Bitcoin turn to be ugly currency, the price will slump very soon.
US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
291–300 of 480 posts
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently, at least in the USA, law enforcement has other priorities. George Floyd was killed over an alleged counterfeit $20 bill.
That was a municipal police call-out. That said, slashing the municipal police isn’t a terrible idea
The existence of municipal police is a large part of the problem; the sheer number of police forces in the US is a huge barrier to effective oversight and accountability. A cynic might argue that this lack of accountability in routine policing is a deliberate choice.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Credit card fraud is 'some people steal credit card numbers and (eventually) steal some funds'. It's not good, but it doesn't have the major disruptive effects ransoming an hospital has. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24033925
and usually the credit card companies reverse the charges, and bear the cost. so it's quite different.
Merchants often end up paying the cost though.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although I refuted some of your arguments above ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24033759 ), I agree that cryptocurrency has fairly limited utility, especially given the costs. The biggest issue I have with cryptocurrency is that it’s an utter waste of resources. It incentivizes the consumption of electricity (and talent) purely to print money, rather than to produce value. Yes, currencies provide some value to…
The waste of electricity/mining gear is mostly due to Proof of Work consensus, but moving to Proof of Stake/other consensus algorithms will eliminate basically all waste (eg. Ethereum is moving to PoS).
No one has a demonstrated effective PoS implementation yet (that isn't simple centralization). ETH will not move to PoS anytime soon enough to be meaningful, nor will any other cryptocurrency.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler
Isn't 'tumbling' literally a money laundering operation?
Money laundering involves the intentional hiding of the origins of funds obtained through criminal activity. Attributing the source of funds as being criminally obtained is difficult if tumbling is done effectively. If tumbling was reason enough to be suspected of money laundering, so would splitting a $100 at a gas station.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#296Let this be a lesson to those that say bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has no real value outside of speculation. This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era. The difficulty of receiving that volume of money in that short of a period of time in a difficult to trace manner is a new thing. We are entering a new era where crime can pay in very large sums with orders of magnitude less complexity…
>>democratizing large scale crime Ah give me a break, I am having a very hard time wrapping my mind around this obsession HN has for hating cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Solution to everything is to ban things we don't like, also while we are at it, lets ban credit cards too, credit-card fraud is close to 30Billion world wide[1]. People tend to focus on the bad about technology instead of all the good it can brin…
Crypto may not have been founded based on malevolent intent, but the majority of its initial usage was definitely used for so.
In my time exploring Tor pre crypto boom 2017, I noticed markets of CP, Illegal Weapons, and Illegal services such as hitmen all operating under Bitcoin.
And I'm willing to bet that, since its inception till now, the number of transactions that was used for crime is greater than the number of transactions that weren't.
And I'm also willing to bet that the majority of the transactions that was used for crime, was to purchase drugs.
I do think we need to be concerned about Bitcoin and how it is a crime enabler.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#297So what's the current optimal solution, as far as precautionary measurements go - for these kinds of scenarios? The more companies that shell out, the more it's going to happen / motivate these pirates to continue with such rackets.
Do you want a solution that makes such an attack unprofitable to execute (i.e. it raises the cost of doing a similar attack above $4.5M)? Buy insurance and pray. There is not a single readily available enterprise solution that would even dare to put that in writing, let alone deliver. If there is one that does dare, ask to test their claim by having the deal conditional on them putting out an open $4.5M bug bounty an…
Not a good test.
If they expect a decent ROI, the attack can't cost any amount up to $4.5M to execute.
The $4.5M isn't a guaranteed outcome from such an attack. Some targets may not be willing to pay, or may only be willing to pay a substantially smaller amount.
Also, part of the execution cost is the non-monetary "breaking the law" factor. For instance, would you rather make a legal $1M or an illegal $2M?
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#298So what's the current optimal solution, as far as precautionary measurements go - for these kinds of scenarios? The more companies that shell out, the more it's going to happen / motivate these pirates to continue with such rackets.
Offsite offline backups. Redundant ones. This scenario is really no different than if your datacenter had a gas leak and blew up, particularly because you never will ever be able to prove the attacker didn't retain your data somewhere so all you can do is guarantee recovery. Of note in this case is that the thieves only stole 2TB of data - this is a trivial expense to orchestrate a manyfold backup regime for in near…
As long as the backed up data can't be infected.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know that? Are you judging based on a representative sample of all uses of cryptocurrency, or the uses you hear about?
If there are any large scale positive uses of cryptocurrency, I'm sure that we would have heard of them by now; The proponents would have shouted them from the rooftops. That said, proponents do have a shot at enlightening us (me and other viewers of the thread). What large scale positive application are you aware of?
The main one I know of is international money transfers (remittances). Usually these have to go through an oligopoly that sets the fees and exchange rates to be favorable to itself. This is the kind of market that's pretty big on the international scale, but it's completely boring and non-sensational to read about a bunch of people who are sending $400 to their moms on a regular basis.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>democratizing large scale crime Ah give me a break, I am having a very hard time wrapping my mind around this obsession HN has for hating cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Solution to everything is to ban things we don't like, also while we are at it, lets ban credit cards too, credit-card fraud is close to 30Billion world wide[1]. People tend to focus on the bad about technology instead of all the good it can brin…
Crypto may not have been founded based on malevolent intent, but the majority of its initial usage was definitely used for so. In my time exploring Tor pre crypto boom 2017, I noticed markets of CP, Illegal Weapons, and Illegal services such as hitmen all operating under Bitcoin. And I'm willing to bet that, since its inception till now, the number of transactions that was used for crime is greater than the number of…
So how exactly were people doing these crimes before 2009?
>>And I'm willing to bet that, since its inception till now, the number of transactions that was used for crime is greater than the number of transactions that weren't.
Nice bet, but if you are wrong can I send you my bitcoin address?