Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 312 posts

Re: Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK

#41

Post by ht85 »

gesman wrote: post #3

Conclusion: If you keep any cryptocurrency on an exchange or online service that can or is capable of controlling your private keys - MOVE all your cryptos to your own deterministic wallet YESTERDAY!

I think the biggest problem is having a single point of failure. I personally keep about half my coins on exchanges, but no exchange holds more than 10%.

Storing your coins might be the best solution in theory, but in practice unless you're very savvy about the whole stack - hardware, OS, software and blockchain tech, it's hard to be sure you're not making a dumb mistake and exposing your whole stack.

Even hardware wallet can have vulnerabilities, and any form of "paper wallet" can be physically lost or destroyed.

My opinion is that you should hedge to make any loss tolerable, instead of trying to prevent it completely.

Re: Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK

#42

Post by rhapsodic »

user9182031 wrote: post #14
tn_ wrote: post #2

I don't understand why news like this doesn't have that huge of an impact of bitcoin's price.. Bitcoin seems to be hovering around 11k~ as I'm writing this. It's been at the same price it seems for the past couple of days...

Could you share why you think it would impact the price of Bitcoin? With a market cap of 186 billion dollars, and a daily volume of 10 billion I couldn't see how it'd have that much of an impact.

>Could you share why you think it would impact the price of Bitcoin? With a market cap of 186 billion dollars, and a daily volume of 10 billion I couldn't see how it'd have that much of an impact.

When hundreds of millions of dollars worth can disappear in the blink of an eye like that, it adds a new element of risk aside from the risk of normal price drops. So it only stands to reason that investors would factor that into the value they place on bitcoin and the price would go down.

Have you ever noticed that currencies issued by corrupt and/or unstable governments tend to be worth little relative to the currencies of stable, well-governed countries?

Re: Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK

#43

Post by larkeith »

cflewis wrote: post #33

As someone who knows very little about the blockchain, I was wondering if the Bitcoins are "known"? Like, they have a hash or something? Can't they be then blacklisted from use somehow? I thought the whole point of the blockchain was that all the transactions were all known?

They are known, but the point of a decentralized blockchain is that there is no central authority to 'blacklist' them.

Furthermore, there are methods by which bitcoins can be anonymized once obtained: look up 'bitcoin tumbler'.

Re: Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK

#44

Post by tooop »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #38
cflewis wrote: post #33

As someone who knows very little about the blockchain, I was wondering if the Bitcoins are "known"? Like, they have a hash or something? Can't they be then blacklisted from use somehow? I thought the whole point of the blockchain was that all the transactions were all known?

Knowing their history is good against faking the coins aka counterfeiting. If someone steals $50,000 from your bank account you may or may not ever see it again. Bitcoin will help you track it down to wherever it ends up, unlike your bank.

You can't fake (counterfeit) bitcoin...

Re: Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK

#46

Post by cal5k »

cflewis wrote: post #33

As someone who knows very little about the blockchain, I was wondering if the Bitcoins are "known"? Like, they have a hash or something? Can't they be then blacklisted from use somehow? I thought the whole point of the blockchain was that all the transactions were all known?

Yes... all of the addresses involved should be known and can be blacklisted by major exchanges.

Still - the question is why was it even possible for a "hack" to score so much cryptocurrency? This is a legendary score on par with Mt Gox... they should be holding all currency not required for immediate trading liquidity in cold storage and rebalancing as needed.

Re: Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK

#47

Post by stale2002 »

cflewis wrote: post #33

As someone who knows very little about the blockchain, I was wondering if the Bitcoins are "known"? Like, they have a hash or something? Can't they be then blacklisted from use somehow? I thought the whole point of the blockchain was that all the transactions were all known?

It is very difficult to blacklist coins with the current culture of Bitcoin.

If 1 person refuses to accept the coins, there are thousands and thousands of others who knowingly WILL. And an even larger group of people who aren't even going to be aware of your blacklist and will do so unknowingly.

In order to blacklist coins, it is not enough to just blacklist the 1 address. You have to black everyone who accepts those coins, and everyone who accepts coins from the people who accepted them and so on.

And at that point you have blacklisted the entire network.

Re: Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK

#48

Post by wampwamp »

cflewis wrote: post #33

As someone who knows very little about the blockchain, I was wondering if the Bitcoins are "known"? Like, they have a hash or something? Can't they be then blacklisted from use somehow? I thought the whole point of the blockchain was that all the transactions were all known?

Yes, bitcoin transactions are 'known' and are represented by a unique hash; however, It's impossible to 'reject' an incoming bitcoin transaction. Miners can implement custom software that can exclude blacklisted transactions from their list of mineable transactions, but requiring all miners to blacklist an address or transaction would require a hard fork.

Re: Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK

#49

Post by ReverseCold »

s0rce wrote: post #7

Wow, didn't know Mt. Gox lost 850k BTC, thats 9B USD at the current price. Are these coins traced? Were they quietly sold or are hackers sitting on billions in BTC?

The coins stolen are XEM (https://nem.io/) not Bitcoin. They're currently tracking the stolen coins to ensure they are not sold.

Preliminary evidence suggests that it was a private key stolen and not a network problem.

Disclaimer: Am somewhat associated with the team, and I hold a small amount of XEM.

Feel free to ask questions.

Post reply on HN