“My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”
twitter.com
twitter.com
These things happen every day, but happening to a core developer (if confirmed!) who has a deep understanding of the systems and security indicates just how fragile crypto can be (in my opinion)
Soon you will see people saying you should have done this or that complicated thing, or how somebody so smart could should have known better.
No matter what they say it is never enough. This is why lack of consumer protections suck.
He might be a bitcoin core Dev but does he use ledger/trezor etc?
Is his PGP key on his hardrive or a smartcard?
In this day and age your computer not a bastion it once was. (It never really was but it's more of a problem in 2022 than 1982).
The system needs to be tolerant of failures and faults of multiple natures. And cryptocurrency is very intolerant or many types of failures and faults.
So why is crypto the only thing getting attention?
> Soon you will see people saying you should have done this or that complicated thing
and you answer:
> Is his PGP key on his hardrive or a smartcard?
you're proving their point.
I would assume that if you are a major player in the bitcoin world, you should do complicated things to secure yourself.
Its sort of like if someone wins the lottery, and tells the world they are putting the money under their mattress in their home. Its not unreasonable to say that such a person faces more risk than an ordinary person and should install an alarm system or something.
The Bitcoin model is broken. It very intentionally got rid of all the institutions that regulate and control finance, and in doing so, it got rid of everything that protects regular people from the wolves. The regular people aren't up to the task of protecting themselves, and they regularly show it. The model is broken.
But to the specific point, there is no model that fully takes this into account. There is no model that puts risk to zero. There will always be adversaries that can attack you if the payoff is large enough. There will always be people with increased risk exposure who have to take special precautions because the effort/reward calculus makes sense for malicious people to attack them.
The reason bitcoin sucks is not because its model includes such situations; it sucks because the bar for someone to be the type of person who has to care about such things in bitcoin is so much lower than in traditional banking.
If you don't take up the easy convenient solution to your problem that's on you.
Hopefully this is a starting red flag for the bitcoin Dev team to implement hardware wallet support.
That's the absurd confirmation bias going on in this thread.
Cryptos piffy catchphrase is be your own bank. you can own security far beyond a bank vault for like £40 if you get a ledger nano...
Agreed, and the problem is that this is a feature. Without that feature of a lack of central control, Bitcoin's main use case is invalid.
Internet security is 99% "nobody gives enough damn to do it".
This is my opinion of the entire software industry.
Chrome exploits, iPhone hacks, etc. These are nearly trillion dollar companies. If they can't do it then nobody can. Something is fundamentally broken.
People have touted capability-based security, but I don't think that's the answer, at least for consumer devices (phones and not-administered-by-IT computers). Users will give an app whatever permissions it asks for in order for it to shut up and start running, and those permissions will be used to gut their security. It may limit the damage somewhat, depending on how disciplined the app and the user are, but it will only reduce the damage.
We need a completely different answer. I don't know what it is.
As another poster said, we need some other computing paradigm, but I don't know what that would look like. All I know is something is broken if these behemoth companies with limitless resources still get it wrong.
Yes, Qubes does not solve the problems like Spectre and Meltdown. Yes, you must trust your hardware to use it. If you are looking to solve such problem, then you might be interested in a stateless laptop: https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/state_harmful.p....
Apart from that, I believe, the best computing paradigm is free software and free hardware, but it does not seem too widespread now unfortunately. This would be the actual solution. The "behemoth companies" are not trying to solve computer security. They are trying to get as much profit as possible, and it goes against security of the users. This is why they are not supporting free software.
My current "good enough" solutions are disabled and neutralized ME in a laptop and Librem 5 phone.
So, rather than the consumer being responsible for their actions you support consumers engaging in whatever risky behavior they like as long as someone else is there to protect them or give them a do-over?
Then again, the point the GP seems to make is that this kind of platform should not be adopted for anything important, let the gamblers gamble if they want but don't try to sell it to the general public.
Yes. Every time you make a foolproof system the world brings us a bigger fool. I'd rather a few irresponsible people get a do-over than otherwise responsible people getting rekt like this.
That's unreasonable for something that's supposed to be used as money
There is a big middle ground between "cover for users engaging in whatever risky behavior they like" and "cover for nothing whatsoever".
In this case, the problem is expecting users to be perfectly diligent, and either discard all convenience or all security.
Cryptocurrency continues to be a case study demonstrating why so many of the systems it's trying (unsuccessfully) to replace operate in ways that it doesn't.
Like in the non-crypto world, banks are the experts on storing money securely, but people still try and rob banks despite ordinary people being much easier targets.
cryptocurrency is stupid. regulation around banks is there for many very good reasons.
https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1609655629903265795
you won’t trust highly regulated banks, but you will trust random strangers on the internet whom you know want your wallet and all the coins in it, without any guarantees whatsoever that any security is in place. you only need to trust yourself, which is already 8-10 orders of magnitude less trustworthy than a bank, AT BEST.
even in the rare event that an established bank does go under, and it holds some of your money when it does, FDIC insurance will get you at least some of that money back. cryptocurrency has zero recourse if you are harmed.
i laugh when cryptobros and NFTbros lose money, because anyone with any critical thinking skills whatsoever saw these things as shams at the outset, and we tried to speak up, but none of those who have lost money even considered listening at the time.
it is hilarious to me when these things happen. i actually, literally, laugh out loud, without a single hint of remorse.
Do we know that? The tweet you linked to basically says, we have no idea what happened so we have no idea if it was targeted or not.
But i do agree generally that i have no idea why "imagine the financial system but with no regulation or oversight" is considered a selling point.
A lot of hope, actually. If he followed the simple and oft repeated advice of using a cold wallet and/or offline computer, this attacked would have been mitigated. Hell, if some of the comments/speculation in this thread is true (ie. he kept his wallet.dat on a server connected to the internet), then this hack wouldn't have affected the user with the most basic setup of a software wallet running on a computer behind a NAT firewall.
Every random walk down the timeline results in 100% of coins lost or stolen.
[edit] You can only blame the user so many times before you have to really look inward haha.
Anyways those doing the foisting also includes all the shills, the laser-eyed, the influencers. [edit] It's not enough to say because they weren't forced at gunpoint, it's not coercive or immoral. We don't accept that behavior from people shilling penny stocks. And of course Salvadoran shopowners were in fact coerced with force.
Sure, there are institutional investors holding crypto, but how is this related to the current discussion of securing crypto? They're not exactly keeping their crypto holdings in a software wallet connected to the internet. They typically outsource that to companies that specialize in crypto custody, which presumably have better security practices than the OP.
It preys of financially illiterate people who don't know better because they have been bombarded without any pause by endless list of bullshit as soon as they put the word 'investment', 'money', 'market' or whatever in any search box in the world, that being the one from your local bookstore, online newspapers, youtube, google, reddit and on and on and on...
