the grocery store first : /
Another week Another ... (Score:2, Insightful)
post about bitcoin service being hacked ,
raspberry Pi's not being delivered
Re: (Score:2)
Had my RPi for a month now... what you talkin bout, Willis?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Another week Another ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Another post about bitcoin service being hacked..."
But have you noticed? Just like with the banks and finance companies, the big data breaches haven't been due to "hacking" accounts... they have almost invariably been related to gaining access to unencrypted data... which is a failure of the "victim" institution. I would not even be surprised if most of them were inside jobs.
Similar example: a bank some years ago "lost" some hard drives containing an unencrypted backup, while they were being transported to off-site storage. They didn't even claim it was stolen... just somehow "lost". Well, what the hell, eh? Any money that got stolen as a result is guaranteed by the government.
Bitcoin is a secure protocol. The recent "hacks" had to do with other data that was not adequately protected by the holders of the bitcoins. Those people are fully responsible. It is not a failure on the part of Bitcoins themselves.
Human failure is where this so-called "web of trust" breaks down. Stuff sent over the internet is (or can be, anyway), pretty darned secure. What happens to it once it gets there is where the big point of failure has been.
A "web of trust" means nothing if the people you are ultimately supposed to trust are careless with your data once they get it.
Re: (Score:3)
"That's supposed to make us feel better? Talk about a distinction without a difference..."
No, I wasn't trying to make anybody feel better... just to point out where the real vulnerability is. These "hacks" of Bitcoin sites don't reflect on Bitcoin itself. The real issues have nothing to do with Bitcoin, other than it's the thing being stolen.
When someone robs a bank, people don't go around screaming "Cash! It's all cash's fault!" No, they talk about failure of bank security.
Not surprised ... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not really surprised by this. Someone had the idea to create a purely virtual currency, and someone else has found it to be an attractive target.
The fact that it is vulnerable to this kind of attack probably indicates there's some real flaws in how this currency is supposed to work -- or at least a few places where someone can get through the cracks.
I remember when I first started hearing about this, and thinking "gee, I hope they've thought through all of the security issues". It's like security in o
Re:Not surprised ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual Bitcoin protocol looks quite secure, it's just that every website using it seems to be run by the kind of people I wouldn't trust with a toaster oven.
For God's sake, the largest Bitcoin exchange is MTGox. That's the site formerly known as "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange".
Re:Not surprised ... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, that's kind of the core of the problem.
In the real world, the banking and trading system is monitored by people with the power to enforce, have long histories and memories of what can go wrong, and is generally policed by governments cooperating.
But the internet equivalent makes it sound like a bunch of shady, back alley people doing financial transactions outside of the normal system.
So for me, there's simply no basis to trust "Bob's online brokerage and clearing house for virtual currency", or the entire BitCoin system.
Much like PayPal isn't a bank, but does many bank-like things -- it isn't regulated like a bank, and doesn't offer you the same legal protections. It's hard not to see this as more of the same -- but since the currency still has real world value, people will treat it as such. The tendency to lie, cheat and steal doesn't go away because it's virtual currency.
LOL, like I said, "Bob's online brokerage" ... why should I trust them? They're completely unregulated, outside of the normal banking system, and not really accountable to anybody. What could possibly go wrong?
I view this as being pretty close to walking up to someone running a lemon-aid stand who claims to be a bank, and depositing a bunch of money. When the guy with the lemon-aid stand proves to have little or no security, or is completely dishonest ... well, good luck getting your money back.
Re:Not surprised ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If PayPal isn't regulated like a bank in your country, then thats a failing of your country - in the UK, PayPal is regulated by the Financial Services Authority, and is registered as a bank within the European Economic Area.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Except... it isn't anymore, since 2007 it's been a Luxemborg bank outside UK regulation.
http://tamebay.com/2007/05/paypal-becomes-a-bank-no-longer-under-fsa.html [tamebay.com]
Re:Not surprised ... (Score:5, Informative)
Except that article is incorrect - because its registered within the European Economic Area, it is still FSA registered and falls under the FSAs regulatory umbrella.
PayPal (Europe) Sarl et Cie SCA is registered with the FSA under the registration number 226056.
The fact that it moved to Luxembourg doesn't change the fact that it is regulated within the UK.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
bug tag changed from WORKSFORME to WONTFIX
Re: (Score:2)
In the real world, the banking and trading system is monitored by people with the power to enforce, have long histories and memories of what can go wrong, and is generally policed by governments cooperating.
