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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."
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.
http://dailyanarchist.com/2012...
http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroo...
He was charged for selling agricultural fireworks (to scare away pests) on ebay. Turns out that the manufacturer was making them too powerful and/or not following regulations that limit their sale to farmers, ranchers, and growers.
He was also the only person prosecuted over the incident, despite the same fireworks being sold all over, including Cabelas. (Ken Shearer is mentioned in the CPSC press release, but his case is unrelated.)
See that "Preview" button?
Petro-Euro could easily replace Petro-Dollar (but ask Saddam Hussien how that turned out).
Only when the EU decides to try its hand at keeping the Middle East stable. You might wish to keep the Brits (and French) out of it though, I hear they like to draw borders with no regards to ethic or tribal history. :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I don't know, extortion is evil but you've got some cojones to try and squeeze somebody who ships explosives across state lines. Maybe you're 37 bitcoins will include a special package delivery from Hal Finney. That's odd, this box is ticking.
If you go camping and take a pack of Black Cats with you, you may have just illegally transported explosives. Details matter.
If random hackers find you and shake you down, your imagined immunity from FBI is just imaginary, isn't it? Shows without a legal government backing it up and providing for a non-violent conflict resolution options and contract enforcement options, all these "digital anonymous currencies" are just jokes, created by folks unconnected with reality creating castles in the air.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Euro, is very spendable, mostly stable.
Then you've never watched it's 25%+ fluctuations up and down over the last 10 years.
You can't measure the stability of a currency just by comparing it to your own currency. If we followed that line of reasoning, the only stable currency to you would be one which is pegged to the US Dollar. The price of one Euro fluctuates if you measure it in Dollars, yes, but that does not speak against the stability of the Euro more than it does against the stability of the Dollar.
Bitcoin's not unregulated. Its regulations are simply enforced by technical rather than legal means. Or are you perhaps confusing currency regulations with regulations against extortion?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
According to Wikipedia, a dollar bill weights around 1g. According to Alibaba, a ton of offset printing paper costs around $600 per ton. That means paper costs around 0.06 cents per gram, or put another way, a dollar bill is about 16 times its weight in paper.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Anonymous
The creators of bitcoin never claimed that.
and secure. LOL.
That's more or less equivalent to saying "lol RSA 4096 isn't secure because someone can beat you up and force you to reveal the password lol". Bitcoin is secure.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.