$31 Million In Tokens Stolen From Dollar-Pegged Cryptocurrency Tether 63
Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: All eyes may be on the meteoric rise of Bitcoin at the moment, but it's far from being the only cryptocurrency on the block. Startup Tether issued a critical announcement after it was discovered that "malicious action by an external attacker" had led to the theft of nearly $31 million worth of tokens. Tether is a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency formerly known as Realcoin, and it says that $30,950,010 was stolen from a treasury wallet. The company says it is doing what it can to ensure exchanges do not process these tokens, including temporarily suspending its backend wallet service. Tether knows the address used by the attacker to make the theft, but is not aware of either who the attacker is, or how the attack took place. The company is releasing a new version of its Omni Core software client in what it says is "effectively a temporary hard fork to the Omni Layer."
SFYL (Score:5, Insightful)
They have a script, you know. This has been played out over and over and over and it pretty much always ends the same way - with the criminals fading away and the 'investors' moving on to get fleeced by the next crypto scam.
Re:31 million (Score:1)
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...and the 'investors' moving on to get fleeced by the next crypto scam.
Speaking of which, how do I get in touch the new owners of those supposedly "stolen" 31 million crypto-dollars? Since those 31 million dollars have been disabled and are worth nothing now, is there a private auction where one could possibly bid on those worthless crypto-dollars?
The attacker is holding funds in the following address: 16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r. If you receive any USDT tokens from the above address, or from any downstream address that receives these tokens, do not accept them, as they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by Tether for USD.
Under what authority does Tether think it has the right to siphon away $31 million dollars? How are we supposed to know that Tether is not lying? Is that how crypto-currencies are supposed to work? Are we supposed to reward the most
Does not instill confidence (Score:5, Insightful)
This does not instill confidence.
Re:Does not instill confidence (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does not instill confidence (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not. There's also absolutely no way to 'undo' transactions if someone makes a mistake. The only option that exists is to do a hard-fork, revert the entire blockchain to a point where one or more specific transactions have not happened. This has happened once, with the DAO hack and the Ethereum hard fork which was done to mitigate it.
This is obviously very risky because you risk destroying the project if the fork does not get universal support. The only reason it was a success for Ethereum was that the project at that point was still fairly small, and the amount involved was a single transaction and none of the coin had propagated to other places. These days it would be all but impossible to pull off the same support for a hard fork. People who were victims of the recent Parity fuck-up in which a million ETH tokens are frozen forever: they're SOL. I am fairly certain there's not going to be a hard fork.
So you are correct: from a consumer standpoint, crypto currency has several advantages, but also several downsides.
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There's also absolutely no way to 'undo' transactions if someone makes a mistake
There no way to undo many real world transactions either. That's why it's called "insurance".
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This does not instill confidence.
It's not supposed to.
Now if you try to redeem your tokens for US dollars, Tether can just claim that they were stolen instead of redeeming them to you instead of admitting that those tokens were never worth those amounts it claimed they were worth in the first place.
Who would have guessed? (Score:2)
Seems like criminals like the anonymity of blockchain currencies.
This is why not all cryptocurrencies are bitcoin (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Who Runs bitcoin (Score:1)
Re: Who Runs bitcoin (Score:4, Informative)
Bitcoin is secure because administration of it is completely decentralized so that nobody has to trust anyone. The entire thing is set up so that any point you are depending on the consensus of lots of random third parties who have no way to know what they are giving an opinion on, no way to influence what comes their way, and nothing to gain from the outcome. At every point it uses insane and impossibly large numbers rather than tricks or secrets and assumes everyone is greedy. How do you get lots of people to volunteer to verify transactions they can't cook for personal gain? Call it mining and give them the new chunks of bitcoin plus the transaction fees. Solid strategies with mathematical proofs, a total lack of trust, and no assumption but a general tendency toward self-interest. That is the bitcoin way.
