All he has to do is setup an exchange with a fixed percent fee then pass the funds back and forth through his own exchange and live off the siphon indefinitely.
$98.3 million worth of bitcoins stolen, hacked from from Sheep Marketplace
- Thread starter Instrumentalist
- Start date
Wouldn't it be obvious though if a brand new exchange were created and then shortly afterwards the majority of these funds are sent to it?
I have absolutely no understanding of any of what's being discussed here. I feel like my 90 year old grandmother when the topic of "texting" is brought up. As someone who knows nothing about bitcoin, here are my observations/presumptions.
It seems like bitcoin is the most unsecured form of currency ever invented. All I see is that it's being hacked, mined, stolen etc. WTF?
How do you get change if you buy something from a seller that accepts bit coin. Isn't 1 bitcoin worth about $1100 USD? If Burger King accepted bitcoin and I bought a #6 value meal for $7.87, what denomination or amount would I pay them, and how much would I get back? And exactly how would I pay them with bitcoin?
Will I soon be getting spam emails that say "Buy WOWbitcoin"?
Does anyone ever actually spend it? It seems that it's just being hoarded and none is going back into the marketplace.
Who controls the 'printing' of bitcoins (for lack of a better term)?
It seems like bitcoin is the most unsecured form of currency ever invented. All I see is that it's being hacked, mined, stolen etc. WTF?
How do you get change if you buy something from a seller that accepts bit coin. Isn't 1 bitcoin worth about $1100 USD? If Burger King accepted bitcoin and I bought a #6 value meal for $7.87, what denomination or amount would I pay them, and how much would I get back? And exactly how would I pay them with bitcoin?
Will I soon be getting spam emails that say "Buy WOWbitcoin"?
Does anyone ever actually spend it? It seems that it's just being hoarded and none is going back into the marketplace.
Who controls the 'printing' of bitcoins (for lack of a better term)?
And apparently everyone on the internet suddenly contracted cancer:
That, my friend, is the reason evolution is just a theory!
I'm too busy to wrap my head around this latest heist, as juicy as it sounds... But one thing I'm hoping for... That the perp lives in/visits China in the near future:
China detains Bitcoin fraud suspects - Headlines, features, photo and videos from ecns.cn|china|news|chinanews|ecns|cns
The PRC down with BTC yo.
China detains Bitcoin fraud suspects - Headlines, features, photo and videos from ecns.cn|china|news|chinanews|ecns|cns
The PRC down with BTC yo.
(O_o)
H̨̼̩͐̑͆̀̚&
Bro.
It works the same way USD money works.
If something is $7.87 and all you have is a $20. You pay them $7.87 and get your change back.
$7.87 in BTC is currently 0.00686 BTC. So you would send them 0.00686 BTC, they would instantly convert it into USD and you would get your value meal.
Just like how gold doesnt pop out of the ground by itself, people have to mine it. Users are running BTC Mining operations. It takes an extreme amount of GPU processing power to do this. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 hashing algo. There are thousands upon thousands of people out there mining Bitcoin and hashing this algo. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever be in existence. Once a 'block' of bitcoins is mined, 1 block = 25 bitcoins. You can mine by yourself(solo) or mine with other people in a pool. Mining solo takes forever and is usually not profitable for people unless they have very powerful mining rigs. Mining in a collective pool is easiest and the BTC is divided evenly amongst everyone according to their hashing rate.
I'll answer these for you.
1) They're not hacking "bitcoin" itself, they're hacking into a website that people are storing their bitcoins on - analogous to something like cracking a paypal password. In this specific case many people have suggested that the site's owners could actually the ones pulling off the scam, which wouldn't be surprising seeing as the site itself is an illegal drug exchange. Show up to a 100 million dollar drug deal with fiat cash and you'll probably get scammed and fucked just the same.
2) You can spend fractions of a coin ex. if 1 btc = $1000, and you want to buy something for $100, you just send 1/10 of a btc.
3) Yes people spend it. As it becomes more and more mainstream and the price stabilizes, more people will start spending their hoards as well. Right now it's so new that more people are constantly buying into it which sets off the exchange rate.
4) In a nutshell, anyone can "print bitcoins" and the more powerful your computer the faster you print them. Right now it's pretty much impossible to print (mine) any significant amount of bitcoins without ridiculously expensive hardware so I wouldn't even waste your time with that.
This whole thing on insecurity of supporting infrastructure around BTC, might break it, no matter how secure the actual BTC is.
No way to follow the "money trail", and people generally being greedy thieves, will ruin it.
No way to follow the "money trail", and people generally being greedy thieves, will ruin it.
Wouldn't it be much more traceable than cash in an event like this? If the gov did recognize bitcoin as a legitimate currency and wanted to intervene here, they could just keep tracking the funds until they finally hit an exchange and then force the exchange to provide the user's identity, right?
I'm assuming it does hit an exchange, since there's nothing you could possibly spend 100k btc on and his goal would most likely be to cash some of it out to buy some property.
Except with cash, I don't have to worry about every online thief / hacker in a 7 billion person world stealing the cash inside my wallet. When I go to sleep at night, I don't worry about some 16yo kid in Russia breaking into my house. However, I do worry about them breaking into my Bitcoin wallet.
Well cash is not traceable, but it's much harder to steal cash than btc. When you pay something with BTC, and not get the service, that is that. Its done.
BTC is gone, there is no chargebacks, and the guy stealing from you is not even remotely close to you, so you cannot grab him by the throat, like in an event if he was stealing money in front of your eyes.
Also, what Kiopa said.
(O_o)
H̨̼̩͐̑͆̀̚&
- Buy BTC and send them to a paper wallet.
- Print out a paper wallet.
- Laminate it.
- Put it in a secure weatherproof bag.
- Make sure you bury it above the freeze line.
- ???
- Dig it back up.
Why keep it online? Would you put USD in a bank that didn't insure your funds? Same thing.
Cash under your matters == offline wallet.