It is funny how many people think it is over for bitcoin. Yes, bitcoins are down 50% from the top, but fundmanetals havent changed. It cryptoalgorithm is still rock solid. Exchanges will become more sophisticated and I see only bright future for bitcoin or any other crypto currency
can you explain more how it can not be hacked or replicated?
i have mixed feelings about bitcoins. bitcoins have a phenomenal potential in and of itself, but i have my reservations that it might have similar results as tulips in a few years. the street needs to be kept dark to some extent. imo full transparency demotivates high bracket earners. also in light of recent rumors at mt gox worries me too.
Bitcoin wasn’t hacked. The bank holding them was hacked. If little 7th 2nd 1st Bank of Omaha gets robbed, do you say the US dollar has been attacked and debased?
It can’t be replicated because every btc has a unique identifier. What happened at Mt. Gox was someone hacked their exchange to be able to withdrawal the same btc twice (or more). That was a flaw with Mt. Gox and has nothing to do with bitcoin. When people wanted to withdrawal their (real) btc, Mt. Gox found it was short by about $400,000,000. That’s a hell of a scam, but a failure on the exchange’s part. Has nothing to do with the security of btc itself.
Well if tomorrow we wake up to find JP Morgan just disappear into thin air I think people would be concerned about the US dollar.
People should treat bitcoins like they treat art/collector’s items/etc but with a slightly more efficient trading platform. Nothing else to get hyped up about.
There is a market for everything… according to reddit even human poop
No, but your funds in the 7th 2nd 1st Bank of Omaha are FDIC insured. The Bitcoin folks, whoever they are, don’t want government “interference”, so no FDIC insurance.
That’s an insurance issue, not an issue with the security of the currency. I’d venture that bitcoin is actually one of the most secure currencies around. Can’t really counterfeit it, nothing like that. Pretty solid.
Will people find ways to steal them? Sure. Like they’ve been doing with every other currency since the dawn of man.
I’m no bitcoin advocate, but my concerns aren’t with the security of the currency.
where did i say it was hacked? i was asking a question
That’s the main issue that arisen from all this. As much as btc folks don’t want any regulations around their currency, there needs to be a safe way to trade it. Since many btc advocates are staunch free market anarcho-capitalists, they’ll likely use this Mt. Gox incident as a learning tool. They’ll now believe other exchanges will become more secure and those that prove themselves to be so will gain the support of the community. (Mt. Gox, btw, was having problems months ago. People saw this coming a long way away.)
Others, those that jumped on the btc bandwagon much more recently and view it as a speculative investment, will want some sort of oversight. They’re not part of the core believers. They may not be wrong, but they’re basically going against what btc is all about.
That’s a very difficult question to answer and I’ll give you the same response I’ve given in multiple other threads here. How can the Internet be hacked?
This is a serious question. The Internet can’t be “hacked.” It doesn’t make any sense. Bitcoin is the same premise. Asking how btc cannot be hacked doesn’t actually make any sense.
Edit: Of course, it can be stolen, lost, defrauded, etc. But there’s no such thing as hacking bitcoin.
But if the # of bitcoins is always a known figure how can Mt Gox not realize that?
Don’t they have a full inventory listing of who owns them?
If there were only 100 apples in the world and people started exchanging apples for oranges with me and how the hell can I end up with 105 apples?
double post
Mt Gox doesn’t have ALL the bitcoins. They just have whatever has been deposited.
When you deposit money in your bank, do you think there is a $20 bill with a specific serial number attached to that deposit? Of course not. I assume Gox worked the same, just a pool of coins.
We’re talking about a really shady organization at best, so I wouldn’t be surprised if their books were not much more advanced than Excel. I doubt they had a audit function or a risk management group looking at this sort of thing. It was really a bunch of losers that got rich quick. They had no idea what they were doing.
But if the # of bitcoins is always a known figure how can Mt Gox not realize that?
They do and so does everyone else. It is, in theory, possible to track down every stolen btc. Problem is, it seems likely this was going on for a very long time with very small amounts (think Office Space scam) and the btc have been distributed all over the earth by now. But, if someone really wanted to do so, they could actually track them all down. That’s what the blockchain is for.
Don’t they have a full inventory listing of who owns them?
No. Btc owners are anonymous. While the transactions are completely transparent - http://blockchain.info/ - who is actually holding them is basically impossible to tell. Each btc has two codes. One is a public key that anyone can see and the other is the private key that the owner holds. No one knows for sure what exactly happened at Mt. Gox, but let’s assume some guys had 10,000 btc stored there. They then hacked Mt. Gox and as they made small withdrawals they received their btc and put them away somewhere else while Mt. Gox never registered the transaction and assumed the btc was still there. Done over a long time, Mt. Gox realized they were $400mm short.
If there were only 100 apples in the world and people started exchanging apples for oranges with me and how the hell can I end up with 105 apples?
I think the above answers this, but remember a btc is only a code. The guys that stole the real btc have the apples. Mt. Gox thought they still had them, but it’s not like they can go check the store room and count them. Their computers were telling them they were their (the hacking).
Lots of this is speculation. But I think it’s pretty close to what happened. Mt. Gox just wasn’t that secure and somone pulled off a brilliant heist. $400mm? That’s got to be one of the biggest scores of all time.
cleared up in post above
That’s actually all there is. It’s just the public key, which could be thought of as a serial number.
Why is this Karpeles guy still in Japan? His goose is cooked. I figured he’d be deep in the Peruvian rainforest by now.
So when you deposit, did you keep your specific key, or did you just get assigned a random key from the Gox pool when you withdrew? If you did keep your specific key, then this should be much easier to figure out earlier in the scam. In other words, these guys may be even more incompetent than I thought.
I’ve never owned a btc or had any dealings with Mt. Gox. Just an interested party. But, yes, each btc has its own key and it never changes. Since it was an exchange and transactions were happening so frequently, I assume you would not get your same btc back when you withdrew. This is where the bank analogy probably works. The $20 bill you deposited isn’t going to be the same one you get back. Otherwise Mt. Gox would just be a large safe for btc. Since they were exchanging them for other currencies I seriously doubt you’d get the same one back.
Edit: I misspoke earlier and need to clarify something. It’s your wallet that has a public and private key, not the btc itself. The btc does have a unique identifier though, just like a serial number. The wallet system is pretty cool really. You can publish your public key and people can deposit btc directly with you…for completely legal stuff of course.