People Who Can't Remember Their Bitcoin Passwords Are Really Freaking Out Now (slate.com) 202
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slate: Bitcoin has had quite a week. On Thursday, the cryptocurrency surged past $19,000 a coin before dropping down to $15,600 by Friday midday. The price of a single Bitcoin was below $1,000 in January. Any investors who bought Bitcoins back in 2013, when the price was less than $100, probably feel pretty smart right now. But not all early cryptocurrency enthusiasts are counting their coins. Instead they might be racking their brains trying to remember their passwords, without which those few Bitcoins they bought as an experiment a few years ago could be locked away forever. That's because Bitcoin's decentralization relies on cryptography, where each transaction is signed with an identifier assigned to the person paying and the person receiving Bitcoin.
"I've tried to ignore the news about Bitcoin completely," joked Alexander Halavais, a professor of social technology at Arizona State University, who said he bought $70 of Bitcoin about seven years as a demonstration for a graduate class he was teaching at the time but has since forgotten his password. "I really don't want to know what it's worth now," he told me. "This is possibly $400K and I'm freaking the fuck out. I'm a college student so this would change my life lmao," wrote one Reddit user last week. The user claimed to have bought 40 bitcoins in 2013 but can't remember the password now. "A few years ago, I bought about 20 euros worth of bitcoin, while it was at around 300eur/btc.," lamented another Reddit user earlier this week. "Haven't looked at it since, and recently someone mentioned the price had hit 10.000usd. So, I decided to take a look at my wallet, but found that it wasn't my usual password. I have tried every combination of the password variations I usually use, but none of them worked."
"I've tried to ignore the news about Bitcoin completely," joked Alexander Halavais, a professor of social technology at Arizona State University, who said he bought $70 of Bitcoin about seven years as a demonstration for a graduate class he was teaching at the time but has since forgotten his password. "I really don't want to know what it's worth now," he told me. "This is possibly $400K and I'm freaking the fuck out. I'm a college student so this would change my life lmao," wrote one Reddit user last week. The user claimed to have bought 40 bitcoins in 2013 but can't remember the password now. "A few years ago, I bought about 20 euros worth of bitcoin, while it was at around 300eur/btc.," lamented another Reddit user earlier this week. "Haven't looked at it since, and recently someone mentioned the price had hit 10.000usd. So, I decided to take a look at my wallet, but found that it wasn't my usual password. I have tried every combination of the password variations I usually use, but none of them worked."
hypnosis (Score:2)
to remember.
Re:hypnosis (Score:5, Funny)
I tried hypnosis. It didn't work. My hypnotherapist's new boat is nice though.
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Because my bitcoin collection is now worth $5.00. Still wasn’t worth the return with the couple of hours on clicking links. Back a few years ago.
Re:Bitcoin is bound to fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah. The parts of the coins that remain will just become more valuable. So even if the world is left with a few million wallets with less than a single usable BTC in each, it will be fine. Satoshi could have picked 21 million or 12 million or 1.2 million. It would still be the same.
Re: Bitcoin is bound to fail (Score:2)
At $21,000 per btc the smallest denomination you can get is $0.001. at $210,000btc per use the smallest is 0.01
This doesn't sound so bad until you know finance people require transactions down to $0.0001 and more pressing are the transaction fees which go into the $20 range which makes buying anything less than $200 not worth it. As the fees are 10% of : to &.
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If there's a need for smaller denominations, the protocol can be adjusted.
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The specification for the microtransaction layer (known as lightning network) is now published, and this specification uses a smaller denomination (1e-11 of 1 BTC) which is only rounded when payments are cleared to the bitcoin network.
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Password cracking (Score:5, Insightful)
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In practice, people use similar passwords and similar password setting techniques.
dd if=/dev/urandom count=1 | base64
Also works against $5 wrench cryptanalysis.
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There are already bitcoin wallet recovery services (in fact I believe one of them is something like bitcoinwalletrecovery.com) with an excellent track record.