And if you tell me fractional banking system is a ponzi scheme then you either don't have a clue of what they are or you pretend to.
It doesn't matter which companies, individuals or wathever .org or 'coin something' websites promote them or make a business of them because they're all fucking hucksters at worst or paid shills at best.
Talking 'security' about investment scams is like talking personnal safety in '101 suicide' book.
Except in this case, it seems like he went out of his way to make it less secure, by putting his wallet on his server. This isn't a case of someone losing his mattress savings in a random home burglary, this is a case of someone leaving a duffle bag of cash in the seat of a car.
I mean this guy is already demanding the FBI get involved when the FBI's position is you should just put it in a bank account and not need to call us in the first place.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
I think you're conflating "someone who is defending crypto in this particular instance" with "someone who thinks bitcoin will take over the world".
>I mean this guy is already demanding the FBI get involved when the FBI's position is you should just put it in a bank account and not need to call us in the first place.
Yeah, I think we're in agreement here that he was acting like an idiot.
We've talked a few times, I always appreciate your perspective :)
But even if that weren't true, that doesn't mean its a good idea to use it or advocate for it or pretend it doesn't have these glaring flaws as folks march onward toward the abyss and take down the normies with them.
It's everyone's responsibility to call out bad ideas that harm us all. Especially when as soon as anything goes wrong, the afflicted yell "HELP! POLICE!!" just like our tweeter down-thread. That's a draw on public resources which puts this discourse squarely in the public interest. Not to mention spending like 0.6% of the world's electricity on coal-powered lotto ticket scratcher machines undergirding the whole charade.
The worst part is when things start to go wrong all the talking heads jump in and start saying "nobody could have seen this coming!!" and "crypto deserves better critics!!" It has fantastic critics - you just have to listen. Critics aren't supposed to say things you want to hear.
Your average user will install whatever crap they find on the Internet. Hell, a friend of mine (in their 20s, not a grandma) recently installed god knows what when “Windows support” called. And it’s not the first time a friend fell for this kind of scam.
[1] https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1609655629903265795
Experts did make mistakes for the challenger explosion, but they did much better than the average person. Put 1000 people at complete random into a room and say design and build a rocket, I suspect they won't even get to the build phase after several years.
When it comes to something everyone should be able to do, an expert making a mistake is a bad omen for the rest of us.
Hardware all the way.
I have my pgp key on a yubikey, my crypto on a ledger. My passwords on a mooltipass.
There are few mistakes I could make leading to this kind of compromise. Perhaps none!
That 1000 random people will build it, get it on the launchpad, and press the button. That's not the problem. It's getting to orbit (and back) that would be highly unlikely.
Management chose not to listen.
https://twitter.com/naka_frodo/status/1609655813789949959/ph...
Edit: Also it sounds like he didn't immediately shut down the server after the first hack? That is completely insane. I understand you want to investigate but you are leaving yourself wide open leaving the system running. It's been compromised. End of story.
Then in his arrogance he thought he's expert enough to "clean" the compromised server even when every security guy will tell you to take the data out and burn it to the ground if there is even a suspicion of compromise.
1. Was he storing important secrets on a random server somewhere? A PGP key? Why?
2. Before this went down, he noticed someone broke in TWICE and he didn't shut down the server? What was the rationale? Security wise, is there something preventing you from downloading what is important to you and wiping the whole thing?
1) he thinks that "dedicated servers" are in any way secure
2) discovers malicious intrusion, but doesn't burn down the whole server and re-key everything
3) is supposed to be knowledgable enough to be a core Bitcoin developer but stays on a "dedicated server" after finding malicious intrusion.
This is highly suspect. Either you have stuff that's not worth much, and therefore you don't pay to physically colocate your own server, or at very least you don't pay enough to get a server from a smaller company where you're dealing with real humans with names and reputations... Or you're storing things that really matter, have a large value, or likely both, and you'd pay extra to get better things.
What kind of hubris would lead to continuing to use a compromised server, particularly when the compromise appears to have come from the hosting provider?
Perhaps we need to wait for more information, but from what I've seen so far, there's something not right here.
"Appears to" to the incompetent victim of attack, "I dunno how it happened therefore it must be hosting provider".
He has found no avenue of attack, decided he must be perfect sysadmin so it couldn't be say just a plain 0-day or fact he didn't upgrade some software with security problem and went on blaming hosting provider.
... then continued to use not only same provider but same compromised server for months.
Smart guy ego at work
Because no one can create secure software yet, Bitcoin isn't 100% secure.
This is a case of someone expecting a single machine connected to the internet that had been compromised in the past, to not be compromised again.
Very little software has rigorous security review, even the Linux kernel. Linux Odays sell for $50-100k. If you are storing anything more valuable than that on an internet connected Linux machine, it will eventually be stolen.
Use an offline machine or a hardware wallet for anything that matters to you.
Based on the other comments in this thread it looks like he didn't bother using a hardware wallet (which is literally something that's recommended on bitcoin.org[1]), and kept his wallet.dat on a server exposed to the internet. You're trying to paint a story of "well if a bitcoin core developer can't secure his coins, then who can!?!?", but in this case it looks like he was being an idiot. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet
edit: on twitter he denied that he kept his wallet file on a server
Is there a way I can get my crypto held my an institution with SIPC insurance, the way I hold stocks at a brokerage, so I can outsource this issue to someone else who is backed by a government guarantee? (I obviously don’t expect them to guarantee the value of the crypto, just that the broker doesn’t lose it).
Yeah, that's how most things work in the physical world. If you want to secure a widget, then you need to "secure a physical object that grants irrevocable ownership" of it. Cryptocurrencies improve on this slightly by allowing you set up multisignature schemes, so you can get redundancy in the event of a loss.
>Is there a way I can get my crypto held my an institution with SIPC insurance, the way I hold stocks at a brokerage, so I can outsource this issue to someone else who is backed by a government guarantee?
If you want government guarantees, crypto might not be right for you.
You can’t steal my house by obtaining the deed. You can’t steal my stock by obtaining the stock certificates. That’s not how it works. The vast majority of wealth in developed countries doesn’t rely on physical security to maintain ownership. We’ve collectively outsourced that function to the government and other institutions, so we don’t have to individually hire bodyguards to prevent criminals from taking possession of our homes and stealing our assets.
Most people only hold a relatively small amount of wealth in forms that can by physically stolen (eg. petty cash, electronics). This means that you only need to defend yourself against a $1000 crime (stealing your TV), which is a lot easier than defending against a $1M crime (stealing your house or 401k).
If crypto requires holding my wealth in a hardware wallet that can be stolen, that means I’m only going to be willing to invest the amount of wealth I would spend on a TV, not the kind of wealth I am going to allocate to stocks or bonds.
Granted, crypto has utility for people who can’t use the government-backed institutions, like criminals. And in some countries where the government will steal your money, it has broader appeal. I won’t argue with that.