But the internet equivalent makes it sound like a bunch of shady, back alley people doing financial transactions outside of the normal system.
The mistake is thinking that because the "real" economy needs a "bank" or a "exchange" then a virtual one just naturally of course without thinking needs to replicate the real world.
Kind of like shopping at Barnes and Noble means I wait in line and the teenage cashier takes forever to give me change while she checks her SMS and FB on her smartphone, therefore "naturally" amazon should try to replicate those parts of the experience using "3d virtual reality" or something idiotic like that.
I'm not seeing the
Re: (Score:2)
LOL, like I said, "Bob's online brokerage" ... why should I trust them? They're completely unregulated, outside of the normal banking system, and not really accountable to anybody. What could possibly go wrong?
Did you forget what happened in 2008? The normal banking system is completely unaccountable to anybody.
Insurance (Score:2)
With the normal banking system your account is insured to about $40k-80k depending on laws of the country you live in.
Re: (Score:3)
Not one checking account was lost in the "crisis". Not one savings account was lost in the "crisis". Early on a (completely not insured investment) money market security "broke the buck", that is, returned less than was invested, and that was considered an emergency requiring immediate government attention.
The system is very stable and robust when it comes to dollars put in the bank. Dollars invested in bank stock may vanish, but that's only appropriate.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You hit the nail on the head. Bitcoin just isn't trustworthy for a lot of reasons:
1: It isn't anonymous. Anyone who thinks it is is deluded. There are anonymous currencies (look up Chaum or Tim May's items on this) that actually are truly anonymous, using RSA blinding factors or other items.
2: The system was rigged from the ground up to give lots of coins to people hopping on first, then shaft people later on. This reeks of a classic Ponzi scheme.
3: The lack of interest in security of BitCoin clearin
Re:Not surprised ... (Score:4, Informative)
That's actually not correct at all.
Firstly, Bitcoin exchanges are regulated, that's why Mt Gox requires you to do ID verification and other such things. Not that regulations are a magic wand - US banks routinely get pillaged due to their pathetically weak (often single factor!) security systems. And whilst many European banks at least use dedicated 2-factor calculators, that hasn't stopped massive bank runs in Spain and Greece as people fear different kinds of failure mode.
Secondly, they are not outside the normal banking system. The whole point of a centralized exchange like Mt Gox is to interface with the banking system. They have bank accounts, accept and send bank wires, etc.
Thirdly, they are accountable in the same way any company is accountable. But they go further, publishing transparency reports [bitcointalk.org] that detail exactly how their business is operating. You'll note that Mt Gox is very different to Bitfloor. It is a real company (albiet a small one), not a one-man operation anymore. They have staff processing support tickets. They have redundant datacenters and the ability to withstand 100Gbps DoS attacks. Most crucially 90%+ of their Bitcoins on deposit are stored in offline wallets in various places that can only be accessed physically. Bitfloor (with a whopping 2% of the market) was a one-man job that ran on Linode, a provider that has been completely rooted in the past! That right there should have been an indication that maybe he wasn't really serious.
Let me be clear, anything Bitcoin related is risky right now. That's not because of some inherent flaw of Bitcoin, it's because it's very new and so the ecosystem is immature. In particular the fact that it's an open system with open APIs means a lot of programmers just jump right in and start creating services without fully thinking things through. If you're going to run an exchange you need to have your shit together and there are just way too many people who don't. Now is that their fault, the fault of people who then hand them money, or both?
Re: (Score:3)
And they aren't secure either. I had left 10 bitcoin in there that I had tried to sell a few months ago, and I was waiting for the price to go up (which it has now). But then I got a message saying that 10 bitcoin had been transferred out of my account and click here if you didn't order this. Well, clicking here starts a customer service ticket in which they say to contact the pol
Inexperienced exchange providers (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not the fault of the currency. It is a fault of the exchange provider and the users of the currency really need to be careful in who they put their trust.
I'm sorry but noone without a great deal of development experience should be writing a Bitcoin exchange or any other type of financial exchange exposed to the internet. The attackers got hold of the unencrypted wallet? Why would an exchange wallet ever be unencrypted? Why is there a single wallet in the first place? Why not have seperate wallets per user account encrypted with their own passphrase such that the site operator doesn't even have access? Maybe a master password override to decrypt but never stored online etc.