You give them your passwords you remember, and they bash at the wallet using variations on your password themes. They keep a portion of the proceeds.
Legit services, too.
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How I create new passwords:
Look around me, papers and books, signs. Names from foreign countries are often a good source (unusual letter combinations). Cola bottle on the table? More indata. Select letters from the source data as random as possible. Take numbers, EAN codes, etc. Mix. Capitalize letters as randomly as possible.
At least 8 alphanumeric characters are needed, more is better.
It's of course not as secure as a true random number but secure enough that cracking them would be very hard. PITA to reme
Re:Password cracking (Score:5, Funny)
"Honey, do you remember what was on the kitchen table on november 23rd, 2011?"
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I always use hunter2
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Nope. Not the case at all.
New slashdot (Score:1)
Slashdot: Bitcoin, Network Neutrality and mdsolar's rants. Oh, and occasionally a story about Apple or Tesla.
Mixed sympathy (Score:5, Insightful)
The professor that spent $70? Tough luck, almost like buying a winning lottery ticket and losing it. The guy who bought 20*300 = 6000 euro worth of bitcoins and couldn't be bothered to remember/store the password? Moron. Personally I'm kicking myself for not getting in on this early, because it sounded interesting to me but then I tried to step outside my nerd bubble and thought nah, this will just be some weird nerd thing that "normal people" won't ever get in on. You feel a bit like the guy who turned down the Beatles, like who'd ever want that? Quite a few, it turns out...
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The guy who bought 20*300 = 6000 euro worth of bitcoins and couldn't be bothered to remember/store the password? Moron.
Reading comprehension fail, 20 euro worth of BTC != 20 BTC. So he lost 0.15 BTC = $1500, it's money I guess but not exactly the lottery jackpot.
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No point remembering, they all got hacked (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the day, the only places that I used for exchanging Bitcoin with other cryptocurrencies were sites like Mt. Gox and BTC-E. They both got busted by the feds for various criminal activities, so there is no active account left to log into.
I believe that the mining pools got hacked as well, so there isn't much hope checking if any residual balances left in those accounts as well.
Man... the security of the various Bitcoin exchanges sites really sucked back then. I wonder if it's really better now, or the next big hack is right around the corner.
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There was a major split in Ethereum because one group realized there was a theoretical vulnerability in the protocols that would allow someone to raid other wallets. That was the reason for the split. Then the original founders attempted to bridge this fork by reunifying the two blockchains, but without fixing the original issue.
I personally don't trust anything that makes use of RPC calls or requires server processes to run.
Cashing out (Score:1)
This strikes me as the time in the tulip futures to cash out.
Displaying your ignorance (Score:2)
I "cashed out" a bitcoin last week, put down a 4x payment on my mortgage for this month.
You do realize that hundreds of millions of dollars are traded every day on the cryprocurrency exchanges, right ?
Go to coinbase.com (to pluck an example out of the air), log into your account. Do the 2FA thing with your cell phone. Type in how many btc or LTC or ETH you want to sell, wait a few days, and it appears in your bank account. It's easier than setting up a wire transfer...
password manager (Score:4, Insightful)
seriously, how do you get through life without one ?
would have solved this problem very nicely.
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I have one, but I forgot the master password.
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I store my infrequently used passwords in plain text along with clue words to their applicability in a file with a ridiculous name and a fake file extension in an obscure directory.
If someone goes through the effort of breaking into my house then into my computer then sifting through thousands of files, good luck to them; they can keep whatever they find.
Do you remember when... (Score:2)
Do you remember when you had all that cash in your wallet but couldn't remember how to take it out? Or when your debit card stopped working and you lost your entire bank balance forever?
Bitcoin is such a revolutionary technology if you're looking for unique ways for your average person to lose access to their own wealth.