You can also steal stocks. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/us-charges-ha...
> The vast majority of wealth in developed countries doesn’t rely on physical security to maintain ownership
Indeed, it relies on far sillier things like hoping that nobody spends $100 on a fake ID and pretends to be you.
When your crypto is stolen, the theft cannot be reversed, by design.
>When your crypto is stolen, the theft cannot be reversed, by design.
If someone sends you a phishing link, gets your info, logs into your online banking and sends all of your money overseas, that theft generally can't be reversed either. (You'll find that the CFPB recently updated their Reg E interpretation on this, but that interpretation isn't binding and directly contradicts decades of practice)
If you're a business and get hit by banking malware, you're similarly fucked.
If that is the case, then doesn't that destroy (at least) one of the basic principles of cryptocurrency that people constantly harp on?
The basic principle will be the same most of the time, you identify the thief and use legal measures to force them to return the funds.
There is zero chance that will happen for bitcoin.
You can have a rule that allows spending <$1k at known places, but anything over that has to have approval from 3/5 board members, or your manager etc. Any spending rule can be coded like this.
Brokerage account hacked, stocks sold and money wired away? Your chances of recovery are extremely slim. There's pretty much no recourse once that money has passed through a few hops.
If you want to do multi-signature, you determine where your keys go and who holds them. It's up to you to secure your finances.
https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/media-centre/press-relea...
2/3 and 3/5 are common.
This way it's hard for a theif to find enough keys to steal your BTC, and you get additional backups in case something happens to one or more of your keys.
In all seriousness, I completely agree. I'm not in crypto and this is part of the reason. There would be a huge influx of people like me if there weren't such a risk of theft (by individuals or platforms).
Maybe put some in Gold, Silver and Real Estate too.
Obviously you should never put everything in one basket.
Stock are to me a different class of investment from life savings type of stuff.
> To clarify, the idea is I need to keep my life savings in a fire-proof, theft-proof safe?
But yeah, you should definitely have a _portion_ of your life savings in a well hidden quality safe.
That said, you probably only need to put one key in a safe. Hide the other and give the third to a friend or custodial service like unchained capital.
For day to day use, transfer what you need to and from cold storage to hot wallets.
The more wealth you have the more security you need, and you should count governmental and institutional actors in you decisions or you will ignore threats from counterparty risk, inflation, confiscation, and taxation.
> So you’re saying that to use crypto properly, I have to secure a physical object that grants irrevocable ownership of my wealth? That sounds bad.
Welcome to reality. You'll laugh now, but if you want to hold something of lasting value, that's kinda how it works.
Gold is physical and requires security.
Dollars lose their value to dilution.
Other securities incur risks too.
Multisig BTC looks downright safe in comparison
My crypto has lost more value than any of my other investments. Since crypto (unlike stocks and bonds) doesn’t entitle me to any cash flows, and (unlike dollars) doesn’t allow me to repay any debts, why shouldn’t the value keep dropping?
And now the same is happening to the regular markets since higher rates are sucking dollars from the market.
My Amazon RSUs are 1/2 of my grant date and falling fast.
Shtcoins gonna sht, but BTC hasn't failed in any way, and multisig makes it easier than any other commodity to secure.
I assume one of the signatures is my hardware wallet. Who holds the other signature? Do they have SIPC insurance?
What happens if my wallet is lost or destroyed?
Now a thief needs to steal 3 of these to steal the coins. That's going to be hard for a thief to do. If a fire or natural disaster happens, it needs to destroy 3 wallets before I lose my money.
But it won't be perfectly executed. Let's say you need to do a transaction while you're moving house. And maybe one of your relatives is in financial trouble.
You (probably) don't have the means to do what banks do, and hire an armored transport.
Further, unlike an armored truck full of cash, security by obscurity is really easy here. That and for a short duration (say moving houses as you suggest) one could wipe a cold wallet clean and just remember a seed phrase. Personally, I don't have enough wealth to make this sort of maneuver at all worth it, but it's completely do-able.
Since then I don't believe in short SPOFs.
You could get hit in the head by a robber on your way moving your furniture, because the robber thinks you may be hauling high value stuff, and lose the passphrase. If you back it up on paper then the unguarded house may be broken into, and they steal the bag that had the paper passphrase.
Extremely unlikely that it'll happen to you, but extremely unlikely things happen all the time to someone.
3/5 multisig with collaborative custody would likely already be at least as safe as dollar checking accounts.
> 3/5 multisig with collaborative custody would likely already be at least as safe as dollar checking accounts.
I think that's off by orders of magnitude. If the whole US did this then I'd expect thousands to screw it up every year.
"Just don't make any mistake, ever" doesn't scale. Not to more people, and not to any one person, given enough time.
It's like running a yellow light (and the occasional red, when you thought it'd be yellow a bit longer). You can go your entire life never being in an accident. But there are accidents every day because people run yellow lights.
At this point we'd both need to go do extensive research at the levels of a full time job to really prove one way or the other.
Suffice it to say we disagree and you seem to have much more trust in institutions than I.
If we are all just taking these coins out of circulation to make them as hard as possible for anyone to access, including ourselves -- then what was the point of the entire thing again?
> But aren't we still pretending that crypto is a currency?
These are such smug comments.
> So this means anytime I actually want to spend some of my own money, I need to go to the bank deposit box and also find at least one friend to help me out?
No, it means you have options to fully secure and own crypto assets in a way dollar bills or bank accounts never allowed. You don't have to do it this way, but if you actually have wealth, you should protect the larger portion of it.
If you have $1000 worth of BTC, just carry it in a hot wallet.
If you have $10000 probably put $9000 in a cold wallet and $1000 in a hot wallet for spending.
If you have $100000, you should probably use 2/3 or 3/5 multisig with a collaborative custody company like unchained capital.
If you have another order of magnitude more money than that you probably know better than myself how to hold your wealth.
In any of these cases, you have full control. Nobody can move your BTC without your sign-off. Your capital cannot be rehypothecated.
So in response to your smug question, yes lock away in deep dark vaults your wealth should you have enough to care about. For daily spending walk around using your hot wallet.
Your comp sci oriented since you're on HN, so if that still doesn't satisfy you, then think of it using caching layers. Keep the bulk of your wealth (should you have enough to justify it) in an L1 deep cold storage, then another smaller chunk in L2 cold storage in a single wallet, and finally L3 in a hot wallet for daily spending.
Another way to view it is if you want anonymity and sovereignty over your dollar bills, you have no choice but to secure it yourself -- probably in a safe.
If you're willing to let someone be a dollar custodian (banker) in today's system, they'll only keep a fractional reserve and lend it out. In actuality today they have other more complicated (but lesser) reserve requirements and without the FDIC bank runs would be commonplace. There's then a whole discussion about the solidity of the FDIC and whether it may collapse.
