Part vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol, part DoS attack.
"it's possible for an attacker on the network to mess with the identifier — or hash — of a transaction, which is used by wallets to confirm a transaction between them. Once confirmed, the hashes form part of the Bitcoin 'blockchain' ledger of historical transactions.
An altered hash doesn't affect the underlying value or the destination of the funds, but until the transaction is confirmed, the funds involved are not safe to accept"
They say it will be fixed in 24-48 hours but it highlights three issues:
- The development of the protocol is not held to security standards and they've known about the flaw since 2011. Fixes clearly are done when they feel like it. That's not very reliable. - Transaction reputation. When a bank authorises a transaction, there is a reputation behind that, not only of the bank itself but the bank's relationship with the customer making the payment. Peer to peer transactions don't have this kind of reputation and this flaw exploits that. - Accountability. These transactions are now locked up, who do you call to fix it?
"SecureMac is reporting a new Mac trojan they call OSX/CoinThief.A. The malware targets Mac users and spies on web traffic to steal Bitcoins. They say the malware is in the wild and have received multiple reports of stolen Bitcoins.
SecureMac cites a recent post on reddit of a user who lost 20 Bitcoins, worth well over $10,000 US."
People don't normally have $10000 in their real wallets and a digital theft is pretty much blink and it's gone. A physical theft you can at least try to prevent. You wouldn't even have time to shut off the wifi or pull the plug before a bitcoin transfer was started.
These things happen with Paypal too, credentials are stolen, linked bank accounts drained:
"“I want get my bitcoin back, or get Mt.Gox to bring back public confidence that the company is solvent and people’s money are safe,” said the 40-year-old protester. He deposited 250 bitcoins, with a current value of around $99,000, into his Mt.Gox account in early January, intending to keep them there temporarily, an action he now regrets. He said he won’t use the exchange again."
"Another frustrated Bitcoin trader from Australia, who wished to remain anonymous, also staked out the Mt.Gox offices last week, managing to get some time with executives, though he said he wasn’t completely satisfied."
That's how to show them, buy a $1400 airline ticket to their office, scribble on a card, stand out in the rain (wearing Google Glasses helps show you mean business) and never again use the exchange that stole $99,000 from you. They will rue the day they crossed the bitcoiners.
This highlights why you're damned if you do and damned if you don't - if you let governments control currency, they'll abuse it for their own ends; if you take away that control, you leave yourself open to abuse from 3rd parties that the government can't protect you against.
Here the shoe is on the other foot - Apple is abusing its market power in an attempt to corner a position in payments.
Oh, because they also banned the Starbucks payment app or the paypal payment app or the Visa Qiwi payment app or...oh wait, what were you saying again? I forgot.
"“I want get my bitcoin back, or get Mt.Gox to bring back public confidence that the company is solvent and people’s money are safe,” said the 40-year-old protester. He deposited 250 bitcoins, with a current value of around $99,000, into his Mt.Gox account in early January, intending to keep them there temporarily, an action he now regrets. He said he won’t use the exchange again."
"Another frustrated Bitcoin trader from Australia, who wished to remain anonymous, also staked out the Mt.Gox offices last week, managing to get some time with executives, though he said he wasn’t completely satisfied."
That's how to show them, buy a $1400 airline ticket to their office, scribble on a card, stand out in the rain (wearing Google Glasses helps show you mean business) and never again use the exchange that stole $99,000 from you. They will rue the day they crossed the bitcoiners.
This highlights why you're damned if you do and damned if you don't - if you let governments control currency, they'll abuse it for their own ends; if you take away that control, you leave yourself open to abuse from 3rd parties that the government can't protect you against.
Only fools who deliberately ignored what was happening allowed themselves to get caught in this MtGox mess. Anyone paying attention would've taken their BTC into a paper wallet many months ago. I think those who foolishly kept their accounts online let greed bypass common sense. Because MtGox's problems had so depressed the price of BTC only on their site (down to about $100, versus more than $500+ everywhere else), people vainly thought they would risk it and see if they could ride it out. Dumb move. It's OK to be "greedy", but be smart about it.
Bitcoin is not MtGox. How many times must that be said? MtGox is probably insolvent due to the stupidity of the founders. You should be aware that for about a month, BTC-e (another trading platform, like MtGox) surpassed MtGox in worldwide volume of trades. People knew of MtGox's problems, especially within that elite community of buyers and sellers.
Bitcoin is not MtGox. How many times must that be said? MtGox is probably insolvent due to the stupidity of the founders. You should be aware that for about a month, BTC-e (another trading platform, like MtGox) surpassed MtGox in worldwide volume of trades. People knew of MtGox's problems, especially within that elite community of buyers and sellers.
I'm aware of that, but it's still have a negative effect. If I put money in a bank it's FDIC insured. I don't ever have to worry about the bank folding but what about the people that were holding bitcoins with Mt. Gox? For bitcoin to be taken seriously by the world it can't be seen as that much of a risk.
