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Hacked Bitcoin firm plans to spread losses across all users

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21–28 of 28 posts

Re: Hacked Bitcoin firm plans to spread losses across all users

#21
post #5

I'm not sure why this company believes they deserve to stay in business. They've proven they're not good at security to a percentage of their customers and might be about to cause a lot of bad will with the rest of their customers. More importantly, if I'm an unaffected customer and can swallow the "haircut", how do I know they won't be hacked again? EDIT: As a customer getting a forced haircut, I would also expect t…

I don't think companies base their decisions on what they think they deserve. That's not rational... they're making decisions based on opportunity for profit.

Re: Hacked Bitcoin firm plans to spread losses across all users

#23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish I had done more stuff like that when I was younger. I did get some bitcoin back before it was worth anything, but not nearly as much as I could have if I was serious about it. But of course back then most people didn't know what the potential ceiling was going to be on them. $30 a coin was a ridiculously high price we might never see again at the time. I remember when it crashed after that and went down to ~$7 a…

Really, though, that's like saying you wished you had bought Beanie Babies, MtG cards, or even tulips before the Dutch mania. Bitcoin isn't an investment vehicle, it's a cypherpunk Pog, and its value is completely dependent on the behavior of other collectors. There was no logical reason to believe btc would get within an order of magnitude of its current value, and no reason to think it'll be there ten years from no…

Thank you, I also feel less shitty now after passing on an opportunity like this (opportunity only in hindsight).

Re: Hacked Bitcoin firm plans to spread losses across all users

#24
post #5

I'm not sure why this company believes they deserve to stay in business. They've proven they're not good at security to a percentage of their customers and might be about to cause a lot of bad will with the rest of their customers. More importantly, if I'm an unaffected customer and can swallow the "haircut", how do I know they won't be hacked again? EDIT: As a customer getting a forced haircut, I would also expect t…

If companies staying in business was related in any way to what they "deserve", plenty of large companies would be out of business.

Re: Hacked Bitcoin firm plans to spread losses across all users

#25
post #3

Oh yeah, I think I remember the FDIC doing something similar to this.

?? Can't tell if serious.

The FDIC only insures accounts to a certain amount. So, yeah, I suppose they kinda do this. But it's a known risk and the reason that you, as a consumer, don't keep values beyond the FDIC insured limits in any one bank.

Re: Hacked Bitcoin firm plans to spread losses across all users

#26
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish I had done more stuff like that when I was younger. I did get some bitcoin back before it was worth anything, but not nearly as much as I could have if I was serious about it. But of course back then most people didn't know what the potential ceiling was going to be on them. $30 a coin was a ridiculously high price we might never see again at the time. I remember when it crashed after that and went down to ~$7 a…

Really, though, that's like saying you wished you had bought Beanie Babies, MtG cards, or even tulips before the Dutch mania. Bitcoin isn't an investment vehicle, it's a cypherpunk Pog, and its value is completely dependent on the behavior of other collectors. There was no logical reason to believe btc would get within an order of magnitude of its current value, and no reason to think it'll be there ten years from no…

It was a little different with Bitcoin. There was a time where it was a very passive thing.

You leave the computer on and you mined bitcoins (whole blocks, not just a fraction of a fraction of a reward from a mining group). I left the bitcoin software on for a single week back then. I could have left it on for a few months and mined like 1000+ bitcoins, but I only left it on for a week. I was excited about it too, and thought this could be the future of money, but even back then it didn't occur to me that the price of them would ever shoot up like that. So after a week I got bored and was like "I'll check it out again in a year or so once more people are into it."

You had to actively buy Beanie Babies (or request them as gifts), and sometimes wait in ridiculous lines for hours, etc. A closer analogy would be if someone sent you brand new Beanie Babies for free every week, as long as you said you wanted them.

Granted, you could have taken more active measures to acquire Bitcoin even back then (like that 10,000 bitcoin pizza, for example), but it doesn't require the amount of headspace that something like Beanie Babies would (hunting down the uniques, knowing how much each one is worth, etc). I never got into selling Magic:The Gathering cards even though I played the game for the same reason.

I'm not actually beating myself up about it, I'm just realizing the trajectory of my life would have gone a lot differently if only I let that software keep running several years ago.

Re: Hacked Bitcoin firm plans to spread losses across all users

#27

I recently met a kid that lost 1 million dollars worth of bitcoins. He built a site and all money was hacked and stolen from the database when he was 14.

1 million dollars at what time, the time he had it? At one point I was offered 25BTC for a weekend project. At the time, that was worth ~$20. I didn't take it. I don't regret it either, it was a sound decision at the time, so I contend I only lost twenty bucks, not $25k.

> 1 million dollars at what time, the time he had it?

That's correct.

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