The other thing it does is shift a lot of the burden of "security" onto the users. Bitcoin makes sure that you can trust the bitcoin I just gave you is real, I actually had it in my pocket, and that I can't somehow take it back afterward. It entirely shifts the burden to you to care or not care about whether I got it clubbing seals or helping old ladies cross the street and to me to make sure I'm not buying the Brooklyn bridge. I tend to agree with the makers of Bitcoin, it isn't that those things are important but they aren't the responsibility of the dollars in your wallet.
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It's got a $140billion market cap, if it was going to be plundered then it would have happened a long time ago because that's quite some booty!
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Re: This is why not all cryptocurrencies are bitco (Score:1)
Bitcoin is hardly proven, and you will find this out when the economics don't work out like the fools expected. Beyond that, it's just wasteful. All that hashing to find a special result is a waste of energy. It's not even useful for peer to peer transactions like cash is - you have to be connected to the network to validate the transaction and you might be waiting minutes or even hours if your transaction doesn't make it into a block right away. Plastic cards are processed in seconds. Cash is immediate.
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That hashing isn't to find a special result, it's to validate transactions. "Cash is immediate." 80% outside the country of origin is also fake, all that "wasteful hashing " means there is no fake bitcoin... anywhere. Plastic cards also are not processed in seconds, those transactions can be reversed up to 90 days later that is a hell of a lot longer than it takes to fully process bitcoin.
Hell, I once worked a holiday season at a Michael's cra
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The bank detected them.
"But as long as we're being anecdotal, I pay Cash for pretty much everything, and I get about $1500 in pocket Cash a month from a Bank that is scrupulous about these things. In over three decades, I've never come across a counterfeit bill. Now it is just possible that I don't travel in circles where such bills would be passed; but I understand that there is no honor among thieves."
Given that your cash i
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Then why are you worried about it with your bitcoin?
"Right now there is no insured storage of bitcoin that is backed by federal mandate."
Of course there is, you can store on an offline wallet and stick it in a safe deposit box. Where do you store your gold/silver, jewelry, 5 figures worth of electronics, car, etc? The government or bank is more likely to
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Ah yes, Bitcoin has had no breaches, fraud, or security issues in its 9-year lifetime. The perfect currency. Finally.
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Litecoin and Dogecoin have existed for a long time, almost since the beginning right after Bitcoin.
"Pegged to the dollar." Pffft. (Score:3, Funny)
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the one in my sock drawer.
If you are an attractive female, everything in that sock drawer is a hot currency on the right exchange, such as craigslist.
Identity Crisis (Score:2)
Inside job (Score:1)
wait until suckers pour in the cash then when you think the pot is full, bail and roll out the trope "we were hacked", this is the real "business" model. lets hope the police/SEC look into the staff activities a bit more closely.
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The value of any currency needs to be relatively stable, I guess they thought that was their best option. You are right though in that those that want to 'invest in coin*' won't find it appealing as they can't get in as an early adopter and cash out as the user base grows.
* Any currency that is attractive as an investment itself is not sustainable long term.
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Any currency that is attractive as an investment itself is not sustainable long term.
Think of crypto not as a regular currency, but as an easily tradeable investment.
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A cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar which is redeemable in both directions by a single entity, concentrates the legal burden on that one controlling entity.
The multiple other smaller businesses do not need to co
Shocked? (Score:3)
Shocked? Is anyone shocked?
All of this has happened before. (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to give me shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane?
You want to give me slips of paper backed by shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane?
You want to give me slips of paper not backed by shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane?
You want to give me data backed by paper not backed by shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane?
You want to give me data not backed by paper not backed by shiny lumps of metal for my goats, are you insane? --- where we are now
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You want to give me goats, are you insane?
Seriously, though, proper cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are backed by math, not some silly agreements between people. But I'm not sure if those Tether tokens count as proper cryptocurrency.
They can block the use of specific coins? (Score:3)
That doesn't give me confidence in the currency, if my money could be frozen at someone else's whim.
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That doesn't give me confidence in the currency, if my money could be frozen at someone else's whim.
I know what you mean. Imagine if some (relatively) stable country were to pull it's 500 and 1000 rupee denomination notes suddenly. Chaos would ensue. But that would never happen, would it?
Oh wait: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wir... [dailymail.co.uk]