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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."
No worries! Police has to investigate a robbery of $500,000.. oh wait, anonymous payments were good now?
What type of MORON keeps a balance of $500,000 in BTC?
Keep hyping that ponzi scheme.
The victim's name was "allinvain"... Rather fitting, don't you think? Or maybe the story was made up.
Check the FAQ on the website. it's too long to explain here.
The short and dirty version is "If you asked a bunch of libertarians to design a digital currency, this is what you'd get". Which isn't a wholely bad idea of course, but obviously has some issues that need to be worked out.
TFA says:
BitCoin is a form of fiat currency, meaning it only has value because people believe it has purchasing power.
The Wikipedia article says:
Fiat money is money that has value only because of government regulation or law.
That seems more in accordance with reality. As weak as the dollar has been lately, it would be very difficult for it to lose all or most of its value overnight, unless there was a major world catastrophe, because it is backed by the U.S. government. But (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) Bitcoin could crash any time because its value is given to it entirely by (gullible) people's beliefs. Heck, even stocks are backed by something, a company's performance, and those can crash overnight too.
Sorry, I can't take it anymore.
I'll miss you.
Whoops--I meant to quote a bit more of TFA:
Like most major worldwide money systems, BitCoin is a form of fiat currency, meaning it only has value because people believe it has purchasing power.
That's the important part. Bitcoin is not like most major worldwide money systems.
If the thief were to cash-out he or she would net just about $500,000 at current BitCoin-US Dollar exchange rates.
What type of moron would hand over $500,000 for BitCoins?
... does anyone really think that they're going to one day be able to take that big bank of BTC and get half a million in cash for it from someone?
I mean, I understand that you can probably get small transactions honored through some super shady site but
Aside from the lack of verification of this report I have to wonder if that whole premise of "being worth $500,000" is flawed. Those coins are only worth what someone will pay for them -- maybe some products online you could buy with them. But I highly doubt the market is that robust (yet). And I doubt it will ever reach that level.
I don't doubt that there are early farmers out there sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in BTC just enjoying the hilarious deflation that is taking place. What I doubt is that anybody will ever be able to redeem those for what the "market" says they're worth.
My work here is dung.
The short and dirty version is "If you asked a bunch of libertarians to design a digital currency, this is what you'd get". Which isn't a wholely bad idea of course, but obviously has some issues that need to be worked out.
Much like most libertarians. /rimshot
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Nobody could be stupid enough to...
Any sentence beginning this way is automatically incorrect.
Bitcoin is used by drug addicts and drug dealers to buy narcotics.
So are dollars.
Now, you could have slipped in the word "exclusively", and you'd have had a point, but a point that was factually incorrect.
You could have slipped in the word "primarily", and you'd have had an uncorroborated claim to back up.
Even if it *is* primarily used for criminal purposes, Bitcoin is *fascinating*, and geeky. So it belongs here.
And nothing of value was lost.
I'd amend that to "If you asked a bunch of libertarians who wanted to put the world's economies back on the gold standard ...". Because really, when you think about it, that's what bitcoin is supposed to be - digital gold.
Consider the parallels to gold coinage: a finite worldwide supply, "mining" becomes more difficult as time goes by, and the amount of money in circulation can be reduced by coins being hidden or lost, but never artificially increased. Furthermore, the statements you'll hear from the BTC crowd are exactly like the statements from the gold money crowd - bitcoins will herald in a new era of economic prosperity, bitcoins cannot be manipulated by governments creating more of them, etc. In effect, you've got a community of speculators who are trying to make their own "gold", and get rich by doing it, provided they can make the rest of us buy into the idea. (The historical failure of gold-backed currency in modern economies seems to completely escape all of them.)
However, there is a very big difference between BTC and gold. While it is true that you cannot create more BTC, anyone (or any government) can certainly create a competing digital currency that has as much "value" as bitcoins. Who is to say that a bitcoin has more or less value than any other cryptographically-signed digital coinage? Nothing more than public opinion, and that can be manipulated.
Ultimately, I expect the BTC standard to fail, and when it does, you'll hear exactly the same claims of government / commercial manipulation / sabotage that you hear from believers in gold currency. In that respect, there will be no difference in BTC and gold at all.
I've long longed for a USB hardware device containing a small crypto-processor, a public/private keypair, and a button. Given a standardized interface (as standardized as USB block-devices) it would make a perfect key-solution to keep in my physical keychain to identify myself in all kinds of circumstances.
What happens when your keychain is lost or stolen?
While I didn't check timezones/hours on some timestamps, I think it's still fairly reasonable to call this bullshit. Please check your sources next time.