Why is the wallet stored on the webserver in the first place? Why aren't funds transfered to offline storage on a regular basis? I could go on.
Re:Inexperienced exchange providers (Score:4, Insightful)
But, that's the problem.
In the real world, banks are regulated, covered under some oversight, and insured.
If this parallel banking system doesn't have any of these controls, then there's simply no way you can trust the system as a whole.
So, me, I'll stick to having my money backed by real banks, with an actual transaction processing backed by major players, and which all of the players understand the risks and their own liability.
Trusting the internet with my money is like trusting a crackhead to guard my house. What you're describing is that any idiot can come along and try to get into the game. No thanks.
This may not be a specific issue with the currency, but the entire "banking" ecosystem around it sounds like something I'd fundamentally have zero trust in.
Re: (Score:2)
Money isn't safe, period.
If you hide it under your mattress, someone can break into your house and rob you.
If you put it in the bank, the bank can fail and take your deposits with it...or the feds can simply accuse you of being a druggie or terrorist and flat out seize it.
If you put it in bitcoins, someone can hack your wallet out from under your nose.
Face it, there is no way to keep money safe in this world except to spend it.
Best defense to being robbed is, sadly, not to have anything worth stealing in th
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe not absolutely 100% safe, sure.
But treating random internet sites as if they're proper banks with all of the built in safeguards isn't really a step in the right direction.
As the poster I replied to said, this is about who you trust in the exchange. In this case, it sounds like there's no reason to actually put any trust in them.
In this case, I'd have to say the "real" banking system is far more trustworthy. Some guy who kn
Re: (Score:3)
It seems you're ignoring the fact that different payment methods and currencies are used for different purposes. Putting your savings in BitCoin is idiotic, but if you need to transfer funds, there's no need to hold BitCoin for an appreciable amount of time. Your exposure to this sort of hack is pretty low in that case.
Re:Inexperienced exchange providers (Score:5, Insightful)
If you put it in the bank, the bank can fail and take your deposits with it
No, it can't, at least not in the United States. Under the FDIC [wikipedia.org], depositors are protected by the federal government for up to $250,000 even if the bank goes bust. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which established the FDIC, was passed specifically to prevent this kind of scenario from happening, which it previously had done with some regularity. (Glass-Steagall also banned some dangerous practices like commingling retail and investment banking; unfortunately, by the 1990s, people had forgotten why these regulations were a good idea, and they were repealed, setting the stage for the financial crisis of 2008.)
Re: (Score:2)
And what does the officer do when the fatcats invest your banking dollars in unsafe real estate investments and destroy your 401k? The answer is, borrow more money from you to bail out the people who mishandled your money so they won't go bankrupt.
Re: (Score:2)
Does an uneducated whelp have to be the first to post in all of these? BitCoin isn't insecure - the site holding them was. FFS. MUST we cover this in EVERY article posted here???
Re: (Score:2)
And what does it matter if bitcoin itself is secure when the places that allow you to extract any value for your play money have joke level security? That's like saying that credit cards aren't insecure it's just the payment processors. It's a farcical excuse.
Re: (Score:2)
And what does it matter if bitcoin itself is secure when the places that allow you to extract any value for your play money have joke level security?
Depends on what you mean by "value"... I keep my bitcoins in my personal wallet, never on an exchange. I use exchanges to BUY bitcoins, but never store any there. I also never sell bitcoins for Euro/Dollars/etc - I simply spend them. So for me, the "extracting value" is the spending of them on things I wish to have*
* (yes, feel free to read that as "buy drugs on Silk Road"... that IS my main use of them)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Not surprised ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, Silk Road is still functioning? I would have through with all the publicity it has gotten it wouldn't be trustworthy anymore....
Very trustworthy still. It's basically a service where some people want to buy drugs; and other people want to sell drugs. Add to that the idea that a user rates their purchase (eBay-like) and it's pretty easy to distinguish a legitimate seller from a fake one (theoretically, someone COULD set up a seller account; a bunch of other accounts and then rate themselves on transactions; but so far that doesn't seem to be common, and is usually quite easy to spot).
Publicity only seems to have improved things in general.
Right now, there is a problem with high prices, since a lot of sellers haven't changed their prices since bitcoins were worth half to 3/4 of what they are now; but I suspect that will level out once business starts dropping and they realise they'll make more by lowering their prices somewhat.
