Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they don't say EUR much in polish and they used a "for money" kind of phrase and gtranslate was being "helpful."
Yea- why would BTC translate to BTC, but "kwote" translates to EUR?
"kwote" means "amount"
3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
71–80 of 104 posts
Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't. Instance types are fixed. He was likely using an EBS- root configured AMI, where the mount point for EBS is /. These are EBS-backed, but since the EBS block is automatically created when you spool up the instance; it is also automatically deleted when you terminate the instance, unless you specify otherwise.
This is not actually true. If you Stop an EBS-root EC2 instance, the EBS Volume can be safely detached and moved along to other instances, or you can restart the instance and your data will be ok. Additionally, There's no excuse for not snapshotting your EBS volumes of any sort, and these snapshots persist beyond the lifetime of the volume. I find it just a little sad that relatively few (less than all) EBS customers…
You are, of course, correct. Notice in my post that you replied to I was careful to use the word terminate, not stop, when referring to what I assume he did to his instance.
edit: After re-reading my post it probably wasn't clear to people who don't use EC2; so your reply is probably for the best. :)
Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
#73I guess the bitcoin economy is ruthless on its entrepreneurs and users. Failure to backup, improper trust in individuals, improper understanding of the technology, poor security practice, and bad decisions will wipe out early adopters' wealth continuously and relentlessly. I doubt we will see much of the early adopters retaining their bitcoin wealth from these early days. Those who did are either incredibly lucky, or…
I think that's a bit over the top. It really isn't that hard to keep your coins in your own wallet and back it up. What this demonstrates to me is that people are too trusting. You really shouldn't trust any of these services until they become more transparent in who is backing them, what their infrastructure looks like, their disaster plans, etc.
He's referring to the relentless issues... Mt. Gox, now this.
It will probably continue...
Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
#74Looks like the admin stored the wallet.dat and backups on an ec2 instance, and then shut it down while doing a RAM upgrade without realizing he would lose everything on the disk. Translation of post: DECLARATION I hereby inform all users of the service www.bitomat.pl of system failure that occurred on 26 July 2011 and its consequences. At the outset I would like to apologize for such a long delay in publication of th…
There's a reason real banks use mainframes, not cloud services...
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Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. How do you "increase the amount of RAM" on an EC2 instance other than spinning up a new larger instance? 2. Why didn't they use EBS and take frequent snapshots to S3? It sounds like they were running an instance store EC2, then fired up a larger instance and stopped the first one? This has to be a textbook case of how not to use EC2.
You can't. Instance types are fixed. He was likely using an EBS- root configured AMI, where the mount point for EBS is /. These are EBS-backed, but since the EBS block is automatically created when you spool up the instance; it is also automatically deleted when you terminate the instance, unless you specify otherwise.
And why would anyone want to immediately terminate an instance when you can just stop it instead?
Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
#76On the bright side, if the wallet has truly been lost and not stolen, everybody else's BTC got just a bit more valuable. In other news, funneling thousands of trades through one wallet.dat... how on earth do you successfully back that up when it has new data every minute? If exchanges are going to become a "thing", I'd think you'd want something like multiple redundant networked databases storing the BTC.
Not necessarily,
The hit to confidence in bitcoin might decrease the value of the remaining bitcoins more than the loss of these bitcoins increased it. I suppose we'll have to look at the exchanges...
Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bitcoin exchanges typically require 6 confirmations of a transaction in the block chain before crediting your account with bitcoins. This takes about 1 hour. If you are speculating on bitcoins and you hear about some news that might cause the price to drop, then you don't want to wait 1 hour before you can sell them.
Can you offer more money for the verification, to get it done faster? I think the default is 0.01 BTC, so if you offer 0.05 BTC will you get priority?
At the moment even no-fee transactions usually make it onto the block chain as quickly as possible. The ~1 hour (6 block) confirmation time is due to the recipient being cautious that the sender won't try to double-spend the money by rewriting history with lots of computation power. As more time elapses from when the transaction occurred, this becomes harder, and not as a function of your transaction fees.
Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the point you are trying to make. Incompetent exchange goes out of business. Said exchange try to compensate their customers. Customers learn better to scrutinize other exchanges for their backup policies and how they run their business. Of course, this is the free market. Failure to be competent, either as an investor, user, or exchange, result in monetary loss. To others, this is horrible. To me,…
That there's not a regulated option... To use BitCoins you have to go into the underbelly where you're quite likely to be stolen from and have no recourse. While it's great you enjoy the ability to be mercilessly preyed upon, it's not great that there is no safe option. This one was just (apparently) incompetence. Wait until the real crooks get going.
The safe option is to use an established government backed currency, I want bitcoin to succeed, but I can't honestly tell people about it without describing it as an incredibly risky investment (right now).
Bitcoin has unique properties in terms of exchanging wealth. If you don't actually need those properties though you probably shouldn't be using bitcoin for anything other than playing with it.
Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
#79Everyone keeping their bitcoins in exchanges/(think banks, or broker accounts) instead of their own wallets is completely subverting the point of the idea of bitcoin. BTC has some great unique properties as a p2p cryptocurrency - which goes out the window when everything sits in a few exchanges rather than a bunch of wallets.
Find a way to easily trade bitcoin without centralizing wallets and you got the thousand bitcoin idea. Next step is to turn the thousand bitcoin idea into an actual reality and get rich.
You can always do that if you trust the person enough. The idea with exchanges is essentially to act as an escrow service, but one where the two parties don't have to directly know who each other is. I don't think you can decentralize trust, realistically. Someone ultimately has to be responsible for a bad transaction or handling of BTC.
Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat
#80If this kind of thing keeps happening, isn't Bitcoin inherently deflationary? With gold, for example, only a small proportion is ever permanently "lost"; even shipwrecks can be recovered in the future. And of course more gold is always being dug up. But if bitcoins from a fixed set are slowly being lost in various ways, irreparably shrinking the money supply, it seems like it'd have trouble being a viable long-term c…
Yes, BTC is inherently deflationary, but one of the fascinating things about it is that since it can be infinitely subdivided, this may not be as much a problem as it for meatspace currencies.
Currently BTC is divisible down to 8 decimal places, enabling a maximum possible 2.1 quadrillion atomic units. But that is only an artifact of the data structure used in the current implementation, and could potentially be modified to allow even more granularity.
So, as the value of BTC rises against goods, services, and other currencies, the market can reprice in smaller and smaller increments of BTC, and the incentive to save/hoard that is typically associated with deflationary monetary systems may be weaker with BTC.