Nameless Voice on 18/6/2011 at 15:28
Plus, most journalists will give the rough local value of an amount in another currency. They don't usually include the word "theoretically", though.
Shug on 19/6/2011 at 01:49
That's obviously my point. A properly written article would have stated something along the lines of "Worth approximately US$X at the time of the theft", or similar.
Saying something has a theoretical value automatically assumes it has no practical value, which simply isn't the case when people are buying and selling it for real money at that very moment.
Obviously more people know about the euro than bitcoins. As a journalist, it's his job to inform readers exactly what they are, not to infer that they're monopoly money.
Ko0K on 22/6/2011 at 06:36
I never even heard of BitCoin until the news of this theft hit the front page of Reddit a couple of days ago.
While I'm sympathetic toward the poor guy, it boggles the mind that he trusted a piece of technology still in its infancy to that extent. If this was product being marketed as a currency substitute, for that amount of money to transfer to an unauthorized recipient without any recourse available to the victim would simply be unacceptable. However, seeing how this is a peer-to-peer, open-source (a red-flag phrase, IMO) financial exchange method, I'd be curious as to what this guy could possibly do to recover his loss.
Hopefully the actual amount he put in it was fairly small at the time of his investment, then the unit value appreciated over time, in which case this would be a little more than a learning experience.
Matthew on 22/6/2011 at 09:44
I think that is the case - some reports seem to claim his actual investment was around US$1000.
d0om on 22/6/2011 at 13:03
The whole point of bitcoin is that it is effectively digital cash. Once it is stolen, its gone. Once you spend it, its gone. On the plus side governments cannot freeze your assets, or trace transactions.
You could report the bicoin as stolen, and ask people not to accept the coins in the future, much in the way you can with bank-note serial numbers. I don't think the bitcoin spec allows this to happen though.
(
https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20208066-huge-bitcoin-sell-off-due-to-a-compromised-account-rollback)
Looks like some hackers targeted the weak-link; the exchange converting bit-coins into real cash. They hacked the accounts and tried to sell everyone's bitcoins, crashing the value.
Shug on 23/6/2011 at 00:25
Apparently there's a popular conspiracy theory that the fellow who had 25,000 bitcoins stolen did so deliberately (or faked it); some inconsistencies with posting history, a total lack of security even after he reported a theft from his mining pool operation, and various other things apparently mean he was deliberately trying to crash the value of bitcoins. A little wild, but interesting nonetheless!
SeriousCallersOnly on 4/7/2011 at 01:58
Quote Posted by d0om
It seems to be a very good idea, in principle. The cryptographic solutions to verifying transactions are good.
The way they issue BitCoin, is bad. They are essentially giving away currency to the people who start the system up. I could start my own BitCoin operation, where I would issue all the initial BitCoins to myself, and it would have all the same properties for security (other than I would be in charge or issuing new coins.)
If a similar system was set up, backed by a large company/central bank, where the coins were pegged to some existing currency (ie put in $, get issued new BitCoin) the system might take off as away of securely exchanging money without it being traceable, and with low transaction fees.
Which is what government hates.
Digital money (and digital elections) were figured out by Shamir 5 years ago, but have 0 chances to go mainstream because they would either threaten the power of the elite or are just too fucking complicated for the plebes to trust (they also require the plebes to keep their private keys protected - preferably outside your COMPUTER dumbnutz and have a secure networked computer, which is lol no).
SeriousCallersOnly on 11/7/2011 at 15:50
I think bitcoin mining should be in actual useful work, like the Folding@home project or something.