Bitcoin exchanges are fraught with risks | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin exchanges are fraught with risks

reuters.com

64 pointspetethomas27 comments

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Wow, the article talks about Moolah facing fraud charges. That was a big deal in the Dogecoin community for awhile.

https://www.coindesk.com/former-dogecoin-exchange-ceo-faces-...

He's now a convicted rapist:

https://coinjournal.net/ryan-kennedy-convicted-rape-sentence...

You've also got the owner of the Dogecoin tipbot who stole a bunch of money:

https://gizmodo.com/reddit-users-lose-real-money-after-meme-...

What a fucked up industry.

> What a fucked up industry.

What industry isn't?

Yahoo CEO had fake credentials: http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-CEO-out/ind... He lied and accepted a salary. In my world, I define that as stealing.

Equifax CEO Richard Smith will collect 90M http://fortune.com/2017/09/26/equifax-ceo-richard-smith-net-... What a convenient time to retire.

Questionable morals of Uber CEO https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-ceo/uber-ceo-travis-...

And numerous other examples. Bad people are everywhere. Cryptocurrency is a new realm that combines tech with the economy at a different level and currently, it is like a big experiment. It might be an expensive experiment but the learnings are for sure gonna change the face of the internet.

> ceo fake credentials

no company his a ceo for his undergrad education, sadly. that's probably the nasty side effect of internal fights.

haha wow. How dismissive... This is an absurd reply.

Classic whataboutism.

Much of the serious damage has been done through social engineering of cell phone providers.

My choice for most interesting personal hack:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/12/20/hackers-ha... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13592402

He had kept it offline for most of the past several years, but had connected that device in recent weeks to move them somewhere more secure and sell some. Though he had locked it with a 30-character password, the hackers moved the coins off

At the exchange level, a highly recommended summary of the Mt Gox debacle was discussed recently:

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/09/17/kim-nilsson-... [video] | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272152

There have been hosting-provider-level breaches that might be more technically interesting (Linode 2012):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3654110 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3655137 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3655355

It's always interesting to see HN'ers publicly share here the degree to which they've personally invested in cryptocurrency (non-deletable, non-editable after 1 hour, plus whatever other restrictions). I wonder if HN is willing to delete accounts and/or some or all of their posts?

Edit: to be specific (for gtirloni's sake) - the unusual artificial limits of this site add additional exposure/risk to anyone painting a target on themself here, especially new users and/or years ago when Bitcoin was worth nearly nothing.

I bought 1.5 right around $2500 because I had the money and was willing to lose it. I figured worse case scenario it's a lifetime supply of scratch off lottery tickets in one shot :)

Sold it in one transaction right around $4700, so a nice return. Never buying any more unless it drops below $2k, I think.

What's interesting about that and why would HN care if people are sharing private details of their life willingly?

It's that people should be a lot safer and aware.

I've seen a guy brag about his cryptocurrency stash, and if you went through his post history he'd also talked about where he lived and his profession. If he leaked any other details (through HN or crossreferencing other sites), he might be a really vulnerable target and not even realize it.

There are easier targets...

I bet you that someone could write a program to deanonymize most people posting on the internet, and then cross correlate with claims about high roller stuff.

Ah ok. I thought there was something special about cryptocurrency but I understand, it the usual bragging and attracting criminals. Thanks.

He kept 750 coins on an exchange? That's surely asking for trouble, granted it's shouldn't happen that he would lose anything but given the industry and their reputation then I would thought minimizing exposure on exchanges may be prudent

I love bitcoin articles. It's like ringing the bell for the cows to come home.

I'll let you fine folks tell us all why the risks are no big deal and this is just another piece of the conspiracy against BTC.

This is good for Bitcoin.

It's the early days-- there are already "non-custodial" exchanges-- shapeshift and changelly.... and atomic swaps are just starting to be experimented with. When lightening network exchanges and atomic swaps and side chains are all perfected in 1-5 years much of the exchange risk will be gone.

>shapeshift and changelly

Those are more like brokers rather than exchanges or "non-custodial" exchanges as you called them.

This site is unusable on mobile. As soon as the scroll effects kick in the whole browser locks up and scrolling has to be done with a four second delay; when the article is 40% advertisements on mobile, I'm only going to reload the article so many times before I just give up. I don't want to be a part of this new internet anymore, everything is going to shit.

I'm sorry to hear that but if you on mobile you should try the app materialistic

Rayed

Cryptocurrency anarchists find anarchy less than appealing when it happens to them.

That's just the vocal minority.

>Cryptocurrency anarchists

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by that? Or is it a proxy-word for anarcho-capitalist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-anarchism

If it is, as an anarchy-capitalist, I'm pretty happy with the ecosystem-- without government control, we have seen a lot of the worst people, including hacks and thefts, yes, and those make the systems and software stronger-- because we have a lot of good people, and a genuine meritocracy without gatekeepers keeping out everyone but the well connected.

My thoughts exactly, the space has seen considerable growth... and yes, there's some bad stuff but the market gets smarter and less vulnerable with time. It's overall a large win imo.

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