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Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

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Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#81

Post by annabellish »

rudiger wrote: post #49
xiphias wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were no hardware wallets in the days of MtGox, which meant that it was extremely hard to secure Bitcoins. It got easier since then, and many people learned from MtGox (though many people haven't). Also companies take bigger care of securing their cold wallets. I would never recommend BitFinex to anyone though (GDAX and BitStamp have VC money / long history)

> There were no hardware wallets in the days of MtGox, which meant that it was extremely hard to secure Bitcoins. It was never difficult to hold bitcoins. All you had to do was send them to an address you control with a long passphrase.

What world are you living in? Software wallets are and always will be vulnerable to incalculable numbers of side-channel attacks that they cannot possibly defend against. It is intrinsic to running on a general purpose OS. Hardware wallets are the only method of having anything anywhere _near_ security here.

Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#82

Post by runeks »

cm2187 wrote: post #16
thisisit wrote: post #14

Reading this article made me wonder - how much of the bitcoin rally is due to counterparty risks? If I remember correctly the last ramp up happened during Mt. Gox era. They were having USD withdrawal issues which resulted in BTC prices being very high on the exchange. But it din't deter them from publishing prices and making markets. Now is the case of Bitfinex suffered from a hack like Mt. Gox and are trying to stay…

I am not sure I follow. Counterparty risk should push the price down, not up. This thing is not worth as much because there is a significant risk your investment may go away because of a bug or a mistake.

> Counterparty risk should push the price down, not up.

Not if the counterparty risk causes you to be unable to withdraw national currency, thus forcing you to buy bitcoins for national currency and then withdraw the bitcoins.

The only way for the price to go down, in a scenario like this, is if it's possible to sell bitcoins on the exchange (thus pushing down the price) and withdraw the proceeds.

In a BTCUSD market, if you are unable to withdraw BTC you will sell BTC for USD and withdraw USD, thus pushing down the price. And if you're unable to withdraw USD you will buy BTC for USD and withdraw BTC, thus pushing up the price.

Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#83

Post by [deleted] »

Aledgerly wrote: post #43
comex wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify, since I misread your quote and think others might as well: > "The replacement Kerl hash function is unmodified KECCAK-384 that only converts its input and output from/to 243 trits to 48 bytes using basic two’s complement. KECCAK-384 is well vetted and researched." "Replacement" really does mean replacement, i.e. what they substituted in after the researchers successfully attacked their original hash…

This is a common misunderstanding. IOTA never deployed a vulnerable hashfunction. They had precautionary measures in place and thus had Curl there to test it out, which worked out brilliantly. Keep in mind that IOTA asked the team to attack Curl, not the other way around. This was planned. Curl is meant to be a lightweight crypto for IOT, a field of very active research. None of this is controversial to anyone that i…

[deleted]

Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#84

Post by mbgaxyz »

einarvollset wrote: post #78
csomar wrote: post #9

While I'd enjoy a good detective journalism, this article is just making claims out of thin air. And here is one: > However, this doesn’t stop Bitfinex from tripping over their shoelaces to immediately list a fork which doesn’t exist, in order to make money off of suckers. That is not correct. Bitfinex didn't list Bitcoin Gold. They listed a future contract of Bitcoin Gold (though the naming "token" is a bit confusin…

>First, a new creation of Tether doesn't result in a pump. That would be too obvious for traders to arb the effect. Orly? -> https://www.dropbox.com/sh/lylx2da2vobps8h/AAAN0q62s1X_Wl0H-...

There is interesting linear regression analysis in the folder above, between issuance of Tethers and the price of Bitcoin.

Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#85

Post by 45h34jh53k4j »

annabellish wrote: post #81
rudiger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were no hardware wallets in the days of MtGox, which meant that it was extremely hard to secure Bitcoins. It was never difficult to hold bitcoins. All you had to do was send them to an address you control with a long passphrase.

What world are you living in? Software wallets are and always will be vulnerable to incalculable numbers of side-channel attacks that they cannot possibly defend against. It is intrinsic to running on a general purpose OS. Hardware wallets are the only method of having anything anywhere _near_ security here.

A world where an offline, encrypted data file offers exactly the same security level as an offline, encrypted memory cell.

You invoke side channels -- what about these side channels: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/trezor-power-analysis/

Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#86

Post by hackerboos »

45h34jh53k4j wrote: post #85
annabellish wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What world are you living in? Software wallets are and always will be vulnerable to incalculable numbers of side-channel attacks that they cannot possibly defend against. It is intrinsic to running on a general purpose OS. Hardware wallets are the only method of having anything anywhere _near_ security here.

