Users report losing Bitcoin in clever hack of Electrum wallets

I don’t get it. Why should anyone be thankful that they lost bitcoins, simply because the software was free? I really dislike this trend of absolving free software of literally any quality standards whatsoever. Don’t act entitled, sure, but you’re doing no one any favors by refusing to even express desire for better quality.

If you're going to be so negligent that you don't care to design your free product in such a way that it doesn't let people's money get stolen so easily, it's better not to release at all.

Complicated security vulnerabilities, I get. It's tough. But just the basic thought to inform someone that a message is not from the Electrum "team" would be nice.

It's unreasonable to expect everyone to read every bit source code of all open (or closed) source software they use.

If I were to use Linux for free, and in this imaginary world all of the sudden I had my banking credentials stolen from a similar lack of care, I think I'd be justifiably upset.

Should the people who lost money be thankful they got to use Electrum in the first place?

So does that extend to publishing text without software? No one is forced to believe my free phishing message right? Or my free advice about drinking arsenic to cure cancer?

It is a growing trend to annotate the readme of an open source repo with a kind of statement of confidence. "This is code I'm not vouching for but want to share because it may be useful to others" and "this is my open source project that I consider to be production ready and will tie my reputation to" are very different things.

This was very obviously the second, so ethical duties involving lying to people for your own benefit and concepts of due diligence clearly come in to play.

And even if this makes no sense in your ethical system, at least be aware that people think that way and will remember your name in these kinds of circumstances even if they have no legal recourse.

Can you please not take HN threads on flamewar tangents, and please not post in the flamewar style? Some of your comments have crossed into incivility, or at least testiness. That has a degrading effect on discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Seems pretty hacky to me.

"Electrum is prone to fishing"

If you walked into your bank and someone in the lobby told you complete your transaction at a (fake) bank next door, would you say the bank was hacked?

It is unlikely anyone lost 200 BTC, we can't say for sure because Bitcoin wallets are pseudonymous. But what happened is that someone received a lot of BTC from a lot of different wallets.

I would hope that someone who owns 200 BTC would put a little thought into how to secure it and would not be affected by this hack.

For example:

1. Paying for a VPN, VPS, mail, domains or other digital goods.

2. Paying for physical goods. I usually buy via the Swedish sites webhallen and inet for example.

3. Dark net markets.

4. EatBCH charity which give food to Venezuelans.

5. Cam sites accepting Bitcoin. First search result: https://www.bestwebcamsites.com/bitcoin-cam-sites

Drugs?

One of the Czech biggest online shops (alza.cz) is accepting bitcoin and litecoin as well.

> there's barely been a pickup in the dissent

Many people who were wrong about the dot-com bubble still think they were right. Some external agent just screwed them.

People don't tend to change their views about stuff like cryptocurrencies. The best we can expect is a wealth transfer to saner minds.

The ecosystem is gathering a lot of contributors and researchers. A lot of the issues revolving around tools, infrastructure, scaling, security, user experience have various solutions in development, which are expected to come to fruition in (roughly) the next 2 years.

Bitcoin is 10 years old and may or may not be broken depending on the end use case, but that isn't the only crypto/ blockchain project. For you to center the conversation around those arguments shows you're not very informed on the topic.

A lot of developmental progress in the ecosystem with models/architectures, tools, and infrastructure hasn't happened until recently (past year, give or take).

Bitcoin is yesterday but look at Ethereum. You can now trade dollar backed tokens issued by fully regulated banks for the cost of an Ethereum transaction. This lets you use smart contracts backed by US dollars, or write contracts to trade US dollars for other currencies. The writing is on the wall, more regulated tokens are on the way. Public stocks to municipal bonds. Why wouldn't people want to cut out the middle man?

They're a hedge against a particular kind of collapse of society - one in which the currency collapses (hyperinflation) or the nation-state backing the currency collapses (revolution/coup/regime change/tyranny, followed by asset seizures). If everybody is shooting each other and there's no food in the stores, you're fucked regardless of how many Bitcoin you own. If there's a nuclear attack and the electrical grid is knocked out, your Bitcoin isn't going to be accessible. But if the hard assets & businesses are mostly functional but just don't know how much they're going to get paid tomorrow because the value of a dollar is 1/4 what it was today, Bitcoin is pretty handy. And if the government decrees that the bank accounts of certain persons who are politically opposed to it are now property of the government, Bitcoin is pretty handy.

While I think a number of Bitcoin maximalists have the former couple scenarios in mind, and agree that their beliefs are illogical, the latter two scenarios are actually much, much more common in recent history. Think of Zimbabwe or Venezuela in the present day, Greece in the financial crisis, Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Latin America seemingly every decade since the 1950s, or China during the Cultural Revolution. Bitcoin could've saved lives and fortunes for many of the people affected by these. Indeed, it's held up fairly well for people in Venezuela and Zimbabwe, the two countries to face major currency crises since Bitcoin's invention.

you are comparing apples to oranges.

cash is a physical entity, though -- i'm not sure there's a parallel to be drawn there

I wouldn't advocate going to a 100% cash-only system either in 2018, and neither would any other reasonable individual

> most people

I’m pretty sure GP isn’t trying to say that everyone should use Bitcoin. The thing that gets annoying is that there is a crowd that campaigns this, and then other people (particularly in this comment section) fight back saying nobody should use Bitcoin.

The obvious fact which I feel is somehow being overlooked here is that different people have different needs and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to banking today.

tell people not to use a merchant that has no operating capital, can't deliver, and has poor OPSEC

multisig escrow is a solution that works and a lot of people use for years, requires the service provider have their own resources and capital to fulfill the delivery of goods.

not a solution for everyone, but a solution for many.

> Wasn't the DAO rolled back?

The beauty of The DAO was that it wasn't even a hack or an attack. It was merely somebody cleverly exploiting a loophole in the contract everybody agreed to. After all in crypto-utopia "Code Is Law" and there is no interpretation of a contract outside of the code. The irony is the only actual theft that occurred was the ethereum devs rolling back the contract to save their own asses.

The DAO single handedly proved that the blockchain is fully mutable and is certainly not trustless or censorship resistant. Hanging your hat on any blockchain requires you to trust the developers and miners to do you well. And if they don't... good luck getting your voice heard.