Fractional reserve systems create the banking cycle and is why we have booms and busts. Ponzi's and fractional reserve systems in crypto are why the crypto market just boomed and busted. There are a small number of legitimate crypto currencies and they're value is tied to the illegitimate ones simply due to crypto-crypto liquidity vs crypto-fiat liquidity.
In this thread nobody is taking a holistic view of what BTC provides.
Even comments that say we're not talking about valuation.
The problem is valuation is part of the reason BTC matters. Sure, you can get custodial security in dollars, but they'll be devalued for banking and governmental purposes.
BTC is sound money that's actually easier to store and use than Gold/Silver. That to me is the way to view it.
You can also get access to debt and pay it. Aave, MakerDAO, Alchemyx...
Yeah, more gold is mined in general, but the rate of which is tiny, and the cost of which is way too high.
Of course if we achieve multiplanetary whatever then gold may become worth less, but not worthless.
Still, that's why BTC may be better, buy then what's better? Digital of physical sarcity.
There's a lot of depth and nuance that humans don't have perspective enough to really weigh in on yet here so...
Yeah, when I own a bunch of equity, real estate and other intangible rights, I do my best to fit them all into my back pocket too.
Sure sucks trying to fit a few hundred acres of well placed development ready subdivisions in my jeans, though.
Don't get me wrong, I think they're all probably decent as investments, buy they're a completely different asset class.
I put BTC in the Gold/Silver category in that it can be a hedge against societal issues. In this particular moment, I see BTC as a hedge against the ongoing de-dollarization and eventual inflation or plain lack of purchasing power that could cause.
I also see it as a means of censorship resistance.
Further BTC or any sufficiently distributed money is a way to limit bank/government power since they actually have to tax instead of minting new money.
I try to use my credit card as much as possible for remote purchases, because if the extra legal protections.
Have you bought options with your credit card? Borrowed money against collateral? Purchased and collected revenue rights to music? Traded oil futures?
These are the kinds of things I'm doing frequently on Ethereum.
Unless you're using blockchain financial instruments in order to do more blockchain stuff (the circular use case), the other options are better.
Trading oil futures doesn't need cryptocurrencies. And if you use it anyway then you expose yourself to additional risk not in traditional finance.
E.g. the difference between FTX shenanigans hurting investors (who are now being victim blamed for "not your keys, not your coin") and anyone financially reliant on Tether shenanigans (which includes all holders of BTC) is that Tether seems to be getting away with it, by so far not being subject to a liquidity check / bank run.
The benefit an open finance platform provides is you don't have to have some blessed middleman that conducts the trades or holds money. There are a LOT of these middlemen in finance and many of them are rent seekers abusing laws to their advantage, and working to add more laws to entrench their company as "part of the system".
Then there is the problem of bigger players using their power to "change the terms of the deal" and force smaller players to comply or spend years in court challenging them. When the terms are coded ahead of time and the platform is neutral there is no entity they can corrupt to get their way and the contract executes as specified.
Lastly these systems are transparent, anyone can monitor and report on companies doing dodgy things, rather than a few overworked government bureaucrats. It also makes everything composable with everything else, anyone can build their own Bloomberg terminal equivalent, which is amazing.
FTX isn't DeFi BTW, they were an unregulated opaque trading firm. They are exactly what is wrong with finance.
Does the government have an override mechanism on the blockchain? If yes then what was the point of blockchain. If no, then will the government fork the blockchain?
Does the government just put someone in prison until they give up the keys? Most countries don't have true "life in prison", and what are the implications for the wrongly convicted in the ones that do?
How would you invalidate an illegal smart contract where one party is the estate of someone who died, are in a coma, or gets put under conservatorship?
> The advantage of smart contracts is they automate away the need for costly lawyers in the good case (which is most of the time). You don't need to pay so much overhead for "protection".
Most of lawyer work is clarifying intent, and legal compliance. Smart contracts try to replace the former with coders, but without a common sense safety net. And without the knowledge about what contracts are even legal. As for compliance, that's still needed.
E.g. writing a smart contract to pay someone automatically needs to support garnishing a salary due to various court actions.
What lawyer work exactly becomes automated? Do you know lawyers, and what they spend time on? Every example of smart contracts seem to me to be incredibly arrogant, and even more ignorant about what lawyers do.
It has a smell of "I don't know what they do, which means it can't be hard. I can write a twitter clone in a weekend, so surely I can write a script to replace a lawyer".
You can write a "bucket shop" web app over a weekend, but you need a lawyer to tell you it's illegal, or under which circumstances it's illegal. That's the real "protection".
I mentioned FTX and Tether to point out that the industry is built on a house of cards. E.g. if Tether implodes then that affects your BTC. I'd say it's more likely that Tether implodes than that the US government implodes.
Since they're already practically minting their own dollars they don't need to steal yours.
And if for some reason the FDIC fails, then they effectively will have stolen your dollars.
And if you trust it to a safe in your bedroom, and your house burns down, then... ?
Which is more likely?
The hardware device is typically itself secured by means of a pin. Without the pin, the device can’t be unlocked so can’t be used, too many incorrect pin attempts will brick the device.
So the answers to your questions are:
1) If you entrust it to a safe deposit box then if someone steals it, it is worthless without the pin.
2) If the safe is itself destroyed and with it the device (this is also the case if you have it in a safe deposit box and the depository is burned down or something) then the private keys (and transitively the funds) can still be recovered using the recovery phrase. So if you have securely stored your recovery phrase and are able to retrieve it even this kind of problem won’t cause the accounts to be lost.
So what people tend to recommend is choosing good secure storage for your pin, keeping reasonable physical care of the device, taking the recovery phrase and splitting it into parts and storing those parts separately. If one of the parts is destroyed then you will need to urgently replace the hardware wallet, move the funds and securely store the new recovery phrase because if not you don’t have a fallback if the hardware wallet is destroyed, but otherwise you are good.
[1] https://medium.com/coinmonks/mnemonic-generation-bip39-simpl...
So if someone doesn’t have my wallet but has my recovery phrase they can regenerate my keys and brick my hardware wallet as it sits in my home safe??
Someone else using your recovery phrase to steal your private keys wouldn’t actually brick your hardware wallet. It would still work but obviously since the thing that it was there to secure (your keys) had been stolen that would be moot.
The subtext is that keeping all this stuff secure is hard and depending on your threat model may not be worthwhile. This is similar to the way in which for most people it makes sense to have a bank look after their funds. In the world of crypto though we’ve seen obvious examples of these centralised custodians being untrustworthy and since they are not regulated or FDIC insured or anything of that kind it’s much more risky.
[1] If you want the ability to recover your funds if the hardware device becomes inoperable, lost, stolen etc. If not you could just burn the recovery phrase so you don’t need to secure it.