LOL. Does not matter. So are you telling you need to worry constantly about your trading platform will go under? The report shows that over 8% of all Bitcoins in existence got stollen and maybe more with this MtGox fraud. Mt Gox had been the biggest bitcoin platform for a very long time and now they go up in smoke.
No wonder Apple does not want to touch this with a 10 foot pole.
So where are all the bitcoin lovers now?????
Classic Ponzi scheme.
Anyone even remotely familiar with the risks of online crypto wallets recommends a printed paper wallet instead. If this fact is still not generally understood, then people are not paying attention to real risks that have been demonstrated time and time again.
Trading in Bitcoin and other crypto coins is risky. That's a large part of the appeal. If one is risk averse, then instead keep money in a bank or under a mattress...while it continues to lose value thanks to current monetary policy.
I'm aware of that, but it's still have a negative effect. If I put money in a bank it's FDIC insured. I don't ever have to worry about the bank folding but what about the people that were holding bitcoins with Mt. Gox? For bitcoin to be taken seriously by the world it can't be seen as that much of a risk.
Sure it has a negative effect, people react emotionally to bad news. That's just human nature. However, when "the crowd" reacts emotionally and sells, Warren Buffet recommends one buy instead. "Buy low, sell high". Just stay away from MtGox.
React emotionally? After losing $100k in bitcoins I would to!!!
MtGox refused to allow for withdrawls for several weeks. Now those people with accounts could have lost EVERYTHING. No govt agency will insure this loss right now.
Who puts that amount of money into something uninsured? They gambled and they lost, welcome to the cold hard world.
Sure it has a negative effect, people react emotionally to bad news. That's just human nature. However, when "the crowd" reacts emotionally and sells, Warren Buffet recommends one buy instead. "Buy low, sell high". Just stay away from MtGox.
But the negative effect is on bitcoin as a whole regardless of whether it's reasonable or not. If a priest diddles a boy it's bad for the Catholic church as a whole..
but pretty much everyone else is just trusting that it's all going to be ok. They are trusting that the major exchanges aren't going to go down and there are no security issues to devalue their holdings.
but pretty much everyone else is just trusting that it's all going to be ok. They are trusting that the major exchanges aren't going to go down and there are no security issues to devalue their holdings.
That's something you will forever kick yourself for doing.
Maybe, at the very least they'd come to realise that opportunities can come out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. Bitcoin went up in value 16,000x (1,600,000%) in 3 years. Just $100 of coins at the end of 2010 would be worth millions now. People make decisions based on circumstances at the time though. The people who gain think it's because they are smart, the people who lose think it's because they're unlucky. The 3rd co-founder of Apple Ron Wayne said he didn't regret his decision to leave the company:
"Wayne drew the first Apple logo, wrote the three men's original partnership agreement, and wrote the Apple I manual.
Wayne has stated that he does not regret selling the stock as he made the "best decision with the information available to me at the time".
Had he kept his 10% stock it would have been worth over $35 billion in August 2011.
After leaving Apple, Wayne resisted Jobs' attempts to recruit him back to Apple, remaining at Atari until 1978 when he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and later an electronics company in Salinas, California. He is retired and now lives a quiet lifestyle in a Pahrump Nevada Mobile Home Park selling stamps and rare coins in Pahrump, Nevada, and had never owned an Apple product until 2011, when he was given an iPad 2 by Aral Balkan at the Update Conference in Brighton, United Kingdom.
Wayne also ran a stamp shop in Milpitas, California for a short period of time in the late 1970s, Wayne's Philatelics, on Dempsey Road. After a number of break-ins he moved his stamp operations to Nevada. The logo for the business was a wood-cut style design, with a man sitting under an apple tree, with the "Wayne's Philatelics" name written in a flowing ribbon curved around the tree. This was the original logo he designed for Apple Computer.
He holds a dozen patents but never had enough capital to make money from any of them."
It seems a shame that he lives like that now when you see Apple's success but he didn't contribute to their ultimate success. When you look at Microsoft though, the opposite happened with Paul Allen:
He left Microsoft in 1983, long before Microsoft took off in a big way (before Windows 1.0 I think) but retained his shares as a co-founder, which are now worth a few billion. He has lost out on potentially being the wealthiest person in the world but he's done ok. It's hard to tell how things will work out:
It's so strange to see two very similar circumstances end up in such opposite ways: co-founder of Apple leaves early and ends up in a trailer park, co-founder of Microsoft leaves early and ends up being the 53rd wealthiest person in the world. It's funny how he's described as a self-made billionaire:
Yeah he made the billions all by himself while the engineers who worked for 30 years at Microsoft contributed less than he did.
I always wonder why it makes sense for 1 person like Paul Allen to own so much. If you think about the $13b he has and divide it out in property values of say $200,000, that one guy has enough owned assets to buy homes for 65,000 families. The irony being that those 65,000 families are paying for marked up products to use and paying interest on the loans they have to buy the houses and the interest goes to pay the banks, which pays interest on savings to people who have a lot of savings, like Paul Allen. People at the bottom don't have much income growth. But the billions aren't cash, it's all just perception of worth (including the homes). To trade $13b of stock value requires someone else to invest $13b from something else.
