Posted on 02/13/2014 7:20:59 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The same bug that has plagued several of the biggest players in the Bitcoin economy may have just bitten the Silk Road.
On Thursday, one of the recently-reincarnated drug-selling black market site’s administrators posted a long announcement to the Silk Road 2.0 forums admitting that the site had been hacked by one of its sellers, and its reserve of Bitcoins belonging to both the users and the site itself stolen. The admin, who goes by the name “Defcon,” blamed the same “transaction malleability” bug in the Bitcoin protocol that led to several of the cryptocurrency’s exchanges halting withdrawals in the previous week.
“I am sweating as I write this… I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community: We have been hacked,” Defcon wrote. “Our initial investigations indicate that a vendor exploited a recently discovered vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol known as “transaction malleability” to repeatedly withdraw coins from our system until it was completely empty.”(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
How about running our elections online? These people can be in charge since obama’s pals are still busy trying to figure out the obamacare website.
“What Really Backs the U.S. Dollar? ...”
The ability of the US to service it’s debt and collect taxes. IOW’s the faith of the marketplace.
Nothing. Fake money, worth whatever people who like owning fake things make it. And apparently easy to steal. And created out of nothing. Backed by nothing. And could become worthless without anybody losing face or caring, except those who own it.
Which makes it different than money issued by a government, since the government has a stake in keeping the value of its currency, while the bitcoin people just had to make their money selling it, and now they can move on and leave worthless bits in their wake.
The libertarians and anarchists are turning on each other.
I'll bet you all the bitcoin's in China the NSA was absolutely involved in it. Can't have the USA's faux currency being undermined you know!
If I were NSA, and concerned about hawala as a method of anonymously transferring money to finance terrorism and/or drug / sex / counterfeit trafficking / "sensitive" information trade or valuta exchange, I might think of creating a seemingly anonymous, encrypted channel that I could monitor and control, given the availability of the best cryptoanalysts / hackers and "backdoors" in some of the most widely available encryption software (e.g., RSA).
Making an encrypted P2P protocol is laughably trivial today - just look at the multitude of other "coins" popping out of aether. A little bit of word-of-mouth promotion and... voilà! That should redirect significant amounts of all kinds of hawala to the "captive" channel of Bitcoin economy. It could even be self-financing with the nice profit on the scheme, so no taxpayer financing or disclosure is necessary.
Now, since the real "owner" / "controller" of the scheme must remain incognito, how do we name him/her/them? What if we also leave an "Easter egg" hidden in plain sight?
But that's just me... Or is this a wee bit too Pelican Brief?
Nope ... a darn fine walk-through of your scenario I might add.
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