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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

> Www.bitomat.pl service is on sale for EUR 17,000 BTC

What?

That was my reaction as well. Not just the fact that it's ambiguous whether they're trying to sell for 17k EUR or 17k BTC, but the fact that they're even trying to sell it at all, and then the buyer is presumably on the hook for the BTC that were lost as well!

I currently had ~13 BTC in my Bitomat account- when I login they correctly show my balance, so I'm slightly confused as apparently their database wasn't lost, but their wallet data was? How does that happen? And why was the wallet data not backed up on a non-EC2 instance?

All of this is making me lose some faith in the exchanges- between the MtGox BS and this, is TradeHill the only exchange that can be trusted? Can they even be trusted? It seems they are by far the most competent from a technical perspective, but at this point who wants to trust any of these exchanges with any significant amount of money?

I don't understand how this is news to people. Bitcoin was designed to be a secure, distributed, anonymous country. What do you expect to happen when you stop relying on Bitcoin to store your money and start relying on some random Polish webapp?

Like many 'random Polish web apps' this one was among the top in its class. Poland has world-class software talent, please don't downplay it.

Didn't mean to disparage Polish software development; just was assuming the average user of the site wasn't Polish, leaving them even less legal security— which I see, glancing at the site now, was wrong. So apologies to any offended.

With that said, I think you could pick a better site to be the shining beacon of Poland's world class talent than the site that just lost a bunch of people's money because the only place they were keeping it was on a single EC2 instance store. If this is the top, I'm not sure I wanna see the rest of the class.

> just was assuming the average user of the site wasn't Polish, leaving them even less legal security

People should get rid of that "poland is europe's mexico" notion. It's the EU - you have the same legal security as in the UK, France or Germany.

These particular developers, though, were probably not world-class. Data this important simply should not be lost due to trouble with an EC2 instance; any data on an EC2 instance, even on EBS (though somewhat less so for EBS) should be considered liable to vanish at any moment.

> EUR 17,000 BTC

EUR here is just some strange artifact of google translate

> Serwis www.bitomat.pl zostaje wystawiony na sprzedaż za kwotę 17000 BTC.

translates to:

> Www.bitomat.pl service is on sale for EUR 17,000 BTC.

Maybe they don't say EUR much in polish and they used a "for money" kind of phrase and gtranslate was being "helpful."

Yea- why would BTC translate to BTC, but "kwote" translates to EUR?

Google Translate is heuristics-based, and can occasionally produce strange results. For instance, when translating Irish-language text, it will sometimes translate Baile Ath Cliath (Irish for Dublin, the capital of Ireland) to London, the capital of the UK.

This is likely because its corpus for Irish is made up largely of Irish government documents (all Irish govt documents are translated into Irish, but Irish isn't used by many people and there's not all that much else written in it), and these documents are rather similar to British civil service documents.

"kwote" means "amount"

you could translate that "za kwote" snippet as: ... for sale for the amount of 17k BTC.

Exactly, they screwed up big time by not knowing one of the fundamental things about EC2, now they're trying to sell the thing, and they can't decide on a currency on top of that?

However, it looks like the original page says BTC, so it looks like just a translation error.

Given the price they're selling for I assume they'd use that money to refund the funds from the lost wallet.

That'd be a very dangerous assumption for anyone considering the purchase.

A user's bitcoin "wallet" is really their private key. It seems they didn't lose their database, so they still have a record of how many bitcoins each user should have, but they don't have access to those coins.

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