Bitcoin core developer claims to have lost 200 BTC in hack
cointelegraph.com
cointelegraph.com
The difference between Bitcoin and TradFi shrinks every day.
So much for “Code is law”.
Moving cryptocurrencies around barriers such as custodial exchanges freezing/losing/stealing it is one of the “superpowers” that makes real Crypto valuable.
Any thief dumb enough to deposit their stolen goods onto someone’s exchange deserves to have it frozen — heck, if they deposited it into my wallet, that’s what I wound do!
Explain again how this defeats “code is law”?
Related sayings: "Feet of clay", "Emperor has no clothes". etc.
2. On a more fundamental level, I don't see how this is inconsistent with "code is law". After all, if the attacker willingly transferred his stolen funds to a third party, then in the eyes of the network he legitimately gave up control of it[1], just like luke legitimately gave up control of his coins when his wallet was hacked. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
[1] if you want to make it kosher in the eyes of the law, you could even sneak a clause in the ToS that says you have the right to freeze whatever funds you want.
It has been fascinating to watch society rethink/rebuild financial regulations from first principles and largely end up with the same conclusions. If anything, hopefully getting people to realize that all the rules tradfi institutions follow aren’t just made up for no reason.
Those “regulations“?
This incident alone has forged grim resolve in many people, including myself, to produce systems to grind TradFi to dust.
It would only be possible if everyone used anonymous coins like Zcash and Monero from their own wallets. Any use of exchanges or secondary networks like lightning provides levers to turn people off. Any corporation can be subjected to pressure by not just governments but large groups of people.
I don’t see people like the trucker protestors using cryptographic hardware wallets and waiting minutes for transactions to clear on a block chain.
BTW the trucker thing was a line for many people including myself, and I wasn’t anti-vax and did not vote for Trump. Freezing the assets of people for participating in a protest is not okay. The content of the protest is irrelevant.
No clue on the veracity of the statement, but here it is repeated by news media[0] which is sourcing a member of the Canadian parliament[1].
[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mp-mark-stra...
[1]: https://twitter.com/markstrahl/status/1495472037438967808
>In a tweet on Sunday, Chilliwack-Hope MP Mark Strahl said a woman called Briane, "a single mom from Chilliwack working a minimum wage job," had apparently fallen foul of the Emergencies Act, which was recently invoked by the federal government in a bid to stop protesters occupying streets in downtown Ottawa.
>Vancouver Granville MP Taleeb Noormohamed says he's "quite skeptical" about the claim and has written to Strahl asking for more information, offering to help rectify the situation.
>Strahl has declined to speak to CBC News about the tweet or give any more information about Briane.
>On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported it had been mistakenly sent an email by the Ottawa Police Service, in which a constable said they had gone through the list of donors and found two "Briannes," neither of whom lived in B.C.
I mentioned that in my previous reply. I never even made a claim of truth or not, I was just giving context for what I believe they were claiming. Don't shoot the messenger.
> No clue on the veracity of the statement
Also
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There could be other reasons but I wouldn't be surprised if that was the only reason. Visa and mastercard suspended payment processing for wikileaks.
Some banks were closing accounts if you purchased crypto so it can be even more arbitrary.
https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2022/02/23/chilliwack-mark-str...
Good luck to you, competition is a good thing.
But right now, you have people, mostly younger, thinking they know how to build a better world by starting over from scratch. In programming, we've all seen (and been) the engineer who sees an old codebase for the first time and thinks they could do a better job with a full rewrite. We know that rarely works. And yet somehow many of those same engineers think they can do the same with a global financial system that's been in existence for centuries.
How is this any different than the people who are trying to write a whole social media/communications infrastructure from scratch (ie. fediverse), which turns out to be mostly the same as incumbents but worse? There's even an example of "[new system] is speedrunning the history of [old system]", which the recent debacle on mastodon where people were complaining about unfair/arbitrary bans and name impersonation, both of which are well known problems that centralized platforms ran into and they attempted to put a lid on.
it’s apparently illegal for cz to help americans via binance.com.
It would be like finding out that the fire chief in your town was filling up his car with gas that was supposed to only be for the fire trucks, and then deciding to totally get rid of the fire department. Yes, you end the corruption, but the next time there is a fire a whole block of homes burns down.
A decentralized trustless currency or store of value means that a minor typo OR a hack could cost you everything. And adding layers of protection on top of that makes the underlying layer completely pointless. If every exchange is going to stop any transactions involving my wallets the minute they decide I'm "suspicious" why not just leave my money in cash or gold or in a bank account?
It would be like a town where the government fire department was corrupt and stealing from the town's treasury, so some people move outside the city limits and set up their own volunteer fire department.
Maybe it doesn't work as well. Maybe there are fires the volunteers aren't prepared for. Maybe some government firefighters start fires in the unincorporated area to make townsfolk afraid to leave and join the rebel group. But at least the volunteers aren't stealing from the treasury any more.