Especially if you stored solid brick of gold instead of money
There is a huge amount of vested interest in persuading people bitcoin or ethereum require no trust in third parties. This is not true, as illustrated by this case: the person writing code that’s supposed to secure your money made incorrect assumptions about security and was thus robbed. If you own bitcoin, you necessarily need to trust this person and his colleagues are neither malicious nor stupid. Why that’s better than making the same assumptions about state institutions and banks is, to me, not clear.
this seems more like it could be similar to a simple boating accident
It requires trust that third parties will act rationally in accordance with the incentives provided by the system, which is very different from trusting someone to custody assets for you.
At a larger level it requires trust that people will continue to see BTC/ETH/etc as being worth something, but that isn't a unique problem to blockchain based digital currency solutions.
It's no different from bank login in the end, once someone has it, it can be transferred at will.
Sure, the difference is that in banking system bank doesn't need your credentials to do stuff with money but even that when big crypto bois money are involved stops being immutable as DAO ethereum fork proves, fuck with important people money and nothing is sacred.
Bank login credentials do not confer undisputed ownership of an account. If someone unauthorized gets ahold of them, the bank doesn't throw up its hands and say "welp, nothing we can do now, the account just belongs to the hacker".
Pretty much this is what banks try if they can: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
That's one way, but not the only one.
My preferred mean of storage is through a _vault_ smart contract, such as the "Gnosis safe".
It's basically a smart contract that you deploy, and send your assets to. You can then add some of your trusted friends as co-validators and require 2/3 validations for a withdrawal. You can also set a no-validation required threshold at $X/m for the day to day.
> I obviously don’t expect them to guarantee the value of the crypto, just that the broker doesn’t lose it
For the record, brokers rarely (if ever) store or guarantee client money.
Usually you have a custodian to hold your money (who will guarantee deposits, up to some limits), and your broker will unlock a credit line for you based on your collateral posted at the custodian.
There are custodians in crypto as well, "Paxos" and "Coinbase Custody" being the most well known. They will store your money on cold wallets with very strict guarantees (shamir split of the wallet keys among anonymous holders, strong entropy guarantees on key generation, proof of reserve, etc) and unlock it upon verifying your identity with real humans. It's costly though.
Not really. Can be a file copied across dozens of public places that is well-encrypted (say AES256+Blowfish) using a key securely derived (say PBKDF2 with many iterations) from a random password you don't use anywhere else.
That said, if you do that, have a system that will drill you for that password weekly, or you will just forget it. And make sure this system can't be compromised to record your password as you type it.
I remember that Silk Road associated guy that was caught recently with 50000 BTC. I was wondering why he didn’t just encrypt his wallet?
There is no way crypto coin will work for society at large with such requirements.
https://twitter.com/lukedashjr/status/1169615995742380035
https://old.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/4936kw/lukejr_is_...
Dude seriously Thinks the pope isn’t catholic and the sun revolves around the earth
[anon]>>>>> Does the bitcoin community realize how literally crazy this guy is?
[deleted]>>>> They look the other way. He is by most accounts a talented coder who understands bitcoin's protocol better than most. His eccentricities are alternatively ignored or tolerated, as they are largely (but not always) harmless as far as Bitcoin is concerned.
[deleted]>>>> This tradeoff seems common in fringe libertarian groups. There's always one guy in the group who wants to overthrow the government solely to be able to marry his cousins, and the larger group accepts it because they're not in a position to turn down his assistance.
theskepticalheretic>>> Yeah but that's one hell of a faustian bargain. It wouldn't be too difficult to get a new developer up to speed, or find an equally talented developer who isn't batshit crazy. His craziness drives people away from any project he works on.
Hodldown>> I think you are wrong, I think bitcoin has been looking for real programmers for years but this poor quality of losers, weirdos and vrml dropouts is the best that showed up. I think this is the highest quality a project like this gets.
theskepticalheretic> Well the confounding factor would probably be that experienced high quality programmers have some historical understanding of distributed systems. When they look at bitcoin they chuckle and think "Haha, it's that silly shit from the 90's we used to use to test who had the fastest PC."
I personally know at least two sedevancatists who are amazing coders.
Studying Aquinas is much better preparation for programming than studying Barth.
Hopefully he didn't also lose any SSH keys with push rights to the repo.
It seems reasonable that some due diligence in this area be done in light of this discovery.
In this case you can substitute "nuttiest" with "most lazy".
>The whole point is that he should be the one of most knowledgeable exemplary users.
In this case it wasn't because of lack of knowledge, it was something else (eg. laziness/apathy/cockiness). Kind of like how most people know that they should eat less and exercise more, but don't.
Luke has specifically denied this (before you posted your comment)
edit:
if you're talking about https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1609661811455819776, my guess is that he's either omitting something (eg. the cold wallet was internet connected, or there was a backup of its wallet floating around somewhere), or suffered a stuxnet level attack.
https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1609683917644120067
You can easily browse through his recent tweets here https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/with_replies
Also, how is having a hardware wallet supposed to be secure? Hardware wallets may get stolen, lost, damaged, etc.
Edit: Also, the link you have shared doesn’t even allow you to choose the “New” user type option if you pick a hardware wallet, allowing you to choose only the Experienced user type option.
IOW, a hardware wallet is something that’s only considered usable by someone who is experienced.
It doesn't matter if he did it right or not.
He got robbed and he will never see his crypto again.
How on earth would anyone with less knowledge than him be able to do it right.
You probably give up explaing my mom why she should have used a hardware wallet...
I don't know this person, I am not involved in any way in the bitcoin ecosystem ... but I have thought about it a fair amount, specifically wrt opsec and security practices, self custody, etc.
One of the conclusions I have always come to was:
If I was known to have a lot of bitcoin, for any reason, I would work hard to make it public knowledge that all that bitcoin was gone.
If he had to pass occasional polygraphs, it could create some weird situations.
And if he signed a contract giving all intellectual output to his employer (including side projects), he could find himself in a lawsuit.
Google 'satoshi dorian nakamoto newsweek' and you get to know him. Unless the journalist made the whole thing up or at least a big part of the article is a lie.
After reading that, you start asking youself very serious questions about the whole crypto charade.
According to the article on Newsweek, he did have. He had experience as US army contractor (if I remember well, Tor network was itself the creation of 2 ex-US army contractors...). And he worked extensivelly for the financial sector. Both experiences as a computer engineer.
> it would be very strange to use your real name...
Vanity is a as old sin as the 6 others deadly sins.
That being said, I read reactions by other media outlets ('coin something' websites are not media outlet) and the concensus was the journalist should have let the guy alone and accused him of doxing, which is kind of a funny stance considering the market cap of Bitcoin was already at that time above 100 billions $. I mean, what kind of serious investor would put any money in a 100 billions market cap company created by an anymous guy on the web. In fact it would be impossible because the SEC wouldn't allow the company to be created in the first place.
