Bitcoin Mining Service NiceHash Says Hackers Emptied Its Wallet | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Mining Service NiceHash Says Hackers Emptied Its Wallet

bloomberg.com

52 pointsrayuela15 comments

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Earlier discussion can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613

When I hear about something like this, I always think: "Insider's Job." Sorry, can't help it!

True. Founders risk tolerance may have been such that they looked at current $BTC price and decided this was it.

Can anyone guesstimate what they were profiting? Compare that to a $62m payday.

Reddit says they were making about $500K a day in mining fees.

What prevents them from keep mining?

Downtime, lack of trust from users, etc.

There's nothing wrong with thinking that as a possibility when this comes up!

Not sure anything new in this story from the one discussed four hours earlier (70+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613

The official press release was on reddit, submitted but with no comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/7i0s6o/official_p...

A handful (5) of comments on the earliest related submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863306

I don't know too much about bitcoin but am I reading this correctly that they had $60 million in ONE wallet?

Wouldn't it be wise to have part of this money in several "offline" wallets or something?

Apparently the reasoning is that this would cut fees on transferring money. Instead of transferring it from wallet to wallet, which would incur fees, they keep it all in one wallet, and change internal numbers.

I was just wondering, given the record prices - how soon will we hear about a hack? And here we are.

Though I wonder why the announcement says:

> We are working to verify the precise number of BTC taken.

While the article says:

> A wallet address circulated by NiceHash users shows that more than $60 million of bitcoins might be affected, according to CoinDesk, the cryptocurrency research and news website.

There is no official announcement on the BTC taken, but reddit users have been passing around a wallet that suddenly got $60m recently

It will be interesting to see if, when, and how they try to move all that crypto-loot. I'd be surprised if BTC/USD didn't start falling in anticipation of increased supply (and hopefully some healthy trepidation regarding the state of Bitcoin security), since Bitcoin is still the main source of liquidity between crypto and fiat.

I'm not very familiar with how crypto currencies work but when such an incident happens, how hopeful can the company be that they will get their BTC's back?

Transactions are irreversible. That's basically the entire point. They'll only get the coins back if the thieves are caught, haven't spent them, and give them up.

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