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Yes, I have a bank that is so security conscious, that if I use a cash machine that isn't part of my regular routine or even use EBay, they freeze the account until I call in and confirm that it was me making the purchase. One time, that involves a 45 minute wait in the pissing rain at a gas station.
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>Yes, I have a bank that is so security conscious, that if I use a cash machine that isn't part of my regular routine or even use EBay, they freeze the account until I call in and confirm that it was me making the purchase.
So no you don't, because you actually got your access back.
This isn't a particularly complicated concept.
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I remember relative losing her money that was in a bank account she forgot about, law says money is foreited after period of inactivity.
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no, but your bank might have an overdraft protection system for you where any such becomes a credit card loan. I'd advise against it, interest rates too high. Instead live within your means.
anyway, my point is that losing money due to forgetfulness is hardly a recent thing, old as money itself.
Maybe some of the wallets were hacked (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Maybe some of the wallets were hacked (Score:4, Insightful)
If you still know the public wallet address, you can look up the balance on blockchain.com
That's because they are fucking morons (Score:2)
As always, WRITE DOWN YOUR PASSWORDS (Score:4, Informative)
It really is that simple.
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Now where did I put that slip of paper ten years ago...?
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I encrypt my passwords with PGP, print them out (encrypted), store a file (encrypted) on different cloud services and a few other dittys I'll just keep to myself.
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I PGP'd all my passwords ten years ago.
They were all super long and difficult to remember.
So long as I remembered my PGP password, I'd be in good shape.
Unfortunately, I made my PGP pass phrase super long and difficult to remember.
Well: I lost all of my passwords.
And then what? (Score:1)
You remember your password, and that 100 BTC you have is now worth a theoretical $1.5 mil or more. Good luck doing anything with it.
Whether by design or happenstance, Bitcoin has been rendered useless by the small group of people who have been guiding it, namely the ones who call themselves Bitcoin Core (sounds all official and shit, huh? It's really not.) They fought tooth and nail to make BTC unscalable and really helped turn the legacy Bitcoin chain into the clusterfuck that it is today. Remember all tha
The next cryptocurrency? (Score:1)
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LOL!
Would cracking the passwords cost less than mining (Score:1)
If it costs $85,000 worth of electricity to mine a wallet with 3 million dollars worth of coins?
Wishing... (Score:2)
That I even had this problem in he first case. This is one tech bubble I wasnâ(TM)t on the bleeding edge for...now, I am shut out.
Hereâ(TM)s a question for those familiar with BTC...can you purchase fractional BTC on exchanges? If so, I would assume the easiest path would be to accept fractional BTC payments in lieu of standard cash for goods and services. And, how is that not bartering in the eyes of the tax law?
Seriously...just wondering how to get in on this now.
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Long version: if you ask this question then you need to read more about Bitcoin.
Short version: The smallest unit of Bitcoin is 0.00000001 Bitcoin (a.k.a. 1 satoshi)
It's P A S S W O R D (Score:2)
wallet.dat (Score:2)
Yeah i mined a few bitcoins perhaps 4, back when bitcoins were worth 30 cents and prompty forgot about it.
I am now using testdisk on some old hard drives trying to find my wallet.dat. no luck so far!
Its funny because i usually keep my entire appdata structure between computers, but i have no bitcoin folder that i can find, and i have only had 2 computers between 2009 and now. Maybe i hallucinated mining those coins? so much can happen in 8 years...
i can see why people are madly looking through thrift stores
Gave my Bitcoin to FSF long ago (Score:2)
I had a Bitcoin once, when the Bitcoin Faucet was generous. One day I was like "I'm not doing this. I can lose the Bitcoin or give it to somebody else". At least I hope FSF got it, as their bitcoin address came from cached Google results. They had a period where they thought receiving Bitcoin donations was bad and took the address down from their website.
