Mybitcoin.com runs off with everyone's bitcoin. | Hacker News Reader

Mybitcoin.com runs off with everyone's bitcoin.

mybitcoin.com

27 pointsBinaryAcid20 comments

Well, the host seems totally offline. Was there content there, or is this submission's title your personal interpretation? The whois information has a good chance of being fake though.

The whois information is hidden/protected by this company: http://www.privacyshark.com/about.html which ironically recommends mybitcoin for payment.

I'm a fan of bitcoin and really do hope it succeeds and stabilizes. Still, for supposedly being a community of paranoid libertarian types, they certainly trust total strangers a lot...

There are some threads on the Bitcoin Forum about it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=32900.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=32984.0

On the same weekend, the third largest bitcoin exchange site, Bitomat, lost their wallet.dat and thus lost 17,000 of their customers' BTC in the process:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33457.0

Sad times for bitcoin.

I don't see any evidence of the allegation that Mybitcoin.com runs off with everyone's bitcoin[s] except a non-responding server which isn't conclusive.

What's the case?

The server is not responding and has not been for a few days.

Possibilities:

1) Run off with bitcoin 2) Admin simply doesn't checking on the site often 3) Admin has died and servers gone down

I'm hoping for 2, I don't have any bitcoin there (removed it about a week before) but I know a few who do and options 1 or 2 would be very damaging for bitcoin.

Don't forget the possibly dubious whois information. It could be real, but that address and generic name say otherwise.

The amount of money involved is quite substantial.

There are rumors that one single person had 25000 bitcoins stored at mybtc. That's a very painful amount of money to be panicking about...

Another bad sign is that the company behind mybitcoin.com was apparantly set up off shore and nobody knows who the owner is (AFAIK).

Just like MtGox, MyBTC.com simply was the market leader by virtue of being first.

The owner of mybitcoin.com, Tom Williams, has apparently responded on the BitCoin forums: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33646.0;topicseen

Most people think OP of this thread is a troll. The real mybitcoin owner digitally signs his posts.

Yeah, that's true. I suspect they are right, but given that a moderator (or admin?) whitelisted the OP (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15911.msg419877#msg4...), I think it's possible that he's legit.

It has now been marked as a troll, the admin was optimistic too.

No one saw this coming. </sarcasm>

I cant connect to mybtc. what is the story? Is anyone else having trouble connecting?

same.

How long has it been down?

Not surprising. Back when there was only one bitcoin app in the Android Market, I toyed with the idea of publishing some smallish app that interacted with people's BitCoins or would provide remote access.

How hard would it be to get a pre-paid credit card, publish the app to the app store and have it simply email account credentials to some random throw away email address or just skim a tiny amount of BTC in the background?

It's funny, with BitCoin's design and the current user-driven banking solutions, people are realizing how much control banks have due to the implicit trust. I don't understand why people continue to naively trust these online wallets or even exchanges who will hold your BTC for you... they continue to display poor security habits and haven't done much of anything to truly earn users' trust.

(Note, these are general comments. I've never heard of this site before and I have no idea why the site is not currently accessible. For all I know, their power went out and they're totally legit)

> I don't understand why people continue to naively trust these online wallets or even exchanges

A huge proportion of Bitcoin enthusiasts are speculators. It's hard to speculate without using an exchange. Bitcoin is an interesting system in isolation, but in practice users want the convenience of services that undermine the original goals of Bitcoin as decentralized currency.

Honestly, every time a story about Bitcoin comes up, I'm reminded of EVE Online. It seems to be a community entirely made up of speculators and those trying to scam them.

Yeah, but there's no need to leave your money with the exchange once you've changed currencies. The problem with MtGox was that someone was effectively using it as their wallet... probably for convenience, but frankly, it's not that hard to add/remove BTC from your exchange account so as to not take extra risk and leave it available for a hacker or snooper to take.

"For all I know ... they're totally legit"

Just don't confuse them with:

http://www.totallylegitbitcoins.com

Those guys are rock solid.

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