BitCoin fraud, theft
 

Anyone who loses their wallet.dat file has no way of recovering the Bitcoins it contains, since the currency has no central authority to appeal to. One Bitcoin early-adopter discovered just how painful this can be when they lost 25,000 Bitcoins to a hacking attack - worth around $500,000 at the time of the theft.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/on...ts-are-on.html

i don't get this whole bitcoin thing...

they should contact their local police department or internet cyber crimes division.

Anyone who loses their wallet has no way of recovering the dollars it contains.....

:warning is that for real, where to sell that?:2 cents:

There were a few bitcoin threads on GFY lately, so I guess it's for real :pimp

no way will it ever become a serious payment medium

too volatile right now. in the time you find someone to exchange them they could be worthless.

Me either.

.

think ben bernake replaced by a dungeon master and adam smith by gary gygax.

WOW gold is more stable and won't get hammered by the governments around the world and though Bitcoins are worth more now, they won't be for long...:winkwink:

Why would anyone keep $500,000 in any account like that? Shit I never keep over $100 in my Paypal.

Probably because the value is so volatile. A year ago 25,000BTC was worth fuck all. Can you imagine a modest investment growing by 100 or 1,000 times in a year or two? I guess he got caught by greed (and a little stupidity by not properly securing his wallet)

The other catch with wallets is that it doesn't need to be a CURRENT copy in order for someone to take over and send your BTC to somewhere else. If you throw out a HD that has an obscure backup of a wallet from 3 years ago, and some or all of those coins have not yet been spent by you, whoever acquires that old wallet can get at them.

It's relatively easy to get started with bitcoins but there's a lot to get your head around. Security is possibly the most important part, since you cannot have an authority reverse a fraudulent transaction, yet many people are probably blissfully unaware of what can happen if you don't secure your wallet.

the money was most likely stolen with the aid of the bitcoin wallet targeting tojan making the rounds.

plus there is the problem of finding enough people to make the conversions into real currency.

if you loose cash - it's most likely gone

if someone hacking into my bank account, puts fraudulent charges on my cc = covered.

if someone hacks my bitcoin wallet = not covered.

they need to contact somebody

I really dont understand about bitcoin

At what point, if ever, does bitcoin become currency?

Or is it more of a way to track bartering? Would someone pay a designer in 500 bitcoin who would turn around and give it to their host to cover their monthly cost and so-on?

I take it there is no way to cash out for government currency? Or is there?

This is how it works:

For each new transaction you can generate new unique address. If both clients use unique, only known to them addresses, you won't be able to track where exactly those bitcoins went after you've sent them, and with such you won't be able to trace any other transactions.

If whoever you send bitcoins and their receiving parties use single addresses, made publicly available, then these coins could be traced and know to whom they went.

there are exchanges to cash out bitcoins into real currency but after the biggest exchange (90% of all the transactions) got hacked last week and their database of passwords dumped online they are shut down for now, as is the second biggest exchange.

but with valuations of bitcoins oscillating so wildly - from 0 to 30 now down to 0 today - i can't see how you effectively price anything in bt until the price stabilizes somewhat, which wont happen for a very very long time.

any intermediary medium of exchange is per definition money. people are already using bitcoins to pay hosting bills, domain registrations, designers etc

Yeah, I would put 450,000 on a USB-memory and burn it out on CDs and just keep it in the closet.

Coming soon no doubt: a trojan that hunts your hard drive sectors for the footprints of a deleted wallet.dat file. As I mentioned above, an updated wallet doesn't supercede any previous copies, so an older version may still let an attacker clear you out.

Bitcoin is doomed anyway... my opinion.

fixed this for you

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Bitcoins area cool idea, but I dont' think they'll stick for this reason and a few others.

I dont get the whole twitter thing, but yep there it is.

:2 cents:

C'mon, no one's come up with a joke about the cyber police backtracing the transactions? It's perfect for bitcoins! :1orglaugh

bitcoin is bullshit :2 cents:

bitcoin in the people's currency.