Disclaimer: I am only an infrequent purchaser, since I tend to only buy LSD and in lots of 25 tabs for personal use (which means one purchase lasts me a LONG time (my last purchase was around Christmas last year)). I have a friend who also uses it more frequently though, and his experiences are also good (other than the recent price issues).
Re: (Score:2)
Ergo, the whole landscape in which BitCoin operates is insecure. Ergo, BitCoin is essentially insecure.
Sure, the BitCoin itself might be theoretically safe. But if untrusted sites can get into the game, the whole damned thing becomes a joke. Because, clearly this awesome security you're so excited about doesn't work worth a fucking damn when it comes down to it.
Or are you somehow putt
Re: (Score:3)
No, it's exactly what I'd expect from a young and revolutionary idea -- not yet fully fleshed out, missing a lot of things it really needs, and nowhere ready to be trusted with anything which has real value. In other words, something I'd steer clear of, which is all I'm saying.
It sounds more like a proof of concept than something I'd entrust money to.
And, being on the internet, people either don't
Re: (Score:2)
uhh.. it's not so much about securing the money itself - that it can be stolen demonstrates that it's pretty secure in concept - in what's it' supposed to be anyways. it's supposed to work like "online cash".
" It's like security in operating systems ... there's tons of things you could overlook which can let someone in, and until it starts happening, you likely haven't even thought of all of them." well, hacking these exchanges is more like security in operating systems because that's how these exchanges ge
Re: (Score:3)
News flash (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Not surprised ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the difference is meaningless to the users of it? If all the places that you can use to exchange bitcoin are insecure it really doesn't make a difference whether or not the protocol is secure. If bitcoin is only secure as long as you don't use an exchange then it becomes worthless as a currency for... exchanging money.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
i think these places steal their own bitcoins (Score:2, Interesting)
Easy way to make money, set up a bitcoin exchange, run it long enough to get a couple 100 grand of bitcoins then steal them all from yourself, since bitcoin is untraceable there's really no way to get caught.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That wouldn't surprise me at all. Good scam if you think about it!
in this case the money that disappeared was roughly 140 weeks profits of the exchange. that's quite a lot.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of people are starting to suspect the recent hackers to be mythical. The basic security precautions needed to prevent this kind of thing have been well-known since last year.
Re: (Score:2)
The funny thing is that it is always exchanges getting "hacked", never retailers. And why is that? Because the first thing anyone does when they get a bitcoin is try to convert it to a fiat currency... Says a lot about the viability of this "currency", doesn't it?
Not really, because for this conversion to happen, there has to be another person willing to take the bitcoins in exchange for fiat currency. This of the essence of currency. If you keep them forever once you get them, then they're a collectable, not a currency.
You need help alright (Score:4, Interesting)
This smacks of an inside job, which given the nature of bitcoin, is far to easy.
Set up exchange, collect keys, lose keys in 'compromise', profit. No ???? Needed.
OK, I really don't get BitCoin... (Score:2, Insightful)
Its not anonymous, but pseudonomous. Its actually the opposite of anonymous, as EVERY transaction is recorded in public.
It can't scale.
The major use beyond geek things is buying drugs (Silk Road etc). Heck, even illegal arms sales weren't profitable in BitCoin land!
The believers seem to have a huge amount of "goldbug variation", obsessing about a fixed currency supply.
Hardly any exchange or similar service has remained unhacked.
And 5% of ALL bitcoins ended up in a 6 month, blatenly obvious pyramid scheme
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The title of your post is spot on: you really don't get it.
The amount of black money in the EU is well over 1000 billion euro. Try to picture that much money. Now imagine the corrupt Chinese official who was caught stacking piles of money inside his walls at home because he didn't know how to spend it. Understand that the communist party in China has over 70 million members, many of them an official of some sort. Now think about all the other corrupt places in the world.
I think you get the idea. There's a t
Re: (Score:2)
Why can't it scale? There are about 10T microBTC in existence.
And having a lot of money ending up in a pyramid scheme is hardly the fault of the currency.
Re: (Score:2)
Below is my honest personal point of view. Whether I'm misguided is up to you.
I was pondering about and hoping for something like Bitcoin for the last 15 years, since I realized that cash would go away one day and with it most of my freedoms. It's not about what I do with cash. As long as cash exists as an option, no one actually needs to even use it, it will still serve as a restraint for foci of power.