That said, the word 'consensus' has absolutely no value in case of crypto, because of the shitload of money which has been thrown at paid shills, influencers, financial newspapers, media outlets and celebrities of all kind.
As I said, either the journalist made the whole thing up and should have been fired on the spot, either the whole Bitcoin charade is nothing of the kind we have been told.
Edit: his tweets specifically talk about not using "cloud nonsense " and states getting your own key to a rack is too expensive for him.
Colocation and epoxy in any relevant ports is the obvious way to avoid this.
> So... Any trustworthy companies offering affordable dedicated servers?
>
> Currently paying $55/mo for:
Well, I guess he now has evidence that maybe they touched something else.
Somewhat I'm not surprised at all.
The destination address (https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1YAR6opJCf...) seems to have received ~216 BTC yesterday in the span of 4 minutes
On the other hand, no one can do anything until the coins are moved or more information is uncovered. What a nightmare to lose $3.6m overnight.
(One of his later tweets claimed that "it's basically all gone" or something like that, implying this wasn't just a small fraction of his total coins.)
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?after=d8bdee0fc88...
[2] https://compassmining.io/education/bitcoin-mining-pools-hist...
Back in 2011, a desktop CPU would mine thousands of bitcoins per month.
I know that by the time I even looked at it in 2011 you couldn't mine anything with a desktop CPU.
If true this is absolutely devastating. Somewhat funny too, but devastating.
edit: Well, it's confirmed. Insane.
Imagined banking was only available to people with equivalent of a college degree in finance and ongoing continuing education ..but also half the education is provided by criminals trying to rob use across national borders.
https://np.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/36w6nw/why_did...
https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/490dyi/serious_ques...
I would take what he says with a grain of salt.
Your colo provider can be thoroughly owned, your adversaries can have physical access to the server for extended periods of time and still not be able to do anything because you've denied them access to any ports that'd allow DMA.
Lots of cheap DIY options for fancy case intrusion detection going way beyond that offered by mfgs. USB camera and some tape?
So people are trusting Bitcoin with someone who thinks GPS is a lie
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/4936kw/lukejr_is_...
But yes, Luke Jr's comment was a non sequitur for two reasons. (Any Catholic analysis of Jesus is necessarily a bit of a non sequitur, since Jesus and his disciples weren't... Catholic. )
The geocentrism discussion is interestingly similar: in the same thread he makes two claims, one saying that geocentrism is equivalent to heliocentrism (which is mathematically true, and which is better depends on what specific system you are modelling), but then also says that the Sun orbits the Earth is true and scientific consensus, contradicting himself.
There is a very easy rewrite of what he wrote that makes it totally fine, and probably what he "meant": models are broadly equivalent, choose one based on convenience for the problem at hand, and spirtual truth is independent of science. But since he appears to have strict religious beliefs in the infallibility of Scripture, he can't go all the way to commit to saying that the Scripture is scientifically wrong, though he did hint at it.
He's either a very poor communicator (like many forum posters are in forum posts) or his thought process is quite inconsistent and self-contradictory without him noticing.
Evidently a complete lack of security or worth judgement.
"$300/mo for a rack is expensive" (no, no it isn't) "Someone booted an unknown OS from external media" (no FDE)
Machine compromised on the "17th of november* and instead of considering everything compromised, the guy continued using it evidently.
Zero sympathy whatsoever, if you can't manage the basics you certainly shouldn't be running it yourself, and definitely shouldn't be "core" developer on projects that require at least some security clue
(Also religious nutjob, as referenced in another thread)
> No, they got my cold wallet too somehow
How can that happen?
They likely used the access they had to further infect or snaffle credentials etc - a very simple and obvious one is reverse SSH tunnels for example
Not really. The device used to sign transactions should never be connected to the Internet.
Of course, it's also possible he just wanted something closer to the convenience of a bank account/credit card instead of a pile of cash and failed in the opsec.
Keep a small amount in a hot wallet for convenience and a larger amount (but not too large) in a cold wallet accessed via hardware. But the bulk shouldn’t be accessible without breaking into at least two lock vaults.
At some point this level of care becomes more than absurd.
> attacks his own hypothetical situations
Of course, if someone did follow your example, and then the government compelled the banks to hand over access to the physical tokens, other people similar to you would come out and say "not your keys, not your bitcoin", or insist on even more byzantine forms of secret protection.
Not to mention, with your proposed scheme, actually using your BTC becomes significantly slower than any international bank transfer.
So, if the only way to secure BTC is to this cold wallet dance, then it's clear BTC is not a usable store of value compared to USD.
Most people do not store millions in cash or gold at home.
Multisig is far superior for Bitcoin security. The keys can remain geographically separate at all times. Each signing operation requires only the partially signed transaction (PSBT) and the other public keys.
SSS is a good solution for other key material, and for storing a paper key to be used for recovery purposes, but it's completely inferior to multisig for normal management of a shared and/or large Bitcoin wallet.
I like to have one solution that can work for my entire cryptographic life.
Then, when you're finally ready to access you funds, creating appointments at all those different banks, driving to them all, and then finding out enough of the keys are completely missing that you now cannot access any of your funds:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
Or... you know... you could just store your funds in one or more bank accounts.
“Targeted attack” can mean many things. If you have control over wast sums of hard to trace treasure a determined attacker might just kidnap you and/or your loved ones, and win your cooperation using threats of violence.
Your suggested safety precaution is a sensible start, but far from enough if you have a lot of bitcoin.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1144996480/crypto-hacking-nor...
> The standard advice of buy a Trezor and write down your seed on paper is much better than a Gentoo hot wallet.
1. Sign up for Coinbase (where you give your driver's license + bank account ACH and get validated as a legit US citizen or whatever)
2. Transfer USD into Coinbase
3. Purchase BTC with that USD
4. Transfer that BTC from Coinbase to a $80 Trezor Model One wallet from Amazon?
Coinbase is lower risk here. There are more things that can go wrong in process or memory than the above than Coinbase going belly up or getting fully hacked.
https://www.coinbase.com/blog/celer-bridge-incident-analysis
2. Access (almost) any website in the internet
3. ?????
4. Profit
edit: Mastodon doesn't work without JavaScript, holy hell. We truly are living in a dystopia. Thankfully you can still access his profile from another trusted instance such as mastodon.social at https://mastodon.social/@lukedashjr@bitcoinhackers.org
I'm electing to add new URL regexps to my uBlock filters, to reduce the risk of accidentally clicking a link similar to this. I don't think I want to visit any web domain that caters to people who hold crypto wallets.
/.*coin.*/
/.*crypto.*/
/.*eth.*/Not all of them. Those still running Mastodon v3.5 (rather than v4.0) seem to work fine.
This just redirects me back to <https://bitcoinhackers.org/@lukedashjr>.
