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Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

theguardian.com

1–10 of 133 posts

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#4

I find this hilarious when many European banks have lost 98% of their market caps and individual stocks have just as much volatility in many cases. Maybe the investor warnings should be more even.

You're not wrong about stock volatility, but I think the point that there aren't any mechanisms for safety at all are fairly valid still:

"Investors who are out of pocket will not be able to rely on the Financial Ombudsman Service to settle complaints or order compensation from offending firms. Consumers are also unlikely to be covered under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which covers losses up to £85,000 on fully regulated accounts and investment products including pensions."

You also can't, say, sue BitCoin for securities fraud (or, more realistically, be part of a class-action lawsuit) like you could against a company that you own stock in[0].

Again, I'm not trying to say that stocks are "safe", but it's also true that you have more protections investing in them than you do with Bitcoin (at least for now).

[0]:https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#6
Is it fair game and legal to break into a wallet via cryptographic means alone? I mean without hacking someone's computer/storage to steal the private key that is.

I understand this is not realistic right now, but might be if someone has discovered new math or physics for example.

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#7
post #6

Is it fair game and legal to break into a wallet via cryptographic means alone? I mean without hacking someone's computer/storage to steal the private key that is. I understand this is not realistic right now, but might be if someone has discovered new math or physics for example.

Since the only proof of owner ship is private key material. Yes. And in fact this has been done and demonstrated for certain ethereum or other systems.

edit: certain elliptical curve crypto systems use randomness as part of the encipherment process. If two uses of the same key have low quality randomness/no randomness, solving for the private key material essentially becomes a slightly tedious high school algebra math problem.

heres a paper from last year where they did such an analysis, found some weak keys, and then saw that those wallets had already been hacked/drained! (possibly by someone who did similar work, for profit rather than science) https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023

Re: Bitcoin: Be prepared to lose all your money, FCA warns consumers

#10
This is just: "Don't invest what you aren't prepared to lose," which has been the advice for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for a decade at this point.

The headline makes it sound like they're threatening legal action or some sort of regulation, at least to me.

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