The password is... (Score:2)
wallet.dat export (Score:2)
The other problem is that it's so difficult to extract keys from an old copy of wallet.dat. The stock Bitcoin client that should be able to read it requires a ~150GB download (not necessary for cloud-computing), rather than giving a very trivial tool that allows exporting these addresses into another application. It's as if the developers want to secure the file, without it actually being secure.
One other client crashed when trying to read wallet.dat. It must be getting snagged on some pattern of bits, as i
Years ago, we gave 0.3 BC as a birthday gift... (Score:2)
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You would think that the computation power needed for mining would be more profitable if it were used for password cracking.
Re: Buried treasure (Score:2)
I was just thinking the same thing. Brute forcing the wallet probably is a fraction of mining a single BTC but supposedly you can get hundreds for the same work.
Bitcoin mining hardware cannot be repurposed ... (Score:4, Insightful)
You would think that the computation power needed for mining would be more profitable if it were used for password cracking.
For bitcoins it is not, for other coins it is. Bitcoin mining requires Application Specific hardware (ASIC). We are many years past the point where CPUs or GPUs could mine bitcoin. Other coins are still CPU/GPU mineable. Many believe it is important for a coin to be GPU mineable so that we can have the decentralization that blockchain theory assumes. Bitcoin no longer has such decentralization and is vulnerable, for example 70-80% of the mining power is located in a single country that is not known for a hands off approach to economics and finance.
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Many believe it is important for a coin to be GPU mineable so that we can have the decentralization that blockchain theory assumes.
The problem with that idea is that it doesn't account for wide scale botnet mining. The Bitcoin situation will improve, as we get to the state of the art ASIC, and incremental improvements in ASICs will slow down. This should give other people a chance to catch up.
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The Bitcoin transaction time and cost are already past the point where it is useful as a currency. With what you are describing, it will get far worse before it even has a chance to get better. If it's not useful as a currency, then what is it for? Right now, it just seems to be a gambling commodity for high-risk traders; similar to junk bonds, but, with a far higher chance of significant loss in a short amount of time.
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The Bitcoin transaction time and cost are already past the point where it is useful as a currency
Which has exactly nothing to do with the mining algorithm, and whether it runs on ASICs/CPUs or GPUs.
With what you are describing, it will get far worse before it even has a chance to get better.
No, what I was describing has nothing to do with transaction time and cost. I was talking about the mining distribution. If ASICs level off, it just means that it will be easier to get them distributed over more diverse operations. It changes nothing about the total mining expenses.
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Many believe it is important for a coin to be GPU mineable so that we can have the decentralization that blockchain theory assumes.
The problem with that idea is that it doesn't account for wide scale botnet mining. The Bitcoin situation will improve, as we get to the state of the art ASIC, and incremental improvements in ASICs will slow down. This should give other people a chance to catch up.
It would be far simpler, in a technical sense not a political sense, for bitcoin to change its algorithm to an ASIC resistant one, as other coins are implemented with. There is nothing in blockchain theory that requires one particular algorithm. The early bitcoin devs just made a counterproductive choice, its software, that can be fixed.
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My point was that a GPU based algorithm isn't necessarily better, because of the risk of botnet attacks.
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There's just one tiny problem: to change the algorithm, you need a majority of the miners to agree
No, you don't.
You need to majority of economic players to agree. They determine the value of the coin, and the value will attract the miners.
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There's just one tiny problem: to change the algorithm, you need a majority of the miners to agree. You know, those who just invested millions of dollars in ASICs. Good luck with that. Maybe Bitcoin Cash could do it, though? Or a new fork?
ASICs loose value and become unprofitable to operate as the difficulty increases. With an algorithm change scheduled sufficiently in advance ASIC operators can simply plan to not replace/upgrade their current hardware as it becomes unprofitable.
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The big Bitcoin mining farms are in China, not in the U.S.A.
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And today, those 7500 Bitcoins are now worth 87834954 British Pounds.