There's a big deal made about wealth distribution but really it's the distribution of perception of worth, the confidence people have of value. Technology companies and especially things like Bitcoin are the clearest indicators of what wealth is. Bitcoin comes from nothing, it's just code and text. Facebook comes from nothing, it's just a website, so is Google search. The value all comes from how much people invest their own time in using it.
Collectively, Bitcoin is now a $7b service, solely based on the fact that the people invested in it think that's what it's worth. The speed at which technology has allowed people to connect to each other has accelerated the process of directing people's perception of worth. Inevitably, there will be few developments that many people invest in because successful developments become successful due to trust and trust comes easily from knowing other people are invested in something too (the idea that people look out for their own self-interest gives you an assurance that they will look out for something you share an investment in).
This process seems dangerous to me. Ultimately, the goal to everything people do is improved quality of life but as long as there's the promotion of a few developments out of the value collectivism of many people then it's just going to be that perception of worth is distributed unevenly. This is what causes instability and why currencies are abused because there are too few points of failure and when they fail, they affect so many people.
Bitcoin doesn't tackle this problem, it just goes after the inflationary aspect (and not doing a good job at that so far). Someone could create a service that accepts bitcoins as payment but only spends fiat currency and they could hoard a majority of all coins. Paul Allen alone could buy every bitcoin in existence and still be a billionaire, what happens then? It would fail unless more coins were made, which is one reason fiat currency has that facility. Money is just there to be an intermediary to people's perception of worth they place on varied fields of interest.
The whole idea of bitcoin mining and transaction verification is a distraction because that can be done by a peer-to-peer system anyway. All a decentralized currency needs is enough coins to facilitate high volume transactions e.g allow enough coins for every person in the world to have a reasonable quality of life (minimum paying off a $50,000 property and consumable resources are expected to be earned) so make 35 quadrillion coins, which would be sequential strings. Sell them for 1c each and retain that as a minimum purchase value. When a purchase happens initially, someone would get a unique wallet (public/private key pair - public key could be their wallet id or additional) and a central ledger would encrypt the unique coin string using the public key and this would be stored in the ledger and given to the buyer.
The ledgers would be controlled by trusted central authorities. Now, people might say well that's too big a flaw but we do it with the internet. ICANN controls the central internet registry for who owns domains. Google.com for example is controlled by https://www.markmonitor.com/services/domain-management.php and they say they manage over half the Fortune 100. I believe that there are a handful of top level companies that pretty much control the entire internet domain service in various countries:
Why do we allow so few people to control so much? It works and our confidence in it working in future is from the assumption that people in the collective sharing in the service will act in their self-interest to keep it working. So, the central register would be distributed between trusted peers and the more the better. They'd actually be best in a ledger hierarchy given that international payments would be so rare. All they'd be tracking is ownership strings.
When someone makes a transaction, they are the only one that has the private key and they have encrypted copies of their coins. To make a peer-to-peer purchase, it's anonymous as the details are only encrypted generated strings. Multiple central authorities would be contacted to exchange the coins. The authority would look up the coin owner id (public key) and send a random string encrypted with it. The coin owner would decrypt it with the private key and send back the string (challenge-response authentication). The central authorities would then take the public key from the other party and encrypt the coins with that public key. It wouldn't matter if anyone had someone else's coins without the private key to decrypt them.
Here's the benefit of having a central authority: you can opt to give them ownership and contact information so that if something goes wrong, you can do something about it. You can have authenticated wallets for large amounts and anonymous wallets for anonymous purchases and you can move money from your authenticated wallets to anonymous ones if you aren't doing things that need zero paper trail.
This setup has the benefit that the verification times are low as it's simple encrypt/decrypt, there's no computation. You can opt for security with personal ids. The encryption protocol is tried and tested the world over. If someone steals your private key, anonymous wallets might be gone but they have to steal your coins too. The central authorities can detect suspicious activity, especially on wallets that aren't anonymous.
What happens to the fiat currency used to buy the original wallets?
You wouldn't technically need it because you've created your own currency out of nothing with the same value. If money runs out, it's up to the multiple central authorities to decide if more is needed and it's in all their own best interests not to add more as adding more devalues it anyway. Traders would also be free to reject coins outside of a certain sequential range.
There still needs to be facilities for loans but all that a financial agency could do is buy capital from the central authority. If they run out of capital by over-leveraging, they go broke.
It doesn't eliminate fiat currency because the government will only accept that but it could affect the profitability of the banks.
Marvin, that was a very long post leading right back to your old arguments about how you prefer controlled markets, socialist government and restricted freedoms.
That stuff doesn't work! History is our guide.
Bitcoin at its core is a peer to peer monetary system. As we know, all people are self-interested, thus the Bitcoin network operates on incentives. The various trading platforms, BECAUSE they must abide by local and international anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism rules are already hobbled.
