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BTC Stolen from Poloniex

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21–30 of 136 posts

Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex

#21
post #6

"We fucked up, so we're deducting the losses from everybody's accounts so that people don't immediately withdraw all their money." If my bank sent me this notice, the FIRST thing I'd do is withdraw all my money - there's every chance it may be "an absolute necessity" to steal more of it at any time...

A better way to phrase it would be as a "Bank Holiday" as FDR did, or as a 12.3% "temporary withdrawal floor." It's a lot easier for a government to survive such an event than a small IT company.

Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex

#22
post #8

Dang it people. Race conditions. Security. I know it's not easy but it is important to get it right.

Seriously. I thought this bit of code from the MtGox leak was interesting. Sure looks like a potential double-spend race condition:

  $out = \DB::DAO('Money_Bitcoin_Block_Tx_Out')->searchOne(array('Hash' => $bean->Hash, 'N' => $bean->N));
  if ($out) {
      if ($out->Claimed == 'Y') {
          $bean->Available = 'N';
          $bean->commit();
          continue;
      }
  }
What if someone else claims $out between the read and commit? Is no one at BTC exchanges really asking these kinds of questions?

Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex

#23
"the auditing and security features were not explicitly looking for negative balances".

WTF, who are these clowns that purport to be running the equivalent of a bank?

It's like everyone running a BTC exchange either is corrupt or slept through the part of Databases 101 where they explained "this is why transactions are important, here is banking as an example". Seems likely both.

Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex

#24
post #11

X-Powered-By:PHP/5.5.9-1+sury.org~precise+1 Mt. Gox, Flexcoin, and Poloniex. What do they all have in common? It's not what you think. (:

What they have in common: they deal in Bitcoins, they're not banks, they have a "o" and an "x" in their name.

Now if you're trying to bash PHP (or Ubuntu?) for banking software that does not take an exclusive lock on rows it reads then modifies and a daemon that does not check balances on withdrawal, try again.

Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex

#25
If BTC is going to survive there needs to be insurance against loss. An FDIC for Crypto.

The exchanges take a cut on every transaction, so Poloniex should have self insured for the first 3% (or what ever their transaction fee is). After all they made that money on the transaction.

They should carry insurance for the rest.

The 12.3% deducted from everyone's account is "wrong" in my view because Poloniex absorbed none of the loss, and kept its cut of the transaction.

The "right" thing in my eyes is for Poloniex to adjust minus their transaction fees.

-Brandon Wirtz (Not a Poloniex customer)

Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex

#26

Gosh, it would be nice to have some sort of assurance that the group holding on to my monetary reserves met some sort of minimum level of competency in dealing with quantities of currency. Or, lacking competency, some guarantee that any bank screw-up wouldn't result in loss of funds from my account...I wonder why no one has thought of this before? Oh, wait... Seriously, if I was an economics or law professor today, I…

A percent of every card transaction goes to cover system's losses on fraud. There's value in the costs being predictable, stated up front, etc, but it's not fundamentally different.

Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex

#28
post #24
post #11

X-Powered-By:PHP/5.5.9-1+sury.org~precise+1 Mt. Gox, Flexcoin, and Poloniex. What do they all have in common? It's not what you think. (:

What they have in common: they deal in Bitcoins, they're not banks, they have a "o" and an "x" in their name. Now if you're trying to bash PHP (or Ubuntu?) for banking software that does not take an exclusive lock on rows it reads then modifies and a daemon that does not check balances on withdrawal, try again.

I'm not bashing PHP. I love PHP.

Many PHP developers, on the other hand...

Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex

#29
post #15

I made a comment on an earlier thread about the security properties of hot/cold wallet and the security properties of separating the matching and settlement systems. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7340505 ) This incident is an example of the Bitcoin community's best practices "working." They lost 12.3% rather than 100%. That's actually a considerable accomplishment in Bitcoin, but not a success condition for…

This is the most fascinating part of the Bitcoin story: watching a group of people who are philosophically opposed to most elements of the modern economy discover, one by one, why all those elements exist.

Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex

#30
> If you have 2 BTC, withdraw 10 BTC, and are left with -8 BTC, the software would see that you deposited 2, withdrew 10, and have exactly what you should: -8.

Nice, I wish my bank was so chill about having a negative balance. :)

This reminds me of the early Amazon bug, where you could add negative numbers of items to your cart, and it would credit your account, and then wait for you to ship them the book. ;)

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