I'm familiar with this and would offer to try (Score:3)
I'm VERY familiar with password cracking and I'd be interested in trying to crack some wallets. The success rate will completely depend on the strength of the passphrase and how much the person remembers. If they remember "I used three 'random' words I thought of", that'll be easy enough to crack. If they used 40 truly random characters, that's much, much harder.
Re: I'm familiar with this and would offer to try (Score:1)
Wow, thanks for the insight Common Sense Man!
Did you read that backwards? (Score:2)
> > three 'random' words I thought of", that'll be easy enough to crack.
>> If they used 40 truly random characters, that's much, much harder.
Did you read that backwards? I said three "thought of" words is much easier than 40 truly random characters. You said no, the other way around - three words is much easier than 40 truly random characters. :)
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This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable.
Nope. The forgotten passwords are a Good Thing, because each lost btc means mine are worth more.
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This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable.
Nope. The forgotten passwords are a Good Thing, because each lost btc means mine are worth more.
You assume people will still want bitcoins at that point. :-)
Re:Yet another downside (flipside of pennies) (Score:2)
This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable.
Nope. The forgotten passwords are a Good Thing, because each lost btc means mine are worth more.
You assume people will still want bitcoins at that point. :-)
It works for other currencies too. Several trillion dollars were pissed away in dot com bubbles, CDO/CDS and other zero-value instruments, housing bubbles, Madoff-styled schemes, endless wars... so now those pre-1982 pennies you under your couch cushions are worth almost twice their face value.
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This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable.
Nope. The forgotten passwords are a Good Thing, because each lost btc means mine are worth more.
You assume people will still want bitcoins at that point. :-)
It works for other currencies too. Several trillion dollars were pissed away in dot com bubbles, CDO/CDS and other zero-value instruments, housing bubbles, Madoff-styled schemes, endless wars... so now those pre-1982 pennies you under your couch cushions are worth almost twice their face value.
In your examples currencies were not destroyed. Assets merely dropped in value, much like bitcoin has done on numerous occasions, losing 75+% of its value.
Re:Yet another downside of Bitcoin (Score:4, Insightful)
Which leads to a world where if other people can't steal your wallet, at the very least it makes financial sense for them to try to destroy it, so their own BTC will be more valuable. Think of all the people who (even today) can't be bothered to keep backups of critical files, and lose all their data when their computer is lost, is stolen, or crashes. Think of all the people who lose or forget their passwords. Over time, it is inevitable that more and more BTC will become inaccessible.
Think of a brave new cryptocurrency world where a crashed hard drive impoverishes a family, with no hope of recovery. Think of a world where stealing or destroying the life savings of others is effectively impossible to prosecute, and completely impossible to reverse or repair. And this is somehow supposed to be a good thing?
I expect that a decade from now, most of us will look back on the cryptocurrency craze, shake our heads, and say to ourselves, "What in the world was everyone thinking?"
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Which leads to a world where if other people can't steal your wallet, at the very least it makes financial sense for them to try to destroy it
This is also true for dollars, diamonds, and gold. They are valuable because they are scarce.
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It never ceases to fucking amaze me
You have a lot to learn then. I assume you also carry gold coins in a purse, rather than leaving "things" like dollars in a bank account ?
Re: Yet another downside of Bitcoin (Score:1)
None of those things have "intrinsic value." Dollars have value because we say they do. Diamonds have value because we say they do (yes, they are pretty, but if that's really the basis, then cubic zirconium should be worth at least 30% that of a similarly sized diamond). Gold... well, you get the point.
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Define "inherent value".
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Yes, but, the typical person can't get their hands on a nuke to make your gold worthless and stealing your gold leaves a physical trail of evidence. But, any script kiddie can get a file encryption malware to make your wallet non-accessible and as long as they don't directly try to profit off your coins, there's likely no evidence trail to follow.
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Don't be an idiot. You don't need to nuke gold to destroy it. All you need to do is throw your gold at the Sun with a really big slingshot.