Person to person trade with mutually beneficial openness and transparency via the Bitcoin network is lost when a third party becomes involved. If MtGox was completely transparent in their operations, they would likely not have crashed so spectacularly, because investors would've seen quite clearly that money was being siphoned off.
Once again, regulation and interference from self-interested government entities add nothing. Only in cases of theft or fraud does their involvement become necessary.
That's a very long reply (which I didn't read) which starts out very defensive and accusatory for simply posting a link to an amazing story.
When I said 'you'd come to realize', I didn't mean you, I meant the guy in the story who lost the laptop. It's because you said 'something you will kick yourself over' and I worded it the same way. It's probably an instance where the use of 'one' rather than 'you' makes the meaning clearer. You were saying he'd kick himself over losing it, I was just saying that some people who have experienced and lost opportunity sometimes reach the conclusion that their actions are done in the context of the circumstances. Then I decided to ramble for a while. There was no defense or accusation in my post relating to yours, it was more of a continuation on what you were saying. I'll try rewording it.
Marvin, that was a very long post leading right back to your old arguments about how you prefer controlled markets, socialist government and restricted freedoms.
That stuff doesn't work! History is our guide.
Bitcoin at its core is a peer to peer monetary system.
The system I described wasn't government controlled. It can be setup by anyone. Still anonymous, still essentially peer to peer, except that the transaction verifier is a larger more trusted entity rather than a computation.
As we know, all people are self-interested, thus the Bitcoin network operates on incentives.
Ok so in the scenario that someone buys all or most of the bitcoins or creates a service that everyone pays for with bitcoins until that service owns a significant portion, what then? How does that self-interest help the system work? The remaining supply would be severely constrained with no option but to drive up the value solely for the interest of the majority owner. That owner could then destabilise the currency as and when they wanted.
The various trading platforms, BECAUSE they must abide by local and international anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism rules are already hobbled.
I'll assume you wouldn't prefer something specifically to facilitate terrorism and money-laundering but I don't see what difference having sensible regulation makes. I don't see that Paypal is hobbled simply because they follow regulations, it's one of the biggest payment systems in the world.
Once again, regulation and interference from self-interested government entities add nothing. Only in cases of theft or fraud does their involvement become necessary.
And how do you propose your anonymous, peer-to-peer transaction system be covered in cases of theft or fraud? How do you prove ownership and identity in an anonymous, peer-to-peer system while still maintaining privacy? The system you want encourages theft and illegality that can't be prosecuted easily yet you'd still rather have some necessary involvement. Why would any government body perform those protection duties to protect a currency they can't be paid with and how do they do it when they are kept out of it as much as possible?
When I said 'you'd come to realize', I didn't mean you, I meant the guy in the story who lost the laptop. It's because you said 'something you will kick yourself over' and I worded it the same way.
When I said 'you'd come to realize', I didn't mean you, I meant the guy in the story who lost the laptop. It's because you said 'something you will kick yourself over' and I worded it the same way. It's probably an instance where the use of 'one' rather than 'you' makes the meaning clearer. You were saying he'd kick himself over losing it, I was just saying that some people who have experienced and lost opportunity sometimes reach the conclusion that their actions are done in the context of the circumstances. Then I decided to ramble for a while. There was no defense or accusation in my post relating to yours, it was more of a continuation on what you were saying. I'll try rewording it.
The system I described wasn't government controlled. It can be setup by anyone. Still anonymous, still essentially peer to peer, except that the transaction verifier is a larger more trusted entity rather than a computation.
Ok so in the scenario that someone buys all or most of the bitcoins or creates a service that everyone pays for with bitcoins until that service owns a significant portion, what then? How does that self-interest help the system work? The remaining supply would be severely constrained with no option but to drive up the value solely for the interest of the majority owner. That owner could then destabilise the currency as and when they wanted.
I'll assume you wouldn't prefer something specifically to facilitate terrorism and money-laundering but I don't see what difference having sensible regulation makes. I don't see that Paypal is hobbled simply because they follow regulations, it's one of the biggest payment systems in the world.
And how do you propose your anonymous, peer-to-peer transaction system be covered in cases of theft or fraud? How do you prove ownership and identity in an anonymous, peer-to-peer system while still maintaining privacy? The system you want encourages theft and illegality that can't be prosecuted easily yet you'd still rather have some necessary involvement. Why would any government body perform those protection duties to protect a currency they can't be paid with and how do they do it when they are kept out of it as much as possible?
Ach! I hate this forum software... I'll try to just address a few points, as this whole quote is such a mess now.
Alright, it was not clear you were advocating for self-regulation (you say you meant it to be "setup by anyone") and also because you were advocating a Marxist position about guaranteed incomes for people.
