Hackers Allege Mt. Gox Still Controls "Stolen" Bitcoins 228
The Verge reports that "Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox lost $400 million worth of bitcoins in February. Its management said the amount was stolen after hackers exploited a transaction bug to divert the funds, but some of Mt. Gox's users are not so sure, suggesting instead that the exchange's owners pocketed the cash. Now, facing silence from those owners about the fate of the money and the methods by which 6 percent of all of the Bitcoin in the world could have been stolen, a group of hackers claims it has broken into the bankrupted Bitcoin exchange's network to get answers. ... Forbes reports that the group gained access to the personal blog and Reddit account of Mark Karpeles, Mt. Gox's CEO. The hackers used the platforms to post a message that claimed Karpeles still had access to some of the bitcoins that he'd reported stolen. In support of the claim, they uploaded a series of files that included a spreadsheet of more than a million trades, Karpeles' home addresses, and a screenshot purportedly confirming the hackers' access to the data." (The Forbes article on which the Verge report is based.)
Re:Stills seems like it has to be an inside job (Score:5, Informative)
Beware: Wallet-stealing virus in the dump (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Stills seems like it has to be an inside job (Score:5, Informative)
Consider these Mt. Gox loses [bitcointalk.org]:
But for any programmer, none of this is a surprise given he hacked up an ssh server in PHP, then deployed it on a production server [ycombinator.com].
Re:Stills seems like it has to be an inside job (Score:2, Informative)
Oh come on. Here is a story [cbsnews.com] about a single person stealing about 7billions worth without Bitcoins, trucks and heavy lifting.
Re:Beware: Wallet-stealing virus in the dump (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sitting on a stack of traceable coins (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Use them! don't save them (Score:4, Informative)
"Bitcoins are like cash."
I really REALLY wish people would stop saying this.
They're not. The way the Bitcoin system works, they're more like commodities.
Granted, some businesses have allowed you to pay for things with said fractional commodities, but still. At some point, an actual cash value has to be determined before you can actually SPEND them.
Re:This is why we can't have nice tihngs... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is why we can't have nice tihngs... (Score:5, Informative)
You've misunderstood what currency backing means.
A something-backed currency means that there have to be a _fixed_ amount of physical entity somewhere in the possession of whoever decides to give out the currency. This is not the case with the current fiat. Sure it can be exchanged for all those things you mentioned but it's backed by none of them, some central bankers could agree to create ex nihilo enough money to give a billion USD to every bank account in the world. If you then reason that a dollar is backed by cars then either there would be a huge surplus of cars somewhere to allow this to happen, or someone managed to multiply the current global carpool a millionfold overnight.