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Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

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Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#251

Post by wmf »

IgorPartola wrote: post #234
dragontamer wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the heck are you going to put new BTCs into this new address? Unless you have some anonymous way of depositing BTCs into random addresses, all transfers into and out of that address will be stored into the BTC Blockchain _for life_. No, seriously. Forever, for the rest of Bitcoin's history, there will be a record that two addresses transferred BTC between each other. This will be timestamped, cryptographically si…

No. I was under the impression that the same wallet can have an arbitrary number of addresses. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address seems to support this idea.

You can have multiple addresses per wallet but BTC is still stored in addresses, not wallets. So if you have some BTC in address A and none in address B then you can't use B to buy anything. If you transfer money from A to B that leaves a record.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#252

Post by giovannibajo1 »

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #208
socillion wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is Bitcoin sent frequently, it's also stolen frequently: http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/ http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins-sto... http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech-bitcoi... edit: unrelated, someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day.

Your point stands, but most thefts occur on third party sites/applications where the address of the coins and their private key are stored in a central location. Owners of the bitcoin should transfer their coins to a private wallet. I don't understand how so many sites can't use password hash generation to secure the private keys, or something to keep it more secure. The first link you posted was a site run by an 18…

Sorry to digress a little, but I'm sensitive on age issues :)

Pinkie Pie won his first $50k award by creating a 0-day sandbox escape on Chrome, by chaining 10 different vulnerabilities. He was 19 (now almost 21). Two years before, at 17, he released jailbreakme.com, all by himself, which was a 0-day able to jailbreak all iOS models shipped to date by just visiting a website.

Age means nothing by itself, but the point is correct. The problem is that we don't know how much we can trust bitcoin site owners, as most of them are relatively new with no history to inspect, closed source, and sometimes even run by anonymous users whose experience we can't inspect.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#253

Post by guyht »

dguaraglia wrote: post #232
jganetsk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utterly incorrect. They did not transfer a single dollar. For them to turn those Bitcoins into dollars, they will have to pay more than $0.00. Possibly A LOT more. They may not even be able to turn those bitcoins into dollars for a while, and in all likelihood it will not be $150 million dollars.

This is the correct answer. People rave about how "cheap" it is to transfer bitcoin. What about actually buying anything with that 'money'? Sure, you might be able to buy some crap on the internet with bitcoin, but it won't put food in your table anytime soon without you having to pay a good % in fees to convert it to real currency.

Although I agree with the point you are making, saying "you might be able to buy some crap on the internet with bitcoin" is slightly short of the truth. While you might not be able to live off 100% bitcoin purchases (although some people are doing it), acceptance is growing every day.

A lot of people who are claiming that you will need to pay a large % in fees in order to spend your coins are missing the point.... as bitcoin gains traction, you wont need to convert it to USD first.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#254

Post by jonahx »

[deleted] wrote: post #238
fragsworth wrote: post #64

Consider this: They paid $0.00 for the transfer of $150 million dollars. A direct (i.e. not based on third party credit, regulations, etc.) transfer of wealth of this magnitude between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Depending how safely you want to make the transfer, and how far the entities are on the globe, it can cost hundreds of thousands to million…

[deleted]

Flouting

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#255

Post by socillion »

fragsworth wrote: post #202
socillion wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is Bitcoin sent frequently, it's also stolen frequently: http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/ http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins-sto... http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech-bitcoi... edit: unrelated, someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day.

It's well-known that you can at least secure your bitcoins as well as you can secure gold, if you use cold wallets. The advantage, however, is you don't have to worry nearly as much about the security of a transaction (moving it from one place to another)

It has been demonstrated that:

1) gold can be stolen due to mistakes

2) bitcoin can be stolen due to mistakes

but this does not mean that it is impossible to avoid having either stolen.

I agree that long term storage of both of these can be done very securely, but the risk for both is when trading or using them. Additionally, Bitcoin does require a lot of worry about security - how many people do you think have airgapped wallets?

Aren't the facts that you shouldn't store Bitcoin at exchanges, should use an airgapped storage mechanism, and are otherwise out of luck if your computer is compromised, enough to demonstrate that you also have to worry a lot about the security of Bitcoin transactions? Your stack of gold ingots won't vanish if you take one from the pile in your safe, but your Bitcoins can if you don't take stringent precautions.

If you view a Bitcoin transaction as only what happens on the blockchain, you're missing the context of where it occurs - which gives both gold and Bitcoin risk.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#257

Post by dprice1 »

booyaa00 wrote: post #244
csomar wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience tell me otherwise with both of them. It can take from a few days to a couple weeks.

What country are you in? In the UK bank transfers happen within a couple of minutes. You can login to your bank, transfer money to someone elses bank, they'll login, and see the money.

My guess is the previous commenter is in US. There's an excellent episode of the podcast "planet money" which addresses exactly this question, and which also explains why the system in the UK is much faster.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-...

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#259

Post by vinceguidry »

nico wrote: post #219
aortega wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2013 Argentinian here. To buy a house right now you usually have to pay dollars cash because nobody accepts a currency that devaluates 25% per year. The political class here is crazy corrupt and rich like in every third world country, and they are known for using piles of 500 euros bills to stay out of the bank system because euros have more wealth density than dollars.

I'm a little offended by the "like in every third world country" statement. Chile is not like that at all, and we are a third world country. In fact, here we are ranked right under (20th) the US (19th) in terms of transparency: http://www.transparency.org/country#CHL http://www.transparency.org/country#USA_DataResearch Argentina is ranked 102: http://www.transparency.org/country#ARG_DataResearch In all of Latin Ameri…

"Third-world" is a loaded term and doesn't really have a useful definition anymore.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#260

Post by CoryG89 »

tlrobinson wrote: post #205
socillion wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is Bitcoin sent frequently, it's also stolen frequently: http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/ http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins-sto... http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech-bitcoi... edit: unrelated, someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day.

The difference is Bitcoin can be secured much more cheaply than gold. You can't encrypt gold, setup "n-of-m" multisig transactions, etc. Unless you want to transport gold yourself you're always going to have to trust someone. Hardware wallets should help immensely as well.

From where I stand, this seems to be true of Bitcoin as well. I've never had any Bitcoins personally, but don't you have to store them in a wallet, which you're either going to have to worry about backing up, keeping secure, etc on your own. Or you're going to have to trust someone else to do it for you.
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