That was his inept deduction that was basically "well, I don't know how they got in so it must be hosting provider"
devil's advocate: is DigitalOcean in this category?
He obviously is more of a software developer than an sysadmin, so maybe it's just a poorly optimized personal app host.
"My colo'd server that stores my hot wallet keeps getting compromised. <days later> Welp the wallet is emptied".
I don't know how to take this seriously?
It could be his Twitter has been hacked? We don’t know the whole story.
https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1593227756841578496
Go figure
Maybe because I'm behind a VPN
“kill the coranavirus” before putting them into long-term freeze, then getting mad & @‘ing the pizza company’s twitter account upon liquid ingress to aforementioned packing…
This is what has come of the cool thing (bitcoin - twitter user is a core dev to my knowledge) I learned of as a tween, well over a decade ago.
1) Use a hardware wallet
2) Don't be an idiot.
That's it. That's the whole guide. He missed both steps of the guide.
It's possible that only his twitter account got hacked, and the hacker is having some fun with it.
Beyond being a bitcoin core dev [1], Luke-Jr is also the author of an independent node and wallet implementation known as Bitcoin Knots [2].
This is his mastodon, let's see if he posts anything there:
[1] - https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1609655629903265795
Yes, I refunded.
It means that rather than being a story about public affairs, snake oils, and conspiracies -- security is now a legitimate business concern.
I won't pretend to have an endgame, but I really don't see too much to loathe. Even the most vehement concerns are easily reframed as opportunity.
- Unsuspecting public? To contrast crypto with the system not many people's personal financial planning involves bounding correlations between News Sentiment -> VVIX -> VIX -> Derivatives market -> Volatile inflation across all sectors.
- Security concerns? Again, this slaps a price tag, and hence quantifiable risk-level on every computer system security level -- airgapped? networked? It's practically its own insurance, on software that is still centuries away from being closed-form auditable.
- Proof of work? Global governments cooperate to limit, minimize, control power usage. Not such a bad thing in that light, the power system could use more care and engineering as it is.
He made it worse by being so public, and hosting his own (publicly known) servers.
Most people don't think about it: they have a bank holding their "balance", a broker "holding" their stocks, an employer "holding" their salary, and maybe even a crypto exchange "holding" their tokens - until they don't.
Only when you get into the nitty-gritty of self custody, you understand it's a security hassle: you need to save a seed for crypto, or boxes of gold ingots, or precious art in special climate-controlled packaging etc.
People traded this insecurity, this chance of losing it all in one unfortunate event, for the warm comforts of having someone else custody your assets. But ask Greek people in 2008 (or Lebanese people now) how does it feel to come to a bank where you've had an account until yesterday, and find out there's no money to go around.
We're starting to see some strides being made into simplifying and securing crypto custody (MPD, Multi-sig etc.). But at its core, if you want to truly hold your asset, you will need to keep ahold of something (safe key, seed phrase, physical item etc.).
If your brokerage account somehow gets hacked and all your funds gets stolen that’s not an unsolvable problem. You’ll likely get made whole after a while. There’s people, institutions, and laws to help you.
Store digital cash in your mattress and someone will steal it, and no one will or can help.
Reg E at least protects consumers from some banking malware, but still does not provide protections for phishing victims (despite new non-binding CFPB guidance)
https://www.welivesecurity.com/2022/04/26/trouble-bec-how-st...
But I don't believe him. Lukejr has done irreparable damage to Bitcoin. His role in the mass censorship and gaslighting program that locked Bitcoin into sluggish, expensive, tiny blocks (ostensibly in order to carve out a market for Lightning, in which he had significant interest) is disgraceful, condemnable, and must never be forgotten. This exploitation of opportunity and power spat in the face of every early Bitcoin adopter and evangelist as it violated the perfect system we came to know and love from the whitepaper for commercial gain, arguably starting the trend of charlatans and fraudsters in the crypto space looking for a quick buck with reckless, corrupting abandon.
He will say anything to get what he wants, and he will truly believe he is right and entitled to do so. He has a casual, naive tone to everything he says but this man is far from either. He would look right into his own mother's eyes and tell the most wicked lies for the $5 in her purse. Don't believe anything.
https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1609618498027753472
EDIT: Right, maybe it's all
Which implies that it is indeed most of his bitcoins.
It's possible to create a bitcoin wallet completely offline in a secure environment. The details to the wallet are then stored physically in a secure location/medium. This is called a cold wallet. People typically use a cold wallet for long-term storage of coins.
A "hot" wallet is a type of wallet that's typically stored in internal storage of a network-connected device, such as your personal computer or your smartphone. This is riskier way of storing funds because they can be exfiltrated by malware. You would typically use a hot wallet for day to day transactions.
A "cold" wallet is a type of wallet where private keys to control the funds are never in contact with a network-connected device. They're typically stored in the form of recovery phrases written on paper or metal (in a secure location), or some kind of a smart card that securely stores private keys and exposes an interface to sign individual transactions (e.g. Ledger devices). Funds stored in a cold wallet are much harder to access, but are extremely (or completely) resistant to theft, short of physical access.
In crypto a "hot" wallet should be treated as cash, while a "cold" wallet is more like a savings account.
And your wife bought something from my eBay store. Now I have your home address.
And if I am a ruthless character then I quietly break into your house one day with th3e objective of leaving no sign I was ever there. Search for written down passwords, take a photo, leave.
The point is that companies put vast effort into digital security but in many cases it's easily compromised by going to the home of the person that is the hacking target.
Especially if your parents accidentally left you home alone..
You'd find a legit way into the house.
On a desk at home? It is marginal, certainly a burglary is a low frequency event, but we also have events like fire that make it insecure in other ways.
The perfect password book is combined with a word you remember but don't write down as a pepper, but I doubt it's much of a problem in practice; it takes one leak of an u hashed password to break the code.
I think for many the risk of someone breaking in and stealing your password book is much smaller than the risk of a centralised password manager getting hacked (LastPass and friends).
and the bulk of it should be on a paper wallet, in the vault of a bank or another real world institution. the hardware used to generate this key should be wiped out. so if he followed best practices, he didn't lose this money
edit: just found out that the btc was stolen from a dedicated server on ColoCrossing. this makes no freaking sense. no server connected to internet should have access to the keys to your btc (or access to any keys that could be used to later on grab cryptocurrency keys). hot wallets should be hardware wallets, cold wallets should be acid free paper
Plenty of "normal people" use combinations of physical security to protect their assets. Safes, deposit boxes, tamper proof materials etc.
he would have been more secure having it at coinbase…
Looks like possibly a supply chain attack targeted specifically at Luke Jr's server.
Exactly why we don't keep our money in our house, but in banks.
Nobody says "not under your mattress, not your cash".