Your scenario where "someone buys all or most of the bitcoins" simply is not possible. The vast majority of bitcoins are held by individuals and new bitcoins are being mined all the time (this is mathematically controlled, about 25 new bitcoins every 10 minutes). Because of the nature of bitcoins, a buyer would have to approach every holder individually and bid for their supply. Not every person would want to sell, based on Bitcoin's growth curve. This is an impossible scenario.
What is "sensible regulation"? Who decides? Therein lies the problem. The Blockchain (public ledger) is the regulator... No individual should ever be entrusted with that power, which is the problem with politicized central banking authorities.
Finally, Bitcoin ISN'T anonymous! It's not easy to track and trace every person who owns bitcoins, but they are not invisible. In fact, in cases of theft and fraud, people have been blacklisting certain bitcoins. We have existing laws that protect individuals from theft and fraud, in fact, these laws are one of the reason government exists. Our court system exists because mob rule is not the way to do things. Good laws protect our individual constitutionally protected rights and in the case of bitcoins, we are talking about property rights.
Comments
http://www.zdnet.com/bitcoin-under-mutated-transaction-dos-attacks-but-funds-safe-7000026237/
Part vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol, part DoS attack.
"it's possible for an attacker on the network to mess with the identifier — or hash — of a transaction, which is used by wallets to confirm a transaction between them. Once confirmed, the hashes form part of the Bitcoin 'blockchain' ledger of historical transactions.
An altered hash doesn't affect the underlying value or the destination of the funds, but until the transaction is confirmed, the funds involved are not safe to accept"
They say it will be fixed in 24-48 hours but it highlights three issues:
- The development of the protocol is not held to security standards and they've known about the flaw since 2011. Fixes clearly are done when they feel like it. That's not very reliable.
- Transaction reputation. When a bank authorises a transaction, there is a reputation behind that, not only of the bank itself but the bank's relationship with the customer making the payment. Peer to peer transactions don't have this kind of reputation and this flaw exploits that.
- Accountability. These transactions are now locked up, who do you call to fix it?
http://www.zdnet.com/mac-trojan-steals-bitcoins-7000026144/
"SecureMac is reporting a new Mac trojan they call OSX/CoinThief.A. The malware targets Mac users and spies on web traffic to steal Bitcoins. They say the malware is in the wild and have received multiple reports of stolen Bitcoins.
SecureMac cites a recent post on reddit of a user who lost 20 Bitcoins, worth well over $10,000 US."
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xf2qj/my_wallet_just_emptied_into_this_address/
People don't normally have $10000 in their real wallets and a digital theft is pretty much blink and it's gone. A physical theft you can at least try to prevent. You wouldn't even have time to shut off the wifi or pull the plug before a bitcoin transfer was started.
These things happen with Paypal too, credentials are stolen, linked bank accounts drained:
http://voices.yahoo.com/paypal-fraud-drained-checking-account-262593.html
but they cover you for fraudulent transactions.
Apparently they handled 80% of all bitcoin transactions at one point. Two people are up in arms about it:
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/02/14/bitcoin-protester-confronts-mt-gox-executive/
"“I want get my bitcoin back, or get Mt.Gox to bring back public confidence that the company is solvent and people’s money are safe,” said the 40-year-old protester. He deposited 250 bitcoins, with a current value of around $99,000, into his Mt.Gox account in early January, intending to keep them there temporarily, an action he now regrets. He said he won’t use the exchange again."
"Another frustrated Bitcoin trader from Australia, who wished to remain anonymous, also staked out the Mt.Gox offices last week, managing to get some time with executives, though he said he wasn’t completely satisfied."
That's how to show them, buy a $1400 airline ticket to their office, scribble on a card, stand out in the rain (wearing Google Glasses helps show you mean business) and never again use the exchange that stole $99,000 from you. They will rue the day they crossed the bitcoiners.
This highlights why you're damned if you do and damned if you don't - if you let governments control currency, they'll abuse it for their own ends; if you take away that control, you leave yourself open to abuse from 3rd parties that the government can't protect you against.
Oh, because they also banned the Starbucks payment app or the paypal payment app or the Visa Qiwi payment app or...oh wait, what were you saying again? I forgot.
Only fools who deliberately ignored what was happening allowed themselves to get caught in this MtGox mess. Anyone paying attention would've taken their BTC into a paper wallet many months ago. I think those who foolishly kept their accounts online let greed bypass common sense. Because MtGox's problems had so depressed the price of BTC only on their site (down to about $100, versus more than $500+ everywhere else), people vainly thought they would risk it and see if they could ride it out. Dumb move. It's OK to be "greedy", but be smart about it.
Bitcoin is not MtGox. How many times must that be said? MtGox is probably insolvent due to the stupidity of the founders. You should be aware that for about a month, BTC-e (another trading platform, like MtGox) surpassed MtGox in worldwide volume of trades. People knew of MtGox's problems, especially within that elite community of buyers and sellers.
I'm aware of that, but it's still have a negative effect. If I put money in a bank it's FDIC insured. I don't ever have to worry about the bank folding but what about the people that were holding bitcoins with Mt. Gox? For bitcoin to be taken seriously by the world it can't be seen as that much of a risk.
