Posted on 03/04/2014 8:42:51 AM PST by Izzy Dunne
On March 2nd 2014 Flexcoin was attacked and robbed of all coins in the hot wallet. The attacker made off with 896 BTC, dividing them into these two addresses:
1NDkevapt4SWYFEmquCDBSf7DLMTNVggdu
1QFcC5JitGwpFKqRDd9QNH3eGN56dCNgy6
As Flexcoin does not have the resources, assets, or otherwise to come back from this loss, we are closing our doors immediately. Users who put their coins into cold storage will be contacted by Flexcoin and asked to verify their identity. Once identified, cold storage coins will be transferred out free of charge. Cold storage coins were held offline and not within reach of the attacker. All other users will be directed to Flexcoin's "Terms of service" located at "Flexcoin.com/118.html" a document which was agreed on, upon signing up with Flexcoin.
Flexcoin will attempt to work with law enforcement to trace the source of the hack.
Updates will be posted on twitter as soon as they become available.
First, stop being so serious.
Second, you can buy them on margin and you can short them. Just not everywhere, only a couple of exchanges.
Your points indicate your understanding of the bitcoin protocol is pretty weak. You might want to read up.
“No. No way is Bitcoin being systematically taken down. No way. It’s still a great investment. Hurry and get in while you still can make millions!
-Nigerian Prince Al Awabi”
- And lots of other FREEPers
“Starting my own currency called ‘Poop Coin’. Buy in soon while supplies last.”
Really a good idea in its own right, sadly it’s not virtual enough to be hip right how. Now, VirtualPoopCoin, you might have something then!
I hope it works out for you.
Gosh, another flaw to work on.
I never said you can't buy bitcoins on margin.
I have no idea if you can or can't.
If you tell me that bitcoin futures and options and short sales can be transacted in foreign countries, I believe you.
But why any investor would accept that kind of counter party risk is beyond my understanding, or interest.
In the USA, last time I checked, options, futures, and short sales are regulated by state and federal agencies.
Please send me the links to any USA based bitcoin exchanges that offer options, futures, or short sales.
I took your advice and “read up.”
Still reads like the first time I read it.
The bitcoin maximum is 21 million.
Thus, if the supply of bitcoins is reduced, the price of each remaining bitcoin will go up, unless demand changes.
As to stolen bitcoins - everyone seems to agree that each bitcoin has a public chain of transaction addresses.
Once a bitcoin is flagged as “stolen,” who is going to accept it?
That sounds like a good question, but it's not. You need to read more, but here it is in a nutshell. There is no such thing as a flag in the chain. (BTW, there is only one chain or ledger with all the coins, i.e. unspent amounts, in it). The only thing that can be stolen is a private key. Of course it can't be stolen, only copied.
The only recourse when your private key is read by an intruder of some sort is for you to use that private key to sign a transaction to transfer all the coins under that private key to another public/private key in your possession.
The miners who add the transactions to the ledger chain simply add all valid transactions (i.e. with inputs being unspent amounts). If your transaction is first, it is valid and kept in the chain. If not, you are SOL and lost those amounts.
As I said there is no flag or room in the data for a "stolen" flag or any other flag. More importantly there is no authority whatsoever to set such a flag. If a miner or group of miners did that somehow, their garbage flag or any other invalid data would be ignored by all other miners. The only exception would be 51% of miners doing it, but that's not going to happen.
However, both essays I read on this, the first two (unsponsored) hits on Google by the way, say that each bitcoin can be traced back to the original block chain, or, the “Genesis Block” as one author expressed it.
Let's put this discussion back in the real world.
FlexCoin wrote this on their website:
“On March 2nd 2014 Flexcoin was attacked and robbed of all coins in the hot wallet. The attacker made off with 896 BTC, dividing them into these two addresses:
“1NDkevapt4SWYFEmquCDBSf7DLMTNVggdu
“1QFcC5JitGwpFKqRDd9QNH3eGN56dCNgy6”
Now, if I understand your explanation:
(1) There is no way to verify that FlexCoin ever possessed 896 bitcoins, and there is no way to verify they were stolen.
(2) The two addresses where the allegedly stolen bitcoins were deposited cannot be flagged.
(3) Merchants, exchanges, and other traders will continue to do business with those two addresses, even though FlexCoin claims they are full of stolen bitcoins.
My next question is obvious:
Why would any rational person invest one penny in a market like that?
The first address you typed was transacted here: https://blockchain.info/address/1NDkevapt4SWYFEmquCDBSf7DLMTNVggdu and you can easily click and follow it into a large exchange where it was probably turned into some other money. Any investigator with half a brain could do this too. Merchants or exchanges or anyone else at the receiving end of a transaction do not get to "choose" who they want to do business with since, as I pointed out, there is no flag, and secondlm most of it is automated, nobody decides anything.
Why would any rational person invest one penny in a market like that?
Nobody is investing. There are quite a few speculators who are hoping for a lot more commerce to drive up the demand for bitcoins. There are geeks who just like it for the elegance and mining lottery. The rest of the early adopters like me recognize that this is the future of digital commerce. There are huge productivity improvements already in having a worldwide staff of programmers willing to do small tasks for small amounts of coin. That will blossom into much more worldwide digital commerce even without any exchanges and their ubiquitous speculators.
Very hard for me to understand why.
What exactly is wrong with today's digital commerce?
In my own case, I don't see how it could be any simpler or less expensive.
Most of my bills are paid automatically by my credit card, and the rest are paid by a one second swipe.
All my income is on direct deposit.
I wrote one check in the last two years, for my new Drivers License.
My checking account is free.
My credit card is free and gives cash back each month.
Not one account holder at my bank has lost one penny in the last 80 years.
Why would I want to change something this simple, this reliable, and this transparent?
I also can't imagine what advantage merchants would see in bitcoins.
It would be too dangerous to have a bitcoin account because anyone with superior technology could make all your money disappear.
And, on the opposite end, there would be the perpetual risk of civil lawsuits claiming you accepted stolen bitcoins, plus the perpetual risk of criminal indictment for laundering stolen bitcoins.
Bitcoin may be the future for tax evasion and drug money, but for everything else, I don't get it.
Ah, that's the rub. The income of the future will be small amounts of bitcoin for each small amount of work. You will work when you want on what you want. It will be much more difficult to make the equivalent of a big salary but it will be more rewarding in the long since productivity is its own reward.
It would be too dangerous to have a bitcoin account because anyone with superior technology could make all your money disappear.
The chain and the mining is engineered for maximum simplicity although some complexity is needed to meet performance requirements. There is simply no superior technology that can make money disappear. The money disappears only in accounts where people are trying to cash in for dollars (i.e. greed). In fact bitcoin penalizes greed. If you are not greedy you are safe.
there would be the perpetual risk of civil lawsuits claiming you accepted stolen bitcoins, plus the perpetual risk of criminal indictment for laundering stolen bitcoins.
Without meaning to, you are thinking like a statist. The statists hate the idea of not keeping everyone perfectly safe even though they always fail miserably at it. They automatically assume everyone is greedy (like they are) when in fact bitcoin was invented by people with an egalitarian mindset. Bitcoin is a perfect way to say you support someone's work personally and politically, whereas the statists prefer liberal-minded regimented corporations or employment by the state,
Most of all the state wants to know and control everything because they believe that is the only way to combat criminality. But many criminals actually do better in the system which devolves into anarcho-tyranny.
I should not have let that slide by. Account holders have gone from $100 in purchasing power to about $6 in those 80 years.
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