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I expect that a decade from now, most of us will look back on the cryptocurrency craze, shake our heads, and say to ourselves, "What in the world was everyone thinking?"
They were thinking they could get something for nothing. The same thing people in ponzi schemes always think.
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You can make BTC wallets that can be recovered with some memorized words.
If you can memorize 'correct horse battery staple' you can flee your burning home with nothing and still have access to your wallets.
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This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable.
Nope. The forgotten passwords are a Good Thing, because each lost btc means mine are worth more.
Nope right back at you. The problem with the BTC public ledger is there's no way to identify currency out of circulation. The value of your bitcoin won't ever change without a system to clearly mark stranded coins. The system says there are X bitcoins on the market and supply and demand will play a role with that assumption of X.
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The value of your bitcoin won't ever change without a system to clearly mark stranded coins
Yes it will. If the guy with the 7500 bitcoins hadn't lost his harddisk, he probably would have sold them at some point, increasing the circulation.
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What he means is, given a wallet address, how do you determine if the coins are lost or the owner is simply holding to them in order to sell them later?
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how do you determine if the coins are lost or the owner is simply holding to them in order to sell them later?
You wait until "later".
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Yes it will. If the guy with the 7500 bitcoins hadn't lost his harddisk, he probably would have sold them at some point, increasing the circulation.
The value of currency is based on supply and demand, not movement. No one is sitting around staring at people wallet checking for their movement. All they know is the total in circulation.
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Glad I could help make yours worth more.
I didn't forget my password, I deleted my wallet.
When BitCoin was first started, I thought -- hmm that is neat, and started mining. I had mined at least 40 or 50 BTC and then I wasn't getting any more after a few months so I shut it down. BTC still wasn't worth anything, and you couldn't do anything with it like you can now, so I just left it and forgot about it.
I was getting rid of the PC that had the wallet on it, and didn't think twice when I shredded the drive. Th
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It's also why encrypted email will always stay even less popular than the Linux desktop. (I decides that on the day I went to decrypt some "old" encrypted mail, and realized I'd forgotten the pass phrase.)
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You're an idiot. Head over to gdax and once you bank account is linked you can transfer like $20k a day...
Crashed scheduled after futures trading goes live (Score:3)
How long until Bitcoin bubble crashes?
The crash is not scheduled until after bitcoin futures trading is implemented in the first half of 2018 and the put options are in place. :-)
Re:Slashdot poll idea: NFL (Score:2)
I just read where Jerry Jones' Dallas Cowboys football team is worth $4.2 billion.
Perhaps.
But in our economic system, worth is determined by the buyer, not the seller.
That means bitcoin is 1) going to go up and down randomly and 2) it is dependent on an already existing market. It cannot hold the market up by itself like a dollar or renminbi.
You can put your house on the market for whatever price you think it can get. The price you actually
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They also use cold hard US dollars, cash on hand - recommendations for that?
Vote Republican, implement trickle down economics, and wait for the dollar to crash.
That'll show them danged terrorists.
Re: Never cashing out fully. (Score:1)
Sell 10% of your stash every time the price rises 20%. So if you had 10 bitcoins, sell one at 15k, 0.9 at 18k, 0.8 at 22k. You slowly take profit, while never running the risk of selling them all and then forever kicking yourself if they moon to a million bucks each.
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Suppose the real. tangible value of gold is $400 / ounce (approx the cost of a cheap mine), are people stupid for paying $1200 for it ? Are you laughing your ass off ?
Or do you assume the real, tangible price of gold is equal to whatever the current traded value is ?
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You tell him! If he knew ANYTHING about the history of new age, dotcom, ninja loaning, modern, anything goes capitalism, he'd know investing these days requires jumping on whatever's hot right now, fundamentals be damned to hell!
Now you on the other hand...let me just say...I like the cut of your jib. I bet you have a huge penis too.
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Replace "cryptocurrency" with "money" and it's the same thing.
Selfish assholes will always be selfish assholes.