LOL. Does not matter. So are you telling you need to worry constantly about your trading platform will go under? The report shows that over 8% of all Bitcoins in existence got stollen and maybe more with this MtGox fraud. Mt Gox had been the biggest bitcoin platform for a very long time and now they go up in smoke.
No wonder Apple does not want to touch this with a 10 foot pole.
So where are all the bitcoin lovers now?????
Classic Ponzi scheme.
Anyone even remotely familiar with the risks of online crypto wallets recommends a printed paper wallet instead. If this fact is still not generally understood, then people are not paying attention to real risks that have been demonstrated time and time again.
Trading in Bitcoin and other crypto coins is risky. That's a large part of the appeal. If one is risk averse, then instead keep money in a bank or under a mattress...while it continues to lose value thanks to current monetary policy.
I'm aware of that, but it's still have a negative effect. If I put money in a bank it's FDIC insured. I don't ever have to worry about the bank folding but what about the people that were holding bitcoins with Mt. Gox? For bitcoin to be taken seriously by the world it can't be seen as that much of a risk.
Sure it has a negative effect, people react emotionally to bad news. That's just human nature. However, when "the crowd" reacts emotionally and sells, Warren Buffet recommends one buy instead. "Buy low, sell high". Just stay away from MtGox.
Who puts that amount of money into something uninsured? They gambled and they lost, welcome to the cold hard world.
But the negative effect is on bitcoin as a whole regardless of whether it's reasonable or not. If a priest diddles a boy it's bad for the Catholic church as a whole..
Most of the bitcoin system ($7.3b) is uninsured. There's one company offering insurance here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25680016
but pretty much everyone else is just trusting that it's all going to be ok. They are trusting that the major exchanges aren't going to go down and there are no security issues to devalue their holdings.
From a link from the article you posted…
That's something you will forever kick yourself for doing.
Maybe, at the very least they'd come to realise that opportunities can come out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. Bitcoin went up in value 16,000x (1,600,000%) in 3 years. Just $100 of coins at the end of 2010 would be worth millions now. People make decisions based on circumstances at the time though. The people who gain think it's because they are smart, the people who lose think it's because they're unlucky. The 3rd co-founder of Apple Ron Wayne said he didn't regret his decision to leave the company:
"Wayne drew the first Apple logo, wrote the three men's original partnership agreement, and wrote the Apple I manual.
Wayne has stated that he does not regret selling the stock as he made the "best decision with the information available to me at the time".
Had he kept his 10% stock it would have been worth over $35 billion in August 2011.
After leaving Apple, Wayne resisted Jobs' attempts to recruit him back to Apple, remaining at Atari until 1978 when he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and later an electronics company in Salinas, California. He is retired and now lives a quiet lifestyle in a Pahrump Nevada Mobile Home Park selling stamps and rare coins in Pahrump, Nevada, and had never owned an Apple product until 2011, when he was given an iPad 2 by Aral Balkan at the Update Conference in Brighton, United Kingdom.
Wayne also ran a stamp shop in Milpitas, California for a short period of time in the late 1970s, Wayne's Philatelics, on Dempsey Road. After a number of break-ins he moved his stamp operations to Nevada. The logo for the business was a wood-cut style design, with a man sitting under an apple tree, with the "Wayne's Philatelics" name written in a flowing ribbon curved around the tree. This was the original logo he designed for Apple Computer.
He holds a dozen patents but never had enough capital to make money from any of them."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne
It seems a shame that he lives like that now when you see Apple's success but he didn't contribute to their ultimate success. When you look at Microsoft though, the opposite happened with Paul Allen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen
He left Microsoft in 1983, long before Microsoft took off in a big way (before Windows 1.0 I think) but retained his shares as a co-founder, which are now worth a few billion. He has lost out on potentially being the wealthiest person in the world but he's done ok. It's hard to tell how things will work out:
http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-co-founder-paul-allen-made-40-billion-stock-blunder
It's so strange to see two very similar circumstances end up in such opposite ways: co-founder of Apple leaves early and ends up in a trailer park, co-founder of Microsoft leaves early and ends up being the 53rd wealthiest person in the world. It's funny how he's described as a self-made billionaire:
http://www.forbes.com/profile/paul-allen/
Yeah he made the billions all by himself while the engineers who worked for 30 years at Microsoft contributed less than he did.
I always wonder why it makes sense for 1 person like Paul Allen to own so much. If you think about the $13b he has and divide it out in property values of say $200,000, that one guy has enough owned assets to buy homes for 65,000 families. The irony being that those 65,000 families are paying for marked up products to use and paying interest on the loans they have to buy the houses and the interest goes to pay the banks, which pays interest on savings to people who have a lot of savings, like Paul Allen. People at the bottom don't have much income growth. But the billions aren't cash, it's all just perception of worth (including the homes). To trade $13b of stock value requires someone else to invest $13b from something else.