Bitcoin is a protocol, I assume TradFi means traditional finance companies. The companies that deal with Bitcoin shouldn't be different from TradFi to begin with (and that's a good thing). They are typically holding and handling assets (Bitcoin) on behalf of others and philosopically I see only little difference whether you are doing that with Bitcoin, with physical assets like gold, or digital database rows like equities or bonds.
Using Bitcoin in a self-custodial manner is something else altogether.
Despite how progressive we nerd types signal to be, HN can sure be a boy's club of in-groups sometimes.
I'll take my downvotes, I mean it. You guys in this comment thread are not bringing value to this discussion.
A primary example of such a nutcase belief complex is: 1. That X is the only true religion. 2. That believing in false things is not a natural right and is heresy. 3. That heresy can and should be punished.
This belief complex has been demonstrated publicly by the mentioned person.
If someone expresses an unreasonable belief, such as that it is moral to execute "heretics", then that person deserves scorn regardless of whatever "belief club" they claim to belong to. Not only that, he himself is a "heretic" to Catholics for believing that Pope Francis is some kind of impostor installed by the liberal MSM media.
Sorry, but sometimes a nutcase is just a nutcase. The easiest way to identify a nutcase is identifying professed beliefs that are either internally inconsistent or that no reasonable person would remotely agree with.
Technically, believing a valid papal election did not occur and that others believe in it only because of a fraud conspiracy when such an election did occur is not heretical, even from the perspective of the doctrine of the part of the Church that recognizes the election.
I'm not saying that this guy isn’t a heretic from the point of view of (what the MSM describes as, from his PoV) the Catholic heirarchy, or even that his sedevacantism isn’t rooted in heresy, just that the particular view pointed to isn’t heretical on the surface (since it doesn't touch on, much less conflict with, any essential doctrine.)
He claims:
>> it is legitimate to punish by death, someone who openly declares the popes to not be infallible on matters of faith and morals
But also claims that, in simple terms, “executed code is not code or lawful” if it’s executed code dealing with his magic internet tokens…
What a conundrum…
What a specimen of a human being I’ve come upon tonight. I’ve known of the man’s existence, not this beautiful list of past quotes you’ve given us tho.
Did not know there was a raging christo-fascist amongst the core dev team.
Unfortunat.
And this is 6 years old, in the meantime he has graced us with many more, including one where he says that slavery is fine because it's just another type of employment contract!
He kept claiming it must be physical access, but the information he shared about the attacks points more to an IPMI, BMC, iLO or iDRAC type interface being unsecured.
He also didn't use FDE on the server which made the attacks possible...
You really should read more about him to see how this incident might be more plausible in the context of such an unusual individual's unique and non-mainstream lifestyle
"Another things that will push the price of Bitcoins up is the cost to store Bitcoin's will be very high, as Bitcoin storage companies will need to have paper wallets, vaults, security guards, insurance and many things we associate with a tradition bank, and this will be an ongoing cost, which will only get more and more expensive since Bitcoins are limited in number and demand will only go up. So I would not be surprised one to day see the million dollar Bitcoin!"
Link here: https://www.castoshi.net/blog/bitcoin-is-terrible-for-consum...
I'd be shocked if he doesn't have thousands in paper wallets.
What chance does the unbanked have? They'll have a much better chance in traditional banking.
I guess that’s true, but only in the sense of “even core devs can get lazy/stupid/cocky and fail to implement basic security measures (eg. hardware wallets)”, not “securing bitcoins is such an impossible feat that even a bitcoin core dev can do it”
For the mainstream the advice becomes: Don't leave your coins in an exchange or other third party. But also don't manage it yourself. Leaving no option.
After decades of stupid "secure" password policies and lately almost worthless sms/otp as second factor auth the industry finally came up with a real solution: webauthn.
I think that if a webauthn like solution is provided for crypto storage then you won't see wallets stolen anymore.
Also Luke Jr is pretty much a terrible person so I won’t shed tears on this one.
Perhaps a stroll by this would have been useful for a core dev with $3.2 million in a wallet stored in a profoundly stupid way on a server.
Compromised server[1]...
[1] https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1593227756841578496
Donation of what? It only makes sense if the purpose of Bitcoin is to go up in fiat denominated terms, but that’s not a currency it’s a Ponzi scheme.
I think you're either reading too much into it, or are interpreting "donation" too literally. He's just pointing out the very simple fact that if there is less of a scarce resource, then the value of what remains goes up, all things being equal. He's not advocating that people burn their bitcoins intentionally to make everyone rich or whatever. The whole thing is just a subtle joke, and it seems like you missed it.
That’s not applicable in this context because the coins were stolen (ie. transferred to someone else) not lost (ie. transferred to no one). In the former case it doesn’t make everyone’s coins more valuable because it could still be spent.
The guidelines are more than merely rules. They’re the glue that holds us together and prevents us from tearing each other apart in political flamewar.