To get better idea - I had my webserver hacked solely for a purpose to get on VPN and hack my desktop and laptop one night and all wallet files copied.
Person(s), who did it 1) were definitely very good at it, since they got root permissions on all machines (all 3 running different versions of Ubuntu) and 2) believe in it to the point where they think withdrawing it at this point in time not required - coins still did not move after hack event.
For me it sounds like very professional people interested in it and they believe bitcoin will be stable enough to keep coins where they are right now for a long time.
really? tell us more about what happened. how did they get from the webserver to your laptop? (e.g. what was listening on your laptop?)
I find these sorts of attacks very interesting (and very frightening) because if a sysadmin's desktop is compromised, without the sysadmin noticing, the attacker has access, essentially, to everything the sysadmin accesses with that
desktop. The best you can do, as far as I can tell, is to use some sort of 'the private key never leaves the smart card' system, and to run some sort of tripwire-esque intrusion detection system; the latter is key, because even with a theoretically perfect smartcard, if the attacker owns my ssh client binary when I authenticate to the server... it's over.
i do not know details. I am pretty good with security stuff, but this time i had no clue.
basically somebody was able to get root permissions on the webserver, 'cos (s)he removed all system log files.
Then (s)he was able somehow to hack into my laptop and desktop connected to this webserver via VPN. My local machines were running regular dev stuff: apache, nginx, mysql, etc, but nothing with obvious vulnerabilities. And on top of it - (s)he removed log files, which could be done only by having root access to both machines. Nothing in authlog (i restored it), nothing in wtmp.. I made byte copy for later research, but at this point in time - no clue how this could happened.
While I can suspect hosting staff doing this on server - it really boggles my mind how it could be done on two home remote machines, both running different Ubuntu versions.
ps: bizarre part was - once i realized it happened, I started doing research on webserver and (s)he started kicking me out and banning IP address in firewall! the only way to finally get to the machine was to reboot it in single mode (my hosting provider allows to reboot it in single mode and start ssh for root account with random password)
I hosted few bitcoin-related services, so I was obvious target. Although after year-old hack I never kept significant amount of coins on the server anymore. But this time attack was much more sophisticated.
What can we learn from this list? First, it demonstrates that a broad group of people are comfortable enough with the bitcoin crypto to exit the traditional banking system and leave significant value on the blockchain for extended periods.
Erm no. Someone could have mined those BitCoins at the very start for very little effort. For example in 2010, someone offered 10,000 bitcoins if you bought them a pizza ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137 ). Bitcoins were worth very little then.
In the early days it was very easy to clock up huge amounts of bitcoins.
The mt gox volume is about $300k a day. Any one of these people could sell $10k a day without making that much of a dent in the price (they used to have a $1k a day limit but I'm sure that's not foolproof).
That would be enough to liquidate even the largest portfolio in 8 months. Certainly if you were uneasy about the market, that's exactly what you'd be doing (and maybe they are).
That and there is only one balance over 100k USD. But there are a lot of people that would consider 100k an almost meaninglessly small amount of money.
> In the early days it was very easy to clock up huge amounts of bitcoins.
It was also very very easy to just lose huge amounts of bitcoins, too. Unless mined coins have moved at some point, the odds are pretty good - especially by now - that the owner has just lost or forgot about them.
People keep confusing the software and the currency.
An open source distributed software system is available for free and is able to offer privacy, cross-border protection and prevention of asset seizure. But these characteristics are properties of the code and its forks, not of a specific coin or Bitcoin in particular.
What offers Bitcoin value is the level of marketing that makes people pour money and graphic cards in this specific implementation of the code. It doesn't have any scarcity - the code is forkable, there aren't any laws making it mandatory to use it for commerce/taxes, nor any laws that prohibit alternative coins from appearing. In fact, many other coin systems do exist, with the same advantages:
I am personally amazed at how much the author of bitcoin got right, he is clearly a genius.
However, bitcoin is not perfect, interestingly, it seems as though bitcoin's creator did not predict the rise of mining pools. They could eventually exert the same amount of influence over the bitcoin economy as banks do today with government backed money.
There are other technical issues which could relatively easily be fixed in the code but would require a "hardfork", a change in the protocol meaning that either all nodes upgrade to the new protocol, or a new blockchain is started.
Wow, the whole point of bitcoin is freedom. You're essentially arguing that this freedom is cool and all, but we'd all be better off if with less of it.
A certain ideal or principle of freedom is what interests you about Bitcoin. Author of grandparent might have different reasons for his interest in Bitcoin. So, the contradiction or double standard you see is not really there.
>What offers Bitcoin value is the level of marketing that makes people pour money and graphic cards in this specific implementation of the code.
More specifically, people trust Gavin Andreeson and the BTC core team more than any of the people behind the other forks. Gavin & co. have a pretty good record of commitment to transparency, openness, and doing the right thing for the community.
Some of the other forks, like SolidCoin for example, were done with some sketchiness (holding large pools of initially mined coins in reserve).
Each passing month so far only solidifies Bitcoin's lead in that crucial aspect of a virtual currency.
Ultimately, the value of a currency is derived from its supply relative to its demand, the same as any other commodity. Governments can artificially stimulate demand by making it legal tender and only accepting taxes in it, or by managing the supply via gold/silver-backing or central bank monetary policies, etc.
Same with BTC, and the drivers of that demand will vary over time and as economic conditions change.
Yes but so what? You can't apply the same software to fiat currencies for international settlement. The attractiveness of Bitcoin is precisely the power of open source software and asymmetric cryptography. Bitcoin has value because it's one of the only few currencies with fixed protocols and definite "game rules". These are exactly the pre-requisites for a currency to be fundamentally "open-sourced".
The 'value' of the currency ultimately comes from people's opinion in it, and whether or not it is legal tender is just one influence on that opinion. You might be forced to accept payment in a currency but that doesn't mean you value the currency much. Eg the Zimbabwe dollar.
it's not so much "accept payment in" as "pay taxes in"
I can accept bitcoin, e-gold, marks, cattle, whatever I want as payment... no problem, until tax day rolls around.
At that point, I need to figure the value, in dollars, of the two sheep that bob gave me for helping him scale his wool broker website, and then I need to figure the value of the rusted out nissan I gave joe for the 128GiB ram that I used in the project, and from that figure the profit I made. I then need to pay taxes, in US dollars, on that profit.
So, it's not so much that I'm forced to accept payment in dollars as that accepting payment in anything else is a huge pain in the ass for my accountant.
(I am forced to pay my taxes in dollars, of course, but to me that seems pretty reasonable. All businesses choose what currencies they accept payment in. The fact that it's harder to avoid doing business with the government than with other businesses doesn't really change that.)
Bitcoin is not backed by anything at all, which is part of what makes it such a fascinating experiment, and part of why it is so successful at challenging peoples' assumptions about what money really is.
Nope. If that was the case it wouldnt be worth much at all, considering the lack of business built around bitcoin. I think the value comes from the trust that people place in it and the huge hype that it got during the bubble.
Person(s), who did it 1) were definitely very good at it, since they got root permissions on all machines (all 3 running different versions of Ubuntu) and 2) believe in it to the point where they think withdrawing it at this point in time not required - coins still did not move after hack event.
For me it sounds like very professional people interested in it and they believe bitcoin will be stable enough to keep coins where they are right now for a long time.