By "like Bitcoin", I don't mean a fixed supply, proof-of-work based P2P Internet currency. What I mean is
Re: (Score:2)
Re:OK, I really don't get BitCoin... (Score:4, Funny)
Bitcoin indeed seems to attract the same sort of nutters that gold standard advocacy does.
Anyone who advocates a fixed supply currency where massive deflation is inevitable needs to have their head checked.
They go to this one doctor from Texas for the exam. According to him, they're thinking perfectly rationally.
Re: (Score:2)
I think those who tried running the Armory found out its hard to compete as a black market when the LEGAL sales are from companies with names like "Cheaper Than Dirt"
I'll stick with gold, silver, and dollars (Score:2)
I've been following this bitcoin phenom for awhile, wondering what it was all about and if it really could replace "normal" currency. All these recent thefts makes me say "no." At least with dollars the private central bank only steals your money ~5% per year (via supply inflation & dollar devaluation) rather than all at once. And also it's insured from losses (FDIC).
Re: (Score:2)
Also find it UNassuring that he tries to dive-away from taking responsibility (typical of how large corporations act; inveigle, evade, and dodge).
QUOTE USER: "unencrypted backup?"
CEO/manager/whatever: "Yes. It was made when I manually did an upgrade and was put in the unencrypted area on disk. I realize the details of the failure and attack are interesting, but I am currently focused on user accounts and exchange status going forward."
No.
Precisely HOW you fucked up is the most interesting bit of the sotry.
HEY! (Score:2)
Would anyone be surprised? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have heard from a source I cannot disclose that these attacks *might be* government sponsored.
The notion here is that if governments actively attempted to outlaw, ban or block the use of this alternative currency, people would backlash and buckle down even tighter. (You can see how well the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs" has been working out.) Making this currency illegal will only create more criminals.
Instead, it has been said that there is an extremely active initiative to discredit the risk
I would... (Score:2)
BitCoin is frankly too small and too loony and too easy to trace!
The insane self-destructive tendencies of the BitCoin community ensure that governments don't need to do anything about BitCoin. Any "Currency" where 5%!!!! end up in a single Ponzi scheme, where +/- 200% swings in "value" are taken as, ehh, whatever, etc, is going to implode just fine on its own.
Heck, if I was the US Treasury I'd instead (quietly) buy out Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, so that they can trace the USD -\> BTC -\> U
Read the last link in the article for amazement (Score:2)
Risks of non-trackable currency (Score:2)
There are risks when you deal with non-trackable currencies. Theft and loss to destruction are two obvious ones.
Whether its gold stashed in a bank vault that gets broken into, bitcoins or something similar, or dollar bills in your wallet, you are vulnerable to theft. Gold isn't easily destroyed but paper currency is. So are files that only exist as bits on a typical storage medium.
Traceable, cancel-able mediums of exchange, such as travelers checks, credit or debit cards, bank-to-bank transactions, dolla
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why ever use Bitcoin in the first place? (Score:5, Insightful)
It filled the need for an anti-corporate moral superiority.
BitCoin was developed from the start to screw over large companies, who invariably require a trail of some kind for significant transactions. It's promoted as the digital equivalent of cash, and just like cash, the only way to trust a transaction is when you implicitly trust the other party. That kind of trust is only feasible for a small business dealing with a small client base, where the natural urge for social behavior still trumps the natural human urge for antisocial greed.
Sure, maybe BitCoin could eventually work... but it'll first evolve a traceable "BitCoin Certificate" that will be exchangeable for BitCoins at a particular place, and those certificates will have a booming economy grow around their trade, because they're easier to secure than actual BitCoins. Then certificates will be created for BitCoins that don't actually exist, but they'll be paired with certificates for BitCoin debt, and BitCoins will be loaned. Eventually, the BitCoins will just be a meaningless wallet locked away on a server, and the certificates will be the real money, and the demand for certificates will fluctuate in relation to the actual value of the BitCoins. Then someone will gripe about how these certificates are no longer fixed to the BitCoin standard, and they're traceable, and we should make a new currency to solve the problems, that's not controlled by Big BitCoin...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Proper encryption and backup are hard (for the average uneducated schmuck), though, just like securing a briefcase with your life's savings in it. To avoid that hardship, people will dump their savings into the BitCoin banks, get the certificates, and so on. The reasons for wanting certificates change, but there are still ample reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
.. and then there will be this shift to "fiat" BitCoin Certificates that look very much like BitCoin Certificates, but can be created out of thin air by certain entities that wish to control the economy where only some decreasing fraction of them are backed by real BitCoin...
