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$500,000 Worth of Bitcoins Stolen
olsmeister writes "A Bitcoin user allegedly has had $500,000 worth of Bitcoins stolen from him. A hacker supposedly gained access to the user's home computer and managed to get the user's wallet.dat file, which contained the cryptographic keys that allowed him to drain the user's balance."
There are nowhere near $500,000 worth of asks on any of the BitCoin exchanges, selling anywhere near that amount would cause BitCoin's value to drop very quickly.
However I agree that it isn't the best idea to store $500,000 worth of BTC in one BitCoin account.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
This thread was on Reddit 2 days ago. Here's the link: http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/hzrcc/bitcoin_user_loses_25k_bitcoins_when_his_machine/
To summarise:
* it could've never been $500k, that's purely theoretical. In practise it would be worth far less.
* "allinvain" is a true idiot. He was keeping the coins on his main computer which had a virus on it. He was browsing the web and IRCing with it. He found the trojan the night before, had seen that his payout address was changed to another and then to fix this he "changed it back" and went to sleep. He then "moved [his wallet] to a Ubuntu linux vmware install. On the same machine."
* It's probably a hoax
About $2 million is traded at mt gox every day. And it is always going up. You could get $500,000 in about a week without effecting prices much. No problem.
It's not even for drug dealers! Drug dealers want MONEY for their drugs. This is only for the people at the top of the pyramid. You go somewhere trying to buy drugs with bitcoins and you're going to get stabbed.