There's a big deal made about wealth distribution but really it's the distribution of perception of worth, the confidence people have of value. Technology companies and especially things like Bitcoin are the clearest indicators of what wealth is. Bitcoin comes from nothing, it's just code and text. Facebook comes from nothing, it's just a website, so is Google search. The value all comes from how much people invest their own time in using it.
Collectively, Bitcoin is now a $7b service, solely based on the fact that the people invested in it think that's what it's worth. The speed at which technology has allowed people to connect to each other has accelerated the process of directing people's perception of worth. Inevitably, there will be few developments that many people invest in because successful developments become successful due to trust and trust comes easily from knowing other people are invested in something too (the idea that people look out for their own self-interest gives you an assurance that they will look out for something you share an investment in).
This process seems dangerous to me. Ultimately, the goal to everything people do is improved quality of life but as long as there's the promotion of a few developments out of the value collectivism of many people then it's just going to be that perception of worth is distributed unevenly. This is what causes instability and why currencies are abused because there are too few points of failure and when they fail, they affect so many people.
Bitcoin doesn't tackle this problem, it just goes after the inflationary aspect (and not doing a good job at that so far). Someone could create a service that accepts bitcoins as payment but only spends fiat currency and they could hoard a majority of all coins. Paul Allen alone could buy every bitcoin in existence and still be a billionaire, what happens then? It would fail unless more coins were made, which is one reason fiat currency has that facility. Money is just there to be an intermediary to people's perception of worth they place on varied fields of interest.
The whole idea of bitcoin mining and transaction verification is a distraction because that can be done by a peer-to-peer system anyway. All a decentralized currency needs is enough coins to facilitate high volume transactions e.g allow enough coins for every person in the world to have a reasonable quality of life (minimum paying off a $50,000 property and consumable resources are expected to be earned) so make 35 quadrillion coins, which would be sequential strings. Sell them for 1c each and retain that as a minimum purchase value. When a purchase happens initially, someone would get a unique wallet (public/private key pair - public key could be their wallet id or additional) and a central ledger would encrypt the unique coin string using the public key and this would be stored in the ledger and given to the buyer.
The ledgers would be controlled by trusted central authorities. Now, people might say well that's too big a flaw but we do it with the internet. ICANN controls the central internet registry for who owns domains. Google.com for example is controlled by https://www.markmonitor.com/services/domain-management.php and they say they manage over half the Fortune 100. I believe that there are a handful of top level companies that pretty much control the entire internet domain service in various countries:
http://bgr.com/2014/02/19/who-runs-the-internet-6-secret-companies/
Why do we allow so few people to control so much? It works and our confidence in it working in future is from the assumption that people in the collective sharing in the service will act in their self-interest to keep it working. So, the central register would be distributed between trusted peers and the more the better. They'd actually be best in a ledger hierarchy given that international payments would be so rare. All they'd be tracking is ownership strings.
When someone makes a transaction, they are the only one that has the private key and they have encrypted copies of their coins. To make a peer-to-peer purchase, it's anonymous as the details are only encrypted generated strings. Multiple central authorities would be contacted to exchange the coins. The authority would look up the coin owner id (public key) and send a random string encrypted with it. The coin owner would decrypt it with the private key and send back the string (challenge-response authentication). The central authorities would then take the public key from the other party and encrypt the coins with that public key. It wouldn't matter if anyone had someone else's coins without the private key to decrypt them.
Here's the benefit of having a central authority: you can opt to give them ownership and contact information so that if something goes wrong, you can do something about it. You can have authenticated wallets for large amounts and anonymous wallets for anonymous purchases and you can move money from your authenticated wallets to anonymous ones if you aren't doing things that need zero paper trail.
This setup has the benefit that the verification times are low as it's simple encrypt/decrypt, there's no computation. You can opt for security with personal ids. The encryption protocol is tried and tested the world over. If someone steals your private key, anonymous wallets might be gone but they have to steal your coins too. The central authorities can detect suspicious activity, especially on wallets that aren't anonymous.
What happens to the fiat currency used to buy the original wallets?
You wouldn't technically need it because you've created your own currency out of nothing with the same value. If money runs out, it's up to the multiple central authorities to decide if more is needed and it's in all their own best interests not to add more as adding more devalues it anyway. Traders would also be free to reject coins outside of a certain sequential range.
There still needs to be facilities for loans but all that a financial agency could do is buy capital from the central authority. If they run out of capital by over-leveraging, they go broke.
It doesn't eliminate fiat currency because the government will only accept that but it could affect the profitability of the banks.
That stuff doesn't work! History is our guide.
Bitcoin at its core is a peer to peer monetary system. As we know, all people are self-interested, thus the Bitcoin network operates on incentives. The various trading platforms, BECAUSE they must abide by local and international anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism rules are already hobbled.
Person to person trade with mutually beneficial openness and transparency via the Bitcoin network is lost when a third party becomes involved. If MtGox was completely transparent in their operations, they would likely not have crashed so spectacularly, because investors would've seen quite clearly that money was being siphoned off.