So someone explain to me how these BitCoin Certificates will somehow be different from current money?
Re: (Score:2)
*slow applause*
Well done, sir. Your reading comprehension is astounding.
Re:Why ever use Bitcoin in the first place? (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously, there's lots of ways things could go wrong, but I'd give them my money before I'd put it in a bitcoin exchange...
Re: (Score:3)
Hawala works because it occurs inside a cultural and religious system that has strong penalties for not following thru. Bitcoin exchanges don't work because it's mainly run by a bunch of people who are completely against any oversight. They expect their word and their technical expertise to be the bond, without an ovarching cultural/religious framework to validate it.
Enron would have been very different if the perpetrators could have lost appendages for their malfeasance.
Why hawala works (Score:3)
Hawala works because it occurs inside a cultural and religious system that has strong penalties for not following thru.
That's why it works between the hawaladars, the people who exchange money. Traditionally, the people at both ends of the transaction were from the same family. The reason it works for their customers is that it's only a money transfer system. If you send a remittance to someone through hawaladars, and it doesn't show up quickly, you'll never use them again, and neither will your friends. Retail users don't keep balances inside the hawala systems. They don't try to act as banks. So, at least at the lower l
Re: (Score:2)
If it's not well regulated, open and the result of mutually beneficial agreement then expect someone smarter than you to take it from you: this rule applies to money, commerce and war.
Seems to me bitcoin is of mutual benefit - there are people who want to pay with bitcoins and people who want to be paid with bitcoins. That there are a lot of other people who'd like to rob us blind doesn't change that, any more than burglars and bank robbers and shoplifters do in the real world. It's just back to the days of the wild wild west when the sheriff was nowhere to be found and you have to protect your own assets.
Re: (Score:2)
And we moved on from that because a lot of people got robbed blind or shot, and few big endeavours were worth the risk so education and infrastructure was poor.
Re: (Score:2)
If it's not well regulated, open and the result of mutually beneficial agreement then expect someone smarter than you to take it from you: this rule applies to money, commerce and war.
I thought the whole point of war was such that at least one party was going to conclude that the agreement was not to their benefit.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you want war to continue, you must be prepared to enter into a mutually beneficial agreement of well-regulated, open terms.
And if you really want war to continue but just fancy catching your breath (or winning an election), make sure you leave out one of those ingredients.
Re: (Score:2)
War will continue in any case you dreamer. The only thing that stops it is weapons so destructive that nobody wins. Even there it just stops total war, proxy wars get worse if anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Who said that no-one wants war to continue?
Re: (Score:3)
It's better that the stupid bitcoin experiment dies now than when average people with something to lose are duped into the scam.
If it's not well regulated, open and the result of mutually beneficial agreement then expect someone smarter than you to take it from you: this rule applies to money, commerce and war.
By that argument, we should probably also ban hedge funds, ponzi schemes, derivatives trading, that entire 31 multi-level marketing thing, PayPal, Secured Debt Obligations, Beanie Babies, Exchange Traded Funds, house-flipping, Thomas Kinkade paintings, and investment in what China calls a stock market. Wait. What?
Re: (Score:2)
Excellent.
Re: (Score:2)
WTF?
Printing money is an aggressive act towards any nation that pinned its currency to yours. We cause inflation in China when we print dollars. This forces them to move the pin. This is how economic war is fought.
The pin is a simpleminded economic measure devised by engineers that run China. Their metric is industrial utilization. Their target is 100%. Their tool is the exchange rate. The downside is becoming more obvious every day.
It will be totally dysfunctional soon. Look for arbitrage opportunit
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Zimbabwe is using US dollars for all exchanges except those with the government. The people made this change.
I expect when you owe the government money you ether just don't pay or you convert your dollars to toilet paper and run from the bank to the government office before it loses too much value.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe because when you are the victim of credit card fraud that you don't assume the liability and instead that is the card issuer's problem? Or if someone robs you of your cash that they will face criminal charges? On the other hand, the people losing virtual play money assume no liability and will face no prosecution.