Hackers Steal $70M in Bitcoin
time.com
time.com
Are they scanning all the bills that come in? Which bills are in which teller's drawer? I doubt it.
If they received new bills in sequential order from the mint and had them stolen, I could see how they would know the numbers. But then again, what's the point? Your average business isn't going to scan numbers, so by the time the bills pop up again, you have no idea the path they took.
I've heard that serial numbers from ransom money would be recorded. That makes a bit more sense as they are one-time events and there is value in knowing if you find money it came via the ransom.
Really depends on your point of view. The entire use-case of Bitcoin is that no one can reach back in time and "undo" transactions. There is no point for it to exist otherwise.
It's a feature, not a bug.
The organisations these governments put forth as arbiters are, of course, are much worse. Pretty much every bank of any size has been caught embezzling, unilaterally cutting people's accounts, and worse. In many cases for very petty reasons, or just for a quick buck.
So what exactly is your suggestion ?
Is bitcoin more or less trustworthy than BAC, WFC, which are the organisations the Fed chooses to represent it to normal Americans ?
More trustworthy. No doubt about that whatsoever.
Seems like a major issue. If these hacks keep happening thieves are going to own more bitcoin they the rest of the community.
Best you can do is start a tainted coins site and record it there.
Bitcoin didn't invent crime. It's not going to stop it, either.
Credit card chargeback fraud is extremely common. Accepting irreversible payments would be better for these cases as the customer cannot pay, walk out with goods and keep their money. It's much harder for a public company to actively defraud their customers so this is actually more sane.
Also cash has the exact same properties.
I mean, sort of. There are logistics that make stealing $70m worth of physical cash difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Ins...
You can make it more difficult by using things like cold wallets with Shamir Secret Sharing schemes, but $70m of seemingly untraceable assets is an attractive target. Even if you require a quorum of ten people to access the cold wallet, that’s still $10m per person if split amongst themselves.
And someone has to build that system in a trustworthy way in the first place.
Input 1,000 different peoples coins, output any one of their coins one at a time. There's no way to know whose coins are coming out the other side.
You can try to conceal your coins by sending to many addresses, using mixer services to switch your coins with someone else and then trade them often to other cryptocurrencies which makes them harder to track. I would personally try to trade them for Monero where you basically can't trace your transactions.
It would be possible to fork Bitcoin to reject the transactions used in the theft, thereby restoring the funds. This is what Ethereum did for the DAO hack. But so far, the Bitcoin community hasn't shown a willingness to do this.
This is no different than when a bank is robbed and banknotes are stolen. The bank might have written down the numbers of the banknotes and those can be published. But most shops won't check those when somebody buys something.
Well it's quite a bit different because everyone has access to the ledger where you can see what "bills" were stolen and can automatically prevent them from being used.
Bitcoin's blockchain is just a ledger of amounts stored at addresses at points in time.
Say I steal 10 bitcoins from you. I go to someone who cleans bitcoins for a cost of 10%. I send them 10 bitcoins, and they send 1 bitcoin to 9 different wallets (keeping the 10th as payment). That alone would allow you to still track it. But now add in thousands of other people sending them bitcoins on the same day, and some random pauses as to when they send the bitcoins to other wallets, and you are no longer able to tell which bitcoins in are associated with which bitcoins out.
Now, do you just get businesses to stop doing business with anyone (any wallet) that has ever received bit coins from the mixer? And there are many mixers out there.
And this is still simplified. You can be governments are monitoring and running statistical analysis on those mixers to try to find people laundering bitcoins associated with especially bad things. I'd even guess some of the bitcoin laundering operations are ran by governments in an attempt to better track the flow of bitcoins.
The value of a dollar bill is the same whether it was used in a crime. But if it has some ink on it, it might provide evidence that the person holding it robbed a bank. The ink doesn't keep the dollar from being usable.
It has to be this way. Otherwise money simply gets taken out of circulation, and people participating in the economy have to worry about whether money is money.
More: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qomqt/what_a_land...
And with no way to reverse it there's no way to pull the balance back.
In Ethereum's DAO hack, tokens were also stolen, but they got lucky and the money wasn't spendable for a while (because of how the transaction/contract was written), so they were actually able to convince the entire network[1] to agree to reverse that theft as part of the protocol and recover the tokens that way.
[1] Minus a fragment that became EthereumClassic.
And yes, it's not possible to hide stolen Bitcoin. These addresses will be monitored forever. Think about what would happen if you stole some Bitcoin from the mafia and could not cash it. There are some services that can mix Bitcoin to hide their origin.
This ability is guarded by a private key. If this private key is stolen, someone else ALSO has the ability to spend this bitcoin.
Then, if this attacker transfers this bitcoin to another of his own private keys (he 'spends' it), in the blockchain there will be a record, yes. But who owns this new private key is unknown.
all the ransomware in the news in recent year or two accepted bitcoin payment to decrypt your data.
Alex Zvyozdny: Many of you already know that the site reddit spread information about the alleged hacking of our service. We hasten to assure everyone that your bitcoins are safe and sound. And we are the largest pool in the CIS countries are not going to close, but rather increase our presence in the regions. In connection with the increased number of those wishing to mine the crypto currency at our sites, as well as rent or lease capacities for mining, we conduct PLANNED technical works, which are to be completed on Friday morning. From December 8, the service will work in the standard mode. Since this is the most massive update in the last two years, we have indeed suspended all Bitcoin payments, and the funds were taken to a safe place. After the works - everything will be returned to their places. Please do not panic! Sincerely yours, NiceHash.
Gonna call fake news on that quote until proven otherwise. Lots of trolls/disinfo out there about this. e.g. https://www.facebook.com/NiceHashSupport
That said, these guys probably exit scammed.