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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?
The victim's name was "allinvain"... Rather fitting, don't you think? Or maybe the story was made up.
Victim - "I've had the my wallet stolen officer" .DAT"
Officer - "Okay can you describe the wallet to me?"
Victim - "It was about 58KB and ended in
Officer - "Errrrr......so was it leather?"
Keep hyping that ponzi scheme.
Now you need to give the editors some credit here. If they were financially invested in pumping Bitcoins up, this article certainly would not help.
I mean people wouldn't imagine this is good publicity for Bitcoin, would they? Unless someone would go under the logic of, "Wow, people have so much of these things, I should get in on this game." I would like to think the reasoning here is. "Wow, digital property on a computer is so easy to steal."
Maybe I give people too much credit...
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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.
Maybe I give people too much credit...
So long as that credit is not in Bitcoin, it's probably okay.
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.
Those coins are only worth what someone will pay for them -- maybe some products online you could buy with them.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. That's pretty much the definition of money.
How on earth is pointing out a major security breach "shilling" for BitCoin?
Next up: Articles about Sony's security breaches are secretly paid for by Sony!
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
There was no security breach in terms of Bitcoin.
Some idiot had his computer open to abuse and lost private data that correlates to money (and the 000,000$ figure is nothing but guesswork - he didn't "invest" that amount of money in Bitcoin only to lose it - that's what he *estimates* his stuff was worth if he had tried to sell it and all he "spent" was various amount of CPU cycles amounting nowhere close to that figure). Basically, he has his "credit card" number stolen. That's not a breach of the system, just a breach of his inadequate security procedures surrounding something he considered to have a value of several years earnings.
Basically: Pillock.
Having said that, I have to agree with the OP. In the last year, I've come closer to never returning to this site again than I ever have in the past. I don't even know why I have it on my "always open" list of sites, probably force-of-habit more than actual interest.
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
It has to do with the US dollar being backed by the US GNP and Bitcoin being backed by the equivalent of pink elephants.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Nobody could be stupid enough to...
Any sentence beginning this way is automatically incorrect.
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
Lots of people assume that various objects (including paper or virtual money) have value outside of what you can get in exchange.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
This would explain the laundering activity that has been going on the past 24 hours. The equivalent of the entire market of bitcoins has been transferred to hundreds of accounts in 50k+ increments. Only 6.5m BTC in existence, over 8m BTC in transfer activity. If any of that starts selling, it will collapse the market down to nickels and dimes.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
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.
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.
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.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I'm not into Bitcoins, but I don't think any government should be a party to every transaction I make. "Mony laundering" is just an elastic propaganda term for any kind of financial privacy.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry