This time in Alberta, Canada.
Electronic thieves stole $600,000 worth of bitcoins; exchange goes out of business.
That’s why I store my bitcoins under the mattress.
would anyone care if Bitcoins ceased to exist? Other than people who thought they had value?
The “thefts” are going to hurt the whole idea of fake money
Interesting quote from the OP’s cite:
Do you think the people depositing bitcoins in their bank might have hesitated just a bit if they had known that this bank was under attack several times a day?
Keep in mind that regular banking websites are constantly under attack as well.
(They probably have a lot more resources to put into security, though.)
You mean like the “fake money” we have in our fiat currency? The Fed is doing a good enough job of shattering the illusion of its value through quantitative easing.
Well, we all know what happened to the Linden Dollar, and the Altarian Dollar, right?
At least my nest egg of Flanian Pobble Beads and Triganic Ningis is okay…
It’s not fake money; if a number of people regard something as money and use it to buy products and services like money, then it’s money.
What it is, is not very good money.
No, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not keeping up. What’s up with the LindenBuck?
What it is, is not very good money storage. I don’t see that a bunch of exchanges with lousy security invalidates the entire concept of bitcoin.
Let’s see: we can put our trust in a fiat currency backed by a 250-year-old republic with trillions in hard assets and global economic obligations and agreements, not to mention a transparent banking system audited by thousands of entities on a continuing basis;
- or -
A virtual currency invented by techogeek mathematicians that “has value” because intensive computing is used to establish each unit and other technogeeks agree to accept it in exchange for items of value, with pseudoanonymous transactions, no central banking authority, no form of insurance, any-bearer ownership and no backing assets of any kind.
One of these things is not like the other…
ETA: The phrase that keeps popping up when I read defenses and justifications of bitcoin is “cargo cult.” Since US money is all just smoke and mirrors, bitcoiners can do smokin’ mirrors just as darn good.
I don’t understand why somebody smart enough to steal bitcoins would do it the way they are doing it — mass thefts that generate huge publicity, and immediately (and drastically) cut the value of what they stole.
Wouldn’t it be smarter to take amounts small enough that the losses can be covered up, and the value maintained?
Who says each individual theft was massive? It could easily be that there was a campaign of small thefts that the exchange tried to sweep under the rug, and when it hit a critical point they said “we lost this many golds to theft, welp we can’t go on.” It could very well be that the exchanges themselves stole the bitcoins and blamed it on hackers, I don’t think there’s really any good way to tell the difference. If only bitcoins could be traced!:smack:
Everything online is under attack several times a day.
Is there a chance that The Powers That Be orchestrated this to protect the traditional system of exchange in use now? Or should I be wearing a tinfoil hat when I think of that?
You say that as if a currency as wildly unstable as bitcoin has been the past year or two could pose any threat to “the traditional system of exchange”. You may as well propose that the Zimbabwean dollar is going to replace US currency.
Not replace it, but take enough business away from it.
For all that I know about it, I would have scoffed at the very idea of something like Bitcoin in the first place. Yet it seemed to be gaining some degree of legitimacy in the last year or so as more people bought into it. As unstable as it was, it seemed to be trending upwards in popularity.
Replace “bitcoin” with “gold” and you suddenly have many of the same arguments goldbugs use.
The religious fanaticism some people give to gold is similar in many respects to adherents of bitcoin and with about the same level of evidence it would work. I’ll grant bitcoin does make online transactions, particularly across currency zones, simpler, though that seems to be a double edged sword.
I thought the cryptographic nature of Bitcoin meant it was immune to attack. Is this insufficient security, or is BC insecure?