A world where an offline, encrypted data file offers exactly the same security level as an offline, encrypted memory cell. You invoke side channels -- what about these side channels: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/trezor-power-analysis/

"The new firmware 1.3.3 is immune against this attack since it (1) requires a PIN to compute the public key and (2) uses branch-free computations for deriving the public key from the private key."

Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#87

Post by panarky »

thisisit wrote: post #14

Reading this article made me wonder - how much of the bitcoin rally is due to counterparty risks? If I remember correctly the last ramp up happened during Mt. Gox era. They were having USD withdrawal issues which resulted in BTC prices being very high on the exchange. But it din't deter them from publishing prices and making markets. Now is the case of Bitfinex suffered from a hack like Mt. Gox and are trying to stay…

If this was true then you'd expect the exchange rate on Bitfinex to be much higher than other exchanges.

If you can't get USD out of Bitfinex, you'd buy BTC and withdraw, pushing the exchange rate up on Bitfinex. Then you'd sell the BTC on another exchange, pushing the exchange rate down there.

We're not seeing that: https://imgur.com/a/2vxV7

Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#88

Post by kirillseva »

annabellish wrote: post #81
rudiger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were no hardware wallets in the days of MtGox, which meant that it was extremely hard to secure Bitcoins. It was never difficult to hold bitcoins. All you had to do was send them to an address you control with a long passphrase.

What world are you living in? Software wallets are and always will be vulnerable to incalculable numbers of side-channel attacks that they cannot possibly defend against. It is intrinsic to running on a general purpose OS. Hardware wallets are the only method of having anything anywhere _near_ security here.

The browser with its plethora of extensions is arguably even worse than an operating system, and yet people keep using online banking and don't get hacked 24/7. Software can be reasonably secure and is basically as vulnerable as the human that's using it.

If you insist that one should err on the side of being paranoid when handling money, you can argue that hardware wallets are secure iff you manufacture your own hardware.

Want true security without going into hardware manufacturing?

Pick a private key and write it down on a piece of paper (ideally you'd do it in your head) along with the corresponding public key. Then send bitcoin to an address that's controlled by the keypair you just created. If you did all the calculations in your head while wearing a tin-foil hat your bitcoin should be reasonably secure.

Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#89

Post by nadam »

quickben wrote: post #74
nadam wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple downvotes on my comment proves my point. There is serious hate on the EOS project. No matter how much you downvote me, EOS is still doing one of the most promising research and development on how to improve crpyto network throughput and latency. Ethereum research on sharding is also interesting, but seemingly there are extremely hard problems to be solveed there with way more complex software than EOS.

I didn't downvote or upvote you. I had no idea what EOS is until I googled it. I have zero bitcoins (and some token gridcoins from the last month, but in donating CPU time since it started as SETI). The above being said, it looks like you are in your own EOS bubble. You should zoom out of it, and I'd suggest further zoom out of the crypto coin hype, look at the digital coins objectively and decide if you want to lose…

Bitcoin is (or aims to become) digital gold. It is a possibility to store 'gold' in a way that you don't have to trust anyone to store it for you, and can only be stealed from you if somebody knows your private key. Even if you are skeptical about the whole crypto industry, I suggest you to consider that at least the above alone have tremendous value.

EOS is not a money though. It is a trustless high-throughput decentralized execution environment or 'decentralized trustless cloud' so to say. It is an amazing project from technical point of view, (when your cloud application runs, it is run on 21 block producer clusters independently which are voted by stakeholders). And I find it antiintellectual to downvote somebody that speaks positively about this project, while serious and honest debate about it is very rare on the net. (I understand you did not downvote me). Whether it is a good investment, is a tougher question that is why it is not my biggest investment as I mentioned.

As for digital money: Do we need a decentralized trustless money and payment network? There can be a debate about it, but I think, yes. There is a lot of competition in this space, and there is a possibility that because of network effects only one of them will become mainstream. I think DASH is the one that has the biggest potential to achieve this.

Re: Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

#90

Post by darawk »

Bitfinex didn't force anyone to convert to equity. I was a bitfinex customer. I lost money in the hack. They certainly paid me back. These silly criticisms of them need to stop. They did the best they could with a bad situation. I wouldn't have wanted them to do anything differently than exactly what they did.

They allowed people to convert to equity as an option. A choice. They paid back everyone who didn't choose to do that, in full, and quite quickly. Bitfinex's response to that hack should be considered a model for any future company in that situation. Hopefully such a thing won't happen, but if it does, there's no better way to respond than exactly how Bitfinex did.

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