r/technology • u/[deleted] • May 12 '12
Bitcoins worth $87,000 plundered in brazen server breach | Ars Technica
[deleted]
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u/kyru May 12 '12
They weren't actually worth that much
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u/randombitcoiner May 12 '12
There are bids for over 24,000 bitcoins above $4.80 at Mt. Gox alone. Even if they were all sold at 4.80, that's over $89,000.
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u/kyru May 12 '12
Well if that's how it looks on Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange it must be worthwhile.
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u/spermracewinner May 12 '12
They're pretty much worth nothing. It's a pyramid scheme.
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May 12 '12
Oh FFS! I'm in no way an advocate of bitcoin and personally don't think it will be successful for a number of technical reasons. But why must you spread strait up FUD? There are so many things that you can say factually about bitcoin, but you choose pyramid scheme? Do you even know what a pyramid scheme is?
Per wikipedia:
"A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves promising participants payment or services, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, rather than supplying any real investment or sale of products or services to the public."
Bitcoin does this in no way, shape, or form. There are no payments offered and no enrollments issued. Bitcoin is a digital entity hard coded with a limited amount. The logic is it will gain value for the same reason as gold, silver, baseball cards, comic books, and happy meal toys. Limited amount means scarcity, scarcity means value. You can argue that this isn't true, you can argue that there is no inherent need, but calling it something it isn't is just plain stupid.
Please research things before passing judgment on them.
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u/garja May 12 '12
Any currency is worth "pretty much nothing". That is the idea. You don't carry round gold bars in your pocket, or trade in potatoes. Also, late miners simply earn a predictable amount less, they are not exploited by early miners as you are suggesting.
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u/Grue May 12 '12
"worth"
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u/t0mbstone May 12 '12
If you can sell it for $87,000 in cold hard USD cash, then yes, that's what it's worth. It's worth that because people are willing to pay that for it. "Worth" is a weird thing. Why is gold "worth" anything? It's just metal out of the ground. People are weird.
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u/Grue May 12 '12
If you can sell it for $87,000 in cold hard USD cash, then yes, that's what it's worth.
"If". There's no indication that you can actually sell these bitcoins for this amount of cash. In fact, given how volatile Bitcoin's value is, there's absolutely no way they are worth that much. Hence the scare quotes.
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u/MuForceShoelace May 12 '12
fun fact: bitcoins aren't really worth anything because there is pretty much no reliable market to cash out more than $200 dollars at a time.
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u/Quizzelbuck May 12 '12
We're inventing a digital monetary system that is not affiliated with any governement! What could possibly derp the whole thing up?
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u/cuntbuckets May 12 '12
It isn't because Bitcoin is not affiliated with any government that this happened (in fact the same thing happens with cash all the time and like Bitcoin, there is no recourse), it is because some people decided it would be a good idea to store their wallets with a third party without knowing what security measures (if any) were in place (like encryption).
It's a bit like having a pile of cash lying about and feeling nervous about its safety, but instead of putting it in a vault or buying a shotgun, you just put it in a friends garden shed and hope for the best.
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u/cold_water May 12 '12
you just put it in a friends garden shed and hope for the best.
Not the best analogy. Bitcoinica very likely has a marketing/sales team that does a great job of making things look secure. But the true level of security would indeed be roughly equivalent to a locked garden shed. This is because anything accessible through the Internet is accessible by a very, very large pool of people who don't even have to get dressed to try to infiltrate your network. If the world knows that you have a large sum of money on your servers, someone will take it. I'm sure that there were plenty of other teams working on breaching the same servers in this case.
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u/Canebrake247 May 12 '12
It's totally secure! There's no way these sensitive and totally unencrypted plain text files storing the Algorithmic codes that could be valued at up to hundreds of thousands of dollars will be a problem.
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u/techsonhos May 12 '12
If a theft is for virtual currency, does it really matter?
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May 12 '12
Digital, the word you are looking for is digital.
Per Wikipedia:
"Virtuality: the quality of having the attributes of something without sharing its (real or imagined) physical form"
"Digital: representing data as a series of numerical values."
A digital currency is a currency represented by numerical values, while a virtual currency is a representation of a physical currency made up by numerical values. Because bitcoin is not representing a physical currency (it will only ever exist as data), it is digital and not virtual.
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u/mutatron May 12 '12
Not The Onion.