I for one am glad to see this happening now, rather than later. Odd though, that the compromised account held 1/13th of the entire stock of bitcoins. Too much market power. .... Is this technically a crime? What has been stolen other than data?
These thieves better cash in their BITCOINS quickly before there heist is worth nothing. After reading several different articles, it seems more like someone is just trying to bring down the online currency rather than steal for a cash gain. The more you read, the more bitcoin problems start to be reviled.
Bitcoinchannel shows live chart as the hack was taking place. Just imagine watching this chart drop if you owned hundreds if not thousands of bitcoins [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1X6qQt9ONg[/youtube]
I am not sure this is completely accurate as one of the large transactions that is being reported as the trade that initiated the crash is also being claimed to be Mt.Gox moving its cache of Bitcoins to a different wallet to protect them. What is starting to become apparent is how linked a lot of the big players are.. with many threads being removed from forum.bitcoins.org for criticising Mt.Gox and their security and also not mentioning the hack earlier (has been rumoured for several days now). One of the threads mentioning the threads being removed that I was going to link to has now been removed too.. :/ They didn't really get any Bitcoins, that's the point. They logged in to Mt.Gox to carry out the trade but Mt.Gox has a $1000 daily cash out limit so they weren't able to extract much from the site. Mt.Gox kind of works like a bank in that it stores a balance of your Bitcoins.. which you trade. Unlike the ~25000 Bitcoins that were taken off a single user several days ago, this issue is largely isolated to Mt.Gox, that is why Mt.Gox are planning to rollback the transactions.. as they didn't lose a large amount of coins and the problem is isolated to their site. Once again, these aren't really Bitcoin problems, they are people trusting a centralised service problems (but I guess this all comes back to Bitcoins dependance on centralised services!). -edit- Great video of the crash Rubbing Elbows, cheers for posting Stay tuned today/tomorrow for when Mt.Gox returns and reverses the transactions... I am guessing there will be a second crash to mimic the first
I liked this Peter Schiff interview from the other day: Donald Norman, co-founder of Bitcoin Consultancy, on why an online digital currency is the monetary system of the future [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTr_hTC90oQ[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUxyr7cI0Zw[/youtube]