Once again, regulation and interference from self-interested government entities add nothing. Only in cases of theft or fraud does their involvement become necessary.
That's a very long reply (which I didn't read) which starts out very defensive and accusatory for simply posting a link to an amazing story.
When I said 'you'd come to realize', I didn't mean you, I meant the guy in the story who lost the laptop. It's because you said 'something you will kick yourself over' and I worded it the same way. It's probably an instance where the use of 'one' rather than 'you' makes the meaning clearer. You were saying he'd kick himself over losing it, I was just saying that some people who have experienced and lost opportunity sometimes reach the conclusion that their actions are done in the context of the circumstances. Then I decided to ramble for a while. There was no defense or accusation in my post relating to yours, it was more of a continuation on what you were saying. I'll try rewording it.
The system I described wasn't government controlled. It can be setup by anyone. Still anonymous, still essentially peer to peer, except that the transaction verifier is a larger more trusted entity rather than a computation.
Ok so in the scenario that someone buys all or most of the bitcoins or creates a service that everyone pays for with bitcoins until that service owns a significant portion, what then? How does that self-interest help the system work? The remaining supply would be severely constrained with no option but to drive up the value solely for the interest of the majority owner. That owner could then destabilise the currency as and when they wanted.
I'll assume you wouldn't prefer something specifically to facilitate terrorism and money-laundering but I don't see what difference having sensible regulation makes. I don't see that Paypal is hobbled simply because they follow regulations, it's one of the biggest payment systems in the world.
And how do you propose your anonymous, peer-to-peer transaction system be covered in cases of theft or fraud? How do you prove ownership and identity in an anonymous, peer-to-peer system while still maintaining privacy? The system you want encourages theft and illegality that can't be prosecuted easily yet you'd still rather have some necessary involvement. Why would any government body perform those protection duties to protect a currency they can't be paid with and how do they do it when they are kept out of it as much as possible?
Ah. Mea culpa.
When I said 'you'd come to realize', I didn't mean you, I meant the guy in the story who lost the laptop. It's because you said 'something you will kick yourself over' and I worded it the same way. It's probably an instance where the use of 'one' rather than 'you' makes the meaning clearer. You were saying he'd kick himself over losing it, I was just saying that some people who have experienced and lost opportunity sometimes reach the conclusion that their actions are done in the context of the circumstances. Then I decided to ramble for a while. There was no defense or accusation in my post relating to yours, it was more of a continuation on what you were saying. I'll try rewording it.
The system I described wasn't government controlled. It can be setup by anyone. Still anonymous, still essentially peer to peer, except that the transaction verifier is a larger more trusted entity rather than a computation.
Ok so in the scenario that someone buys all or most of the bitcoins or creates a service that everyone pays for with bitcoins until that service owns a significant portion, what then? How does that self-interest help the system work? The remaining supply would be severely constrained with no option but to drive up the value solely for the interest of the majority owner. That owner could then destabilise the currency as and when they wanted.
I'll assume you wouldn't prefer something specifically to facilitate terrorism and money-laundering but I don't see what difference having sensible regulation makes. I don't see that Paypal is hobbled simply because they follow regulations, it's one of the biggest payment systems in the world.
And how do you propose your anonymous, peer-to-peer transaction system be covered in cases of theft or fraud? How do you prove ownership and identity in an anonymous, peer-to-peer system while still maintaining privacy? The system you want encourages theft and illegality that can't be prosecuted easily yet you'd still rather have some necessary involvement. Why would any government body perform those protection duties to protect a currency they can't be paid with and how do they do it when they are kept out of it as much as possible?
Ach! I hate this forum software... I'll try to just address a few points, as this whole quote is such a mess now.
Alright, it was not clear you were advocating for self-regulation (you say you meant it to be "setup by anyone") and also because you were advocating a Marxist position about guaranteed incomes for people.
Your scenario where "someone buys all or most of the bitcoins" simply is not possible. The vast majority of bitcoins are held by individuals and new bitcoins are being mined all the time (this is mathematically controlled, about 25 new bitcoins every 10 minutes). Because of the nature of bitcoins, a buyer would have to approach every holder individually and bid for their supply. Not every person would want to sell, based on Bitcoin's growth curve. This is an impossible scenario.
What is "sensible regulation"? Who decides? Therein lies the problem. The Blockchain (public ledger) is the regulator... No individual should ever be entrusted with that power, which is the problem with politicized central banking authorities.
Finally, Bitcoin ISN'T anonymous! It's not easy to track and trace every person who owns bitcoins, but they are not invisible. In fact, in cases of theft and fraud, people have been blacklisting certain bitcoins. We have existing laws that protect individuals from theft and fraud, in fact, these laws are one of the reason government exists. Our court system exists because mob rule is not the way to do things. Good laws protect our individual constitutionally protected rights and in the case of bitcoins, we are talking about property rights.