31–40 of 555 posts
Given illegal nature of Silk Road 2, I can't help but be suspicious of this explanation of the hack. If someone's sufficiently willing to flaunt laws as to operate a site devoted to selling contraband, what stops them from taking advantage of their position of power and stealing from their users?
Not having very much knowledge about the financial industry - is this also an issue with marketplaces that deal with fiat monies? i.e. Dwolla, Balanced, Stripe, Venmo, all serve as intermediaries for moving money - do these companies have bank accounts that hold onto massive sums of money? What protections would go into keep those accounts secure?
The reversibility of transactions has drawbacks (one that's of interest to me is that it serves as one motivation for reducing privacy and increasing data retention).
Reports like these make me wonder what Hacker News would have looked like during the gold rush in the 1800s.
Given illegal nature of Silk Road 2, I can't help but be suspicious of this explanation of the hack. If someone's sufficiently willing to flaunt laws as to operate a site devoted to selling contraband, what stops them from taking advantage of their position of power and stealing from their users?
This is also the guy that just talked a bunch of trash about the last Dread Pirate Roberts, and how he was so much better about security. Jinxed yourself, bro. Granted this was supposedly in the Bitcoin protocol itself, but for real, there's really never any need to stick your neck out to talk about how great your security is...
Is our only recourse downloading the entire block-chain to keep our wallets stored offline? Or do I have some misunderstanding? I just really like the convenience of services like coinbase.
Edit: here is one way to do it https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_set_up_a_secure_offline_sa...
At a recent meetup there was a presentation recommending Electrum with HD wallets instead. That would mean you really would only need to memorize a passphrase, all the keys would be generated from that so no backup necessary. Personally I am not yet 100% sure HD wallets are safe, need to look into it.
Not having very much knowledge about the financial industry - is this also an issue with marketplaces that deal with fiat monies? i.e. Dwolla, Balanced, Stripe, Venmo, all serve as intermediaries for moving money - do these companies have bank accounts that hold onto massive sums of money? What protections would go into keep those accounts secure?
If the bank itself collapses the FDIC insures my deposits.
Then again if my drug dealer steals all my money I am shit out of luck, much like all the users of this site. I guess it isn't that different at all.
Is our only recourse downloading the entire block-chain to keep our wallets stored offline? Or do I have some misunderstanding? I just really like the convenience of services like coinbase.
But a thin wallet like Electrum is probably your best bet.
Owner decided to cash in and retire to no extradition treaty island?
The claim that this was caused by transaction malleability rings hollow. The reference client (github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin) does not resend transactions because of malleability. The only way you can have double transfers due to malleability is if you are manually reviewing transfers and re-sending them yourself manually. This seems like a very convenient scapegoat.