I don't understand how so many people in that thread can be OK with this happening. Saying "at least you didn't lie to us" when your money is stolen is hilarious. I'd rather keep my money under my mattress than use bitcoin for anything right now.
BTC Stolen from Poloniex
61–70 of 136 posts
Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex
#62Seems to be a recurring theme recently. Evidently too many developers inexperienced in proper security are building these things. You would have thought after everything that has happened so far that people would take a long hard look at their security measures.
My (completely pulled out of thin air) opinion is that there is no way that startups populated by young, hip developers can build a proper system for handling money. You need to have a baggage of a thousand bizarre things how these systems can be violated, unless you want to repeat the same mistakes - and that comes with time and experience.
There are literally at least hundred thousand developers who have worked for 20+ years on financial systems - the industry employs a lot of them. If you're going to be storing money of other people, picking up a random such guy - even completely mediocre, boring one - would at least bring up the many issues that are taken for granted in 'that world' but nonobvious if you're not from the financial industry.
Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex
#63I am only so familiar with Bitcoin, but why not have an additional wallet per user of the exchange? That way its not possible to exceed the funds of that wallet.
Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex
#64On the plus side, Bitcoin isn't regulated like a nation-state's currency, and the vast bulk of fiduciary institution law that nations have doesn't apply (or simply isn't applied) to Bitcoin exchanges. So when a mistake like this happens, nobody has to go to jail.
On the minus side, $50,000 of innocent people's money just got stolen, and nobody is going to jail.
Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex
#65"not looking for negative balances." If this caused the problem here, this shows that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Someone should start an open source project for BTC Exchange's back-end.
Buttercoin did that. Then they decided to go closed source and do a traditional exchange.
Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex
#66If 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…
This is not something that can realistically happen by itself - just as for 'traditional' banking, it would happen only because government regulation would force it to happen.
Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex
#67As some one who's almost entirely oblivious to the trappings of cryptocurrency... is it not possible to trade on sites like this with a local wallet? Or do you have to keep a balance with them separate from your wallet? It's invalid logic to assume that because some bitcoin sites have been hacked, all of them will be, but at this point it seems pretty clear the entire community needs to be a little more careful. Unti…
well for altcoin trades, there are options:
https://coin-swap.net/
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Atomic_cross-chain_trading
there isn't much volume yet, but i think this is the direction things need to go.
Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex
#68> 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. ;)
My bank is completely OK with that. Most banks probably are. The problem is that then they charge me even more money for it rather than going bankrupt themselves. Talk about a bad response...
Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex
#69If 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…
A better solution would be for the Bitcoin Foundation (or some other entity) to certify exchanges and online wallets as being compliant with a well defined code of practice and audit them regularly.
Consumers could look for the mark as indicating that the exchange is a well run outfit rather than a bunch of cowboys.
Re: BTC Stolen from Poloniex
#70"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...
Happens all the time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Cypriot_financi...
Those things are called crises because they actually happen quite rarely. When such episodes become a regular occurrence people tend to abandon the system in question.
I keep seeing this attitude among Bitcoin fans. Of course, there have been many financial crises with regular currencies and banking systems. But that doesn't mean they're the norm. When you look at the number of crisis against the number of different financial systems and years-without-a-crisis it's obvious that they're exceptional. Sadly, the number of Bitcoin shocks seems to be increasing linearly with scale.
I don't think this is inherent so much as a problem of overconfidence and magical thinking. Right now Bitcoin service providers (in the aggregate) are like builders whose structures catch fire distressingly frequently, but who excuse this by pointing to famous fires of the past. The fact that fires have historically been a problem doesn't mean fire codes are useless; quite the opposite, in fact.