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Early Bitcoin Adopters Facing Extortion Threats
An anonymous reader writes Wired recounts the story of Hal Finney, one of the very first adopters of Bitcoin. Finney died earlier this year after a long fight with Lou Gehrig's disease. But for months before his death, he was a victim of constant harassment from somebody trying to extort his Bitcoins. He and his family faced a variety of threats, and had a SWAT team called on their residence. And it turns out Finney is not alone — other early adopters are being targeted with similar threats. "That's when someone using the names Nitrous and Savaged hacked into [early adopter Roger Ver's] email accounts and demanded that he cough up 37 bitcoins—about $20,000 at the time—in order to prevent his private information from being published online. Ver refused, and the hacker apparently backed off after Ver put a 37 bitcoin bounty on his head. Ver, who was himself sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for illegally shipping explosive across state lines, believes that Savaged is not only the same person who swatted Hal Finney, but also the person who gained access to Satoshi Nakamoto's email account earlier this year."
Unregulated currency FTW
That swatting is a thing. How can it be that a single, anonymous phone call is all it takes to deploy a militarized police team to your front door? It blows my mind. That it keeps happening over and over ... ugh.
Ver refused, and the hacker apparently backed off after Ver put a 37 bitcoin bounty on his head.
From TFA: "Then Ver responded with a link to a Facebook post offering that 37-bitcoin bounty for information leading to Nitrous’s arrest, and Nitrous immediately backed down. To be clear, Ver didn’t put a bounty on Nitrous’s head. He merely said he’ll pay out the money when Nitrous is arrested for hacking his accounts."
If you go camping and take a pack of Black Cats with you, you may have just illegally transported explosives. Details matter.
They can be, however people keeping their mouths shut is another thing all together.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Really? US dollar?
Absolutely.
Swiss Franc is much more stable.
The Swiss Franc is the currency of a relatively small country with a GDP around $350 billion. That is not big enough to protect itself against heavy currency speculation and certainly isn't big enough to be as safe as the dollar, yuan or euro. The Swiss economy is increasingly dependent on foreign investment and that should be worrisome if you think it is some sort of safe haven.
Euro, is very spendable, mostly stable
The Euro may not even exist in 10 years and it is anything but stable. Have you paid NO attention to the currency crises in Europe for the last 5 years?
US Dollar is not worth its weight in paper.
Really? Because the people who actually put their money where their mouth is completely disagree with you. If the dollar wasn't considered safe then interest rates should be going through the roof. Instead interest rates are near all time lows meaning that investors consider the dollar to be among the safest places to invest.
China holds vast amount of US Dollars and the moment they decide to sell some or all of these, the currency will start to look like the Zimbabwe Dollar.
Who do you think China is going to sell them to? Seriously, who? The answer is no one. There isn't another buyer that can buy or wants to buy $1 Trillion in US debt. China owns that US debt so that they can keep their currency cheap and thereby support their export driven economy. The moment they sell a substantial portion of their US debt holdings, the yuan will appreciate in value and every single export from China will immediately become more expensive overseas. There is NOTHING China can do to dump their US debt holdings that will not hurt China worse than it will hurt the US. China only holds about 8% of US debt. It's a nice sound bite but the notion that they somehow now "own" the US is absurd to anyone who isn't clueless.