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CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

financemagnates.com

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Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#91
post #57
post #16

Where's the news?! Why do people continue to bang heads against the wall with this madness? Unless you're a thief, how is the craptocurrency thing better than my credit card that's insured from unauthorized use and gives me a cash back?! Yeah, you can't speculate with credit cards, and get rich quick, because $1 = $1 like forever, but isn't that what the real investment tools are for?

Why is gold worth $5 trillion market cap? If someone steals your gold, you can't even get it back easily.

In computing there were relatively few mitigation against breach of physical security. Almost no one uses encrypted volumes, though that is growing rapidly. Even then it says nothing of on line connected access to the medium whilst the volume is mounted.

If someone steals your gold the logistical complexities are much more onerous to being caught. Again, a 3000 year problem almost entirely solved.

The risk of the medium of value is priced into the medium itself.

Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#92
post #16

Where's the news?! Why do people continue to bang heads against the wall with this madness? Unless you're a thief, how is the craptocurrency thing better than my credit card that's insured from unauthorized use and gives me a cash back?! Yeah, you can't speculate with credit cards, and get rich quick, because $1 = $1 like forever, but isn't that what the real investment tools are for?

Just to pick up on this one small point: as I understand it, the cashback you get with a credit card is more or less taken straight from the card processing fee charged to the vendor, which of course, raises prices overall and is therefore not really cashback at all. Without the fee, you would likely have just paid a lower price in the first place. The only party benefitting from the cashback scheme is, of course, th…

> One of the hugely compelling benefits of cryptocurrencies is they entirely eliminate the necessity for such middlemen taking a cut and driving up costs for the parties actually partaking in the transaction.

Without more efficient means of off-chain transactions (such as payment channels) the cost of on-chain cryptocurrency transactions is typically much more expensive than credit card transactions (except for very large amounts, as credit card transactions charge a percentage, and cryptocurrency transactions have a fee not related to the amount transacted).

For some of the cryptocurrencies those fees are currently somewhat hidden, as you don't directly pay them as transaction fees, but as miners get a block reward that contributes to inflation. If you include the miner revenue a Bitcoin transactions currently costs about $20 in average: https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP means that if you have $100 in your bank it'll still be there tomorrow, not randomly erradicated by volatile swings in the market or stolen with no way to get it back. That said this is only true if you have faith in your government.

Right, but it can also be frozen due to the whims of the bank, garnished by the IRS, taken by wire fraud... Obviously cryptocurrencies are sharp tools, but they're stronger financial primitives than what we have. We just need to use them to rebuild the consumer-facing components.

> but it can also be frozen due to the whims of the bank, garnished by the IRS, taken by wire fraud...

If given the choice between the whims of banks vs the whims of cryptocurrency speculators, and the potential for wire-fraud vs the potential for wholesale 'hackfraud', I think I'll take the whims of the banks please.

Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#94
post #14

No problem, just hardfork and start again

That only works when the money is tied to one of the core developers. Don't worry though, blockchains are immutable and safe from centralization.

Last time the problem was that a weakness in the contract's definition was exploited, right?

This time it's a "hack" where someone gained unauthorized access to a webpage and modified it somehow?

IMO if there were ever a case for hardforking around problems it should be for the latter and not the former. Maybe Ethereum could publicly declare itself to be a "not-too-centralized" consensus-audited-by-this-particular-committee-of-humans.

Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#95
post #16

Where's the news?! Why do people continue to bang heads against the wall with this madness? Unless you're a thief, how is the craptocurrency thing better than my credit card that's insured from unauthorized use and gives me a cash back?! Yeah, you can't speculate with credit cards, and get rich quick, because $1 = $1 like forever, but isn't that what the real investment tools are for?

Unless you live in Venezuela http://www.businessinsider.com/venezuela-hyperinflation-char...

Cryptocurrency is not a solution for a fundamentally broken central government and this is especially true for countries like Venezuela where access to computers and reliable internet is not a given.

Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to pick up on this one small point: as I understand it, the cashback you get with a credit card is more or less taken straight from the card processing fee charged to the vendor, which of course, raises prices overall and is therefore not really cashback at all. Without the fee, you would likely have just paid a lower price in the first place. The only party benefitting from the cashback scheme is, of course, th…

> One of the hugely compelling benefits of cryptocurrencies is they entirely eliminate the necessity for such middlemen taking a cut and driving up costs for the parties actually partaking in the transaction. Don't all bitcoin transactions require a transaction fee in order to get processed these days?

I paid ~$0.60 to transfer ~$900 of Bitcoin the other day. For that amount it's not too bad, but you'd pay basically the same if you are paying for a $3 coffee.

The transaction fee is based on the byte size of the transaction, not the monetary amount, so in it's current form it doesn't make sense to use Bitcoin for low-value transactions.

Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#97
post #19

Either the average blockchain startup is unbelievably amateurish re. security or this was an inside job. I suspect the latter but the former does not surprise me one bit.

Isn't most of the IT field unbelievably amateurish re. security? Just look at the bi-monthly releases of user lists from major companies. This is why I think wide adoption of cryptocurrency is a bad idea. Complete computer security is nearly impossible (I want to say completely impossible but I'll end up in an endless debate about single use offline computers printing out paper wallets).

I think this is a disingenuous argument. Yes the vast majority of the IT field are not experts but if you don't hire one of these experts to secure your system, a system which is aiming to raise $12m, then you shouldn't be surprised when you get hacked.

Also, just because you're not an expert does not mean that you have any excuse to be completely clueless and make stupid mistakes.

Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#98
post #7

'Hacked' - or just stolen. Who could ever know in crypto-land? I am sure the ICO contract had something about lost coins in it as well.

Neither. They hacked the webpage and wrote a different address to send money to. Similar to me sending you a letter that I am Oxfam, please send me money. If only the crypto-currency world had laws and the institution of justice...

[deleted]

Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who ran a gas station convenience store for six years, I can tell you that this is not a universal truth. We did require a minimum purchase amount to accept cards, but we most certainly did not raise our prices in response to credit card fees.

So there's a party that takes n% of a big percentage of your purchases, yet that doesn't affect the prices? How?

Because handling cash is expensive too, so the transaction cost was probably already priced in.

Re: CoinDash’s ICO Website Has Been Hacked

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to pick up on this one small point: as I understand it, the cashback you get with a credit card is more or less taken straight from the card processing fee charged to the vendor, which of course, raises prices overall and is therefore not really cashback at all. Without the fee, you would likely have just paid a lower price in the first place. The only party benefitting from the cashback scheme is, of course, th…

> One of the hugely compelling benefits of cryptocurrencies is they entirely eliminate the necessity for such middlemen taking a cut and driving up costs for the parties actually partaking in the transaction. Don't all bitcoin transactions require a transaction fee in order to get processed these days?

One of the big things in the next couple of years is the development of Lightning Network, which requires the upcoming SegWit patches.

The basic protocol allows you to move bitcoins between two entities without putting every single transaction on the chain - only 2 blockchain transactions are needed for unlimited Lightning Network transactions.

Then, on top of this, there's a framework for moving money through the network - I send money to someone I have a Lightning Network payment channel with, they send it to someone they have a channel with, etc, until it gets to you. The great thing about this is that I can prove everyone isn't cheating, and if they are, I can immediately reverse my transaction - I haven't lost any money.

So the result of this is the creation of a network of payment channels which have very very low costs to process payments, aren't embedded in an industry that's difficult to get into (you or I could process payments just by joining the network), and have no ability to try and take a larger cut under the guise of a "points" or "cashback" system as you can easily switch to a different channel which takes a smaller cut.

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