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Tracking a Bitcoin Thief, Part II: Illustrating the Issue of Trust In Altcoins
An anonymous reader writes The team over at the BITCOMSEC (Bitcoin Community Security) project released a second part to their 'Tracking a Bitcoin Thief' series in which they disclose what happened to a once-rising alternate crypto currency project that promised to place guaranteed value of its MidasCoins by backing it with actual Gold. Dealing with the reality of user compromise, the projects founder ups and runs away with all of the communities coins; cashing them out at an exchange for Bitcoins. A sobering tale of trust issues within the alternate crypto currency community. (The first part is interesting, too.)
Ha ha /nelson
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
It's not theft. They just copied some bits.
They certainly misplaced their trust. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for these individuals either. But I would never say they deserve it unless they entered the market with malicious intent. Maybe they were selfish to try and capitalize on the currency, or perhaps they just believe in it from a philosophical standpoint and wanted to support it.
The logic of they-deserved-it-so-its-justified-because-they-let-it-happen is a worn fallacy I'm tired of hearing. If we all believed in such logic, we'd all wear a helmet at all times, otherwise anyone who caves your skull in from behind with a rock would be perfectly justified and socially acceptable. There would be no crime because everything would be legal. Anything you propose as being illegal would be dismissed on that same logic. Oh someone robbed you at gunpoint? Too bad, shouldn't have been outside carrying valuables unarmed. You will probably reply that "anyone who is too weak or goes out unarmed deserves to whatever happens to them, let the weak be weeded out", but even the most well armed and prepared could, and eventually would, find themselves in a situation where they didn't see their assailant in time. Children are pretty uninformed of many of the dangers of the world. Sometimes the best lessons learned are those that are learned the hard way, but there are certainly some terrible things that happen to the uninformed which they didn't by any means deserve. It would be chaos.
Does that address make sense? Are there enough guesses in the article?
I'm confused. All 9x zips in Italy are in Sicily.
Perhaps my understanding of Italian mailing addresses is lacking.
The logic of they-deserved-it-so-its-justified-because-they-let-it-happen is a worn fallacy I'm tired of hearing.
I'd agree but for the fact that the people most repeating this fallacy are the same libertarian idiots who back these alternate currencies. I see it as just deserts.
This sounds like a player who trained in EVE online has taken it into meat space.
Gold is, however, immensely more difficult to transmit through the internets...
Ultimately it boils down to transaction costs. Sophisticated gold bugs do not have trouble moving gold large distances, for a modest cost. The very very low transaction costs of cryptocurrency is only true for a very small population of very technically sophisticated persons -- maintaining safe and secure encrypted data backups involves the kind of skillset that companies pay good money for, so doing this as a hobby is not exactly "free" in any practical sense. The rest of us will need to lean on exchanges, and factor in how to pay for insurance against another apparent (IMHO) inside job like MtGox.
In the future, I am sure I will own cryptocurrencies, but not on purpose and only for hundreds of milliseconds. They will just be another kind of exchange medium hidden in the implementation of some credit card. The costs of those exchanges imploding will only be borne indirectly by me, as part of the hidden fees, and I can walk away and let that be the vendors headache, just like a credit card.
Cryptocurrency exchanges seem to have a much higher risk of catastrophic implosion than a random 19th century bank. People who romanticize unregulated Wild West capitalism now have their opportunity to experience it first hand, on steroids. I am not going to say they deserve to be ripped off, but post-MtGox, they need to factor in some "special" risks of exchanges.
I'd agree but for the fact that the people most repeating this fallacy are the same libertarian idiots who back these alternate currencies. I see it as just deserts.
... that's a rather dry assessment ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
No need for encypted data backups. Transactions are all in the blockchain, not on your computer and addresses (and private keys) can be generated offline. It's enough if you just print your private keys on paper and keep those safe. The only way to lose your bitcoins is to lose your private keys.
This also the reason why storing bitcoins on an exchange is a bad idea. If you don't have the private key those bitcoins are not really yours.
I can't think of a better way of scamming right wing morons than with tales of riches from gold.
What's a better way of scamming left wing morons?
The other big disadvantage of gold is if robber shoots you they take your value. Private keys secured well they shoot you and... monetary mass goes down.
Ok, some jerk actually managed to steal enough Dogecoins a few months ago to be worth actual money, which is so not the point of Dogecoin. I mine them partly because they're worth basically zero while still being cryptographically interesting; six months of one CPU on my old lab PC might have added up to 25 cents, but it's still in the "Reddit tip jar" range, not the "So wow! Many money!" range even though I have much coins.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well yeah copying isn't stealing ...
But I've heard rumors of really big time players in the bitcoin "market" who sell large volumes of bitcoin to THEMSELVES, a very real possibility given the anonymous nature of bitcoin addresses. This causes the value of bitcoin to rise, which then attracts the attention of the smaller players, who buy into the hype thinking, "OMG, bitcoin's going to rise to $$$$ again!". Which of course isn't likely since only a few people are buying and selling bitcoins, each through multiple addresses that artificially inflate the number of people apparently buying and selling bitcoins. When these big time players decide to bail out, the price of bitcoins sinks back to its normal market level (whatever that is).