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

3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

bitomat.pl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 104 posts

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#91

Post by dfc »

dedward wrote: post #11

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.

What unique properties of a cryptocurrency are negated by a functional exchange?

One of the problems with ever realizing a "true free market" in bitcoin trading is the time spent waiting for block confirmations. There are barriers to entry in that you can not just transfer your coins to an exchange and sell instantly. Because of this a lot of people who trade bitcoins keep a certain amount in their exchange accounts.

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#92

Post by dfc »

sp332 wrote: post #45
wcoenen wrote: post #42

Earlier 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?

The transaction fee only helps get it into the first block sooner. It does nothing for the X confirmations after the first.

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#93

Post by sandGorgon »

cperciva wrote: post #90
sandGorgon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is persistent until you delete it. What more could you ask for?

persistent until you terminate the instance. Unlike a EBS volume that you explicitly attach, which persists beyond the termination of the instance you attach it to.

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#94

Post by [deleted] »

indrax wrote: post #39
kiba wrote: post #30

Earlier 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,…

This is an inefficiency of the market. You must have some level (perhaps not rigidly set) of inefficiency at which you would conclude that some type of government regulation would make the market more efficient. Otherwise you'd accept any level of inefficiency as the market working, at which point it's just an ideological label. Although it's not clear that regulation of bitcoin is even possible, we can still conside…

[deleted]

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#95

Post by wnight »

indrax wrote: post #39
kiba wrote: post #30

Earlier 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,…

This is an inefficiency of the market. You must have some level (perhaps not rigidly set) of inefficiency at which you would conclude that some type of government regulation would make the market more efficient. Otherwise you'd accept any level of inefficiency as the market working, at which point it's just an ideological label. Although it's not clear that regulation of bitcoin is even possible, we can still conside…

What makes you think the government can run an economy?

Our economy, despite recent "deregulation" is the most regulated, especially when you count criminal and civil law as well, in the world. There are countless laws against selling known-bad products (lemon cars, toxic mortgages, etc) and we could have almost everyone involved in the recent collapse behind bars if we tried.

We pay through the nose for the regulation, especially in the collateral damage from false positives and economic friction, and it's totally worthless at catching the biggest criminals (in terms of dollars stolen) in world history.

If I want regulation I can use a regulated exchange. Or rather, if I felt like using beta-software I'd be doing it and would be thankful to be allowed even if I had just lost my test fund. Forced regulation would remove the choice.

And ultimately regulation implies that rules stop the bad guys and we know that's true. Thanks, but I'll wait until an open-source and audit-able exchange comes along, and then I'll listen to the experts I respect.

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#96

Post by leon_ »

Cushman wrote: post #47
barnaby wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many 'random Polish web apps' this one was among the top in its class. Poland has world-class software talent, please don't downplay it.

Didn't mean to disparage Polish software development; just was assuming the average user of the site wasn't Polish, leaving them even less legal security— which I see, glancing at the site now, was wrong. So apologies to any offended. With that said, I think you could pick a better site to be the shining beacon of Poland's world class talent than the site that just lost a bunch of people's money because the only plac…

> just was assuming the average user of the site wasn't Polish, leaving them even less legal security

People should get rid of that "poland is europe's mexico" notion. It's the EU - you have the same legal security as in the UK, France or Germany.

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#97

Post by leon_ »

jackolas wrote: post #41
scotty79 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EUR 17,000 BTC EUR here is just some strange artifact of google translate > Serwis www.bitomat.pl zostaje wystawiony na sprzedaż za kwotę 17000 BTC. translates to: > Www.bitomat.pl service is on sale for EUR 17,000 BTC.

Maybe they don't say EUR much in polish and they used a "for money" kind of phrase and gtranslate was being "helpful."

you could translate that "za kwote" snippet as: ... for sale for the amount of 17k BTC.

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#98

Post by Wentz »

indrax wrote: post #39
kiba wrote: post #30

Earlier 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,…

This is an inefficiency of the market. You must have some level (perhaps not rigidly set) of inefficiency at which you would conclude that some type of government regulation would make the market more efficient. Otherwise you'd accept any level of inefficiency as the market working, at which point it's just an ideological label. Although it's not clear that regulation of bitcoin is even possible, we can still conside…

This is an incoherent objection. "Efficiency" isn't some abstract Platonic concept. It is always efficiency for what? And for whose goals?

EDIT: Not to mention that there would be a profit incentive for a private regulation business if the market's already incredibly stong medicine of loss of reputation and business failure weren't enough. Not every problem requires violence or the threat of violence to solve.

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#99

Post by Wentz »

jonknee wrote: post #31
bcl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's to prevent a firm from lying about who they are and what they are doing? Without regulations (and accompanying penalties for breaking the rules), it's the wild West. It sounds good on a libertarian check list, but in practice the people who can least afford it get absolutely destroyed.

There already are penalties for breaking the rules (ruined reputation), and probably far worse ones from a violator's perspective than even an ideal government regulatory fiefdom would provide. The government certainly ain't gonna be throwing people in jail for failing to back up some data, and it sure would be scary if they started. Instead...fines! ? Goverment and big, well-connected businesses have done a wonderful job of convincing people that regulations are what prevent companies from screwing people over, when they are merely a way for major corporations to keep out competition by making it harder small businesses to compete.

Re: 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange lost its wallet.dat

#100

Post by jahnu »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #80
_delirium wrote: post #49

If 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 modi…

> the incentive to save/hoard that is typically associated with deflationary monetary systems may be weaker with BTC.

I don't see how that is possible. The coins may undergo a process similar to a stock split but any holders of the coins end up with equal purchasing power. The incentive to hoard does not go away if the currency is deflationary.

Post reply on HN