81–90 of 104 posts
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Except with a lost wallet.dat there will be a lot of BTC that cannot be given back. Customers are likely going to take a haircut because an incompetent exchange lost their money. In the real world the people running the exchange would be going to jail.
Where do you live that incompetent people who run banks go to jail?
Everyone 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.
Ah, but if the people running the _exchanges_ are too incompetent to safeguard their wallets, as in this case, how bad will the average user be?
The time seems right for the first bitcoin insurance company.
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Bankruptcy. Plus, backup is just a good policy. Practice it lest you end up homeless or have to find another job.
It's hard to go bankrupt when you steal for a living.
This thread has just about reached the point of absurdity.
I 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.
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> Www.bitomat.pl service is on sale for EUR 17,000 BTC What?
That was my reaction as well. Not just the fact that it's ambiguous whether they're trying to sell for 17k EUR or 17k BTC, but the fact that they're even trying to sell it at all, and then the buyer is presumably on the hook for the BTC that were lost as well! I currently had ~13 BTC in my Bitomat account- when I login they correctly show my balance, so I'm slightly confused as apparently their database wasn't lost,…
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I disagree. Regulation has given people a false sense of security, leading to them trusting these unknown and untested entities. Instead of regulation what they need is more transparency. Tell your customers who you are, how you are building your service, what you will do in the case of a disaster. In this particular case you have someone who is playing with the technology without having even a basic understanding of…
How do you ensure transparency without regulation?
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Ah, but if the people running the _exchanges_ are too incompetent to safeguard their wallets, as in this case, how bad will the average user be?
It's a free market, someone else will step in and create a more secure exchange.
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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. I have to repeatedly tell people that EBS-backed is not persistent. Amazon did everyone a big disservice by calling something -backed when it was actually transient.