One thing I'm not seeing mentioned here is discussion of the password for that wallet.dat. This reminds me of back during the 2017 bull run, when I tried to help a friend recover a forgotten password for a bottom 6-figures Dash coin wallet. We went even so far as spinning up some EC2 GPU instances to run Hashcat. In the end, considering the modest value of the wallet, it wasn't cost effective to brute-force. I think we got up to the threshold of 7-9 characters where the time/cost becomes prohibitive.
So I'm wondering, assuming the guy even HAD a password on the database file, or that we didn't have a password.txt on this server, I wonder about the sequence of events where:
1. Server is hacked a few months ago, either knowingly (target a core dev), or farmed (searching for vulnerable servers, grabbing high value assets such as wallet.dats) 2. wallet.dat is copied. IIRC gives free access to the public key, therefore revealing a high value wallet 3. In the meantime, attacker employs compute resources to crack the private key 4. After some months of doing this, finds the passwords, empties the wallet
This would seem to match my quick reading of the events. I'm now intrigued to do some sums to work out the feasibility of doing this when a 7-figure wallet is found. This is assuming compute prices are that much cheaper than 5 years ago, and that this might be a independent attacker, not some NK-style state actor.
I may come back to this and do the calculations...
Sympathy cratering...
Prior to becoming Pope, Benedict did lead the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which was responsible for covering up the child sex abuse scandals of the Catholic Church in Ireland. In addition, while he was Pope, someone high up in the church instructed the Irish part of the church to stymie the government's efforts to investigate said child abuse scandals which resulted in threatened expulsion of the vatican ambassador[1] (recalled by the vatican before it came to that), the closure of the Irish embassy to the Vatican[2] and a public condemnation by the Irish government[3].
What is much less up for debate is that Benedict and his sucessor Francis (who to be fair, has not had the same pre-papal track record as his predecessor) were fairly elected leaders of the catholic church by its own mechanisms.
Also don't take this as approval or support for the guy's reactionary views of what he thinks catholicism should be.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-14281441
[2]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ireland-closes-embassy-to-vat...
[3]: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/kenny-condemns-vatican-respo...
Not sure about other countries, but at least in the US any gains on crypto is only taxable after you've sold (or transacted with) it. Given that he just got his bitcoin stolen, my guess is that he hasn't sold yet, and therefore doesn't owe any taxes yet.
Even core developers are not competent to run their own bank.
Can we now stop hearing about how the unbanked should start running their own banks?
But most HW wallets have tiny screens that make users apathetic to validating tx data.
So use symmetric encryption whenever it's at all possible.
As well, if asymetric encryption is ever broken, then nothing is safe on the internet.
However, including working quantum computers in your threat profile is ridiculous for things like this at the moment.
PGP? RSA? Can you elaborate please?
> symmetric encryption
AES?
Is this what you mean? What's the best way to do AES these days? AES-256-CBC? Is there "symmetric encryption" that is public key/private key? I know AES you just need IV + key and you're "good to go"?
A bit far fetched IMO if the threat model depends on quantum computing but I have no idea about the subject so…
Now I think the priority should be maximum transparency. The job of solving a money laundering scheme should be as simple as a single search query, or a GPT bot question. BTC could be a part of this solution, since its ledger is open.
This is not a perfect solution, but the amount of power these criminals distill from money laundering is far too great.
Uh, because it’s New Year’s Day? Don’t get injured or become a crime victim on a holiday, if possible.
Here's the account, for reference: https://twitter.com/ic3 . Doesn't look like an official to me.
I use Twitter solely for moaning at service providers who respond [far!] faster on Twitter than they do by phone or email, but .. umm ... doesn't this [common] mistake demonstrate how broken this approach is?
Which is expressly impossible to do without creating a fork of the chian... Which is pretty contrary to the ethos of the white papers for Bitcoin.
If the property is replaceable by the charged parties then that could be used by the government as a consideration in plea bargaining or sentencing. But if it’s gone then hopefully the plaintiff purchased insurance on it.
I don't claim that the person in question did this but as a thought experiment IMHO stealing Bitcoin is oxymoron because the transactions are happening in the realm of zero trust computational environment. The whole premise is that this is a trust-less system which means that we shouldn't even attempt to trust in anything about the wallet movements.
Maybe it was a handshake deal that went sour afterwards?
like they are going to summon resources to try to find some guy who is probably in Russia or something
Perhaps you don't owe paradise better, but you do owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Btw one more thought: this kind of thing is natural in conversation because repetition has other functions (e.g. it connects people to share and agree on familiar things). So commenters aren't doing anything wrong in principle when they post like this—it's actually HN's rules which are the unnatural thing. But it's clear that we have to have them, given the mandate of the site.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
Couldn't have happened to a more awful person.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/4936kw/lukejr_is_...
Maybe Ethereum people are better? Let's see what Vitaly thinks about child pornography.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/v0n5d5/vitalik_bu...
I'll proudly go on record saying that I think 99% of crypto related things are scams, money laundering, or for illegal activities including sanctions evasions, but the people at the top are pretty disgusting.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Crypto prtocols need a way to reverse transactions if the original address as well as some quorum of elected "supervisory overseers" agree [1] to it within a week or so. There should also be a mechanism to move the balance to another address with the original owner and these parties.
This wouldn't allow the "regulators" to themselves steal or coerce, but they could provide assistance in large thefts like this.
[1] Obviously the attacker would vote no, but a single yes from the true account owner would override.
Suddenly you have to establish a department that would hear from both parties which introduces the problem of identifying the other party and getting in contact with them, then they would have to evaluate the evidence and make some kind of judgement. Paypal attempts to do what you're describing and it's constantly abused by both buyers and sellers alike.
Bitcoin might not be perfect, it might not even be fit for most purposes (highly subjective), but scrapping the idea outright would be a much better outcome than bastardizing it with "trusted" middlemen to the point where it's not fit for any purpose at all.
I think progress could be made in UX design, by pushing users towards using hardware wallets and other areas, but changing the protocol such that trustless transactions now require trust is not an appropriate solution. It's the core of what cryptocurrency is as a concept.
I still find myself in disagreement - there need to be safeguards at the protocol level, and not just for ordinary people.
Escrow and restitution could be built as a feature where trustless and anonymous transactions can still take place. Taking into account my previous post, imagine this setup:
There are now two types of wallets/addresses. One type functions exactly as Bitcoin does today. The other type, however, automatically subjects transactions to temporally-gated restitution systems and allows you to recover funds if a side channel refund request is made.
Funds in the original Bitcoin wallet type experience transactions that are instant and non-refundable, and you can keep "hot" funds here. The "cold" wallet type requires more time to pass before the funds "settle". It can function as your bank and offer lots of additional security.
It'd be easy to make the wallet type an identifiable part of the address so that all parties know what types of transactions they're involved in.
This extension to the protocol could be 100% opt-in.
It turns out people mostly don't want this.