Tracking a Bitcoin Thief, Part II: Illustrating the Issue of Trust In Altcoins 46
An anonymous reader writes The team over at the BITCOMSEC (Bitcoin Community Security) project released a second part to their 'Tracking a Bitcoin Thief' series in which they disclose what happened to a once-rising alternate crypto currency project that promised to place guaranteed value of its MidasCoins by backing it with actual Gold. Dealing with the reality of user compromise, the projects founder ups and runs away with all of the communities coins; cashing them out at an exchange for Bitcoins. A sobering tale of trust issues within the alternate crypto currency community. (The first part is interesting, too.)
Obligatory (Score:2, Troll)
Ha ha /nelson
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Ha
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*golf clap*
LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not theft. They just copied some bits.
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Hah, if I could mod you insightful, I would, alas, no mod points.
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yep
That's why I mine Dogecoins (Score:2)
Ok, some jerk actually managed to steal enough Dogecoins a few months ago to be worth actual money, which is so not the point of Dogecoin. I mine them partly because they're worth basically zero while still being cryptographically interesting; six months of one CPU on my old lab PC might have added up to 25 cents, but it's still in the "Reddit tip jar" range, not the "So wow! Many money!" range even though I have much coins.
Small time thievery (Score:2)
Well yeah copying isn't stealing ...
But I've heard rumors of really big time players in the bitcoin "market" who sell large volumes of bitcoin to THEMSELVES, a very real possibility given the anonymous nature of bitcoin addresses. This causes the value of bitcoin to rise, which then attracts the attention of the smaller players, who buy into the hype thinking, "OMG, bitcoin's going to rise to $$$$ again!". Which of course isn't likely since only a few people are buying and selling bitcoins, each through mul
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You mean, market manipulation? Something several big banks just got fined millions of dollars for in the forex markets? That should be an interesting one to watch...
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You mean, market manipulation? Something several big banks just got fined millions of dollars for in the forex markets? That should be an interesting one to watch...
Sadly, there is no real regulation in bitcoin yet, so who is going to be fine in the bitcoin case??? And who would do anything about it as of now???
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Who is going to be fined? (I assume that is what you meant) The people doing the manipulation, so the people aNonnyMouseCowered allege that are manipulating the market. Who would do the fining? The SEC, the FCA or another countries financial authority. Wouldn't take much for them to do it either.
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Yeah, in the US at least, the tax ruling that explicitly categorizes bitcoin as a security and not currency puts bitcoin squarely within the jurisdiction of the SEC. Not to mention that any single state attorney general could take up the issue if he/she chose to do so.
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They certainly misplaced their trust. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for these individuals either. But I would never say they deserve it unless they entered the market with malicious intent. Maybe they were selfish to try and capitalize on the currency, or perhaps they just believe in it from a philosophical standpoint and wanted to support it.
The logic of they-deserved-it-so-its-justified-because-they-let-it-happen is a worn fallacy I'm tired of hearing. If we all believed in such logic, we'd al
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The logic of they-deserved-it-so-its-justified-because-they-let-it-happen is a worn fallacy I'm tired of hearing.
I'd agree but for the fact that the people most repeating this fallacy are the same libertarian idiots who back these alternate currencies. I see it as just deserts.
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I'd agree but for the fact that the people most repeating this fallacy are the same libertarian idiots who back these alternate currencies. I see it as just deserts.
... that's a rather dry assessment ...
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Gold is, however, immensely more difficult to transmit through the internets...
Ultimately it boils down to transaction costs. Sophisticated gold bugs do not have trouble moving gold large distances, for a modest cost. The very very low transaction costs of cryptocurrency is only true for a very small population of very technically sophisticated persons -- maintaining safe and secure encrypted data backups involves the kind of skillset that companies pay good money for, so doing this as a hobby is not exactly "free" in any practical sense. The rest of us will need to lean on exchang
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No need for encypted data backups. Transact
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I can't think of a better way of scamming right wing morons than with tales of riches from gold.
What's a better way of scamming left wing morons?
Wrong address in the article? (Score:2)
Does that address make sense? Are there enough guesses in the article?
I'm confused. All 9x zips in Italy are in Sicily.
Perhaps my understanding of Italian mailing addresses is lacking.
EVE Online Spill over? (Score:1)