Binance Says More Than $40 Million in Bitcoin Stolen in 'Large Scale' Hack (techcrunch.com) 138
Hackers have stolen over $40 million worth of bitcoin from Binance, world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, the company said on Tuesday. From a report: In a statement, the company said hackers stole API keys, two-factor codes and other information in the attack. Binance traced the cryptocurrency theft -- more than 7,000 bitcoins at the time of writing -- to a single wallet after the hackers stole the contents of the company's bitcoin hot wallet. Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, said the theft impacted about 2 percent of its total bitcoin holdings.
The fastest way to become a millionaire (Score:2)
The fastest way to become a millionaire is to start a bitcoin repository and steal from everyone when it's "hacked."
Re: The fastest way to become a millionaire (Score:5, Funny)
If Mr Trump has taught us anything, it's that the fastest way to become a millionaire is to start as a billionaire.
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The fastest way to become a millionaire is to start a bitcoin repository and steal from everyone when it's "hacked."
I know...it's soooooooooooooo tempting to set up a repository and then have it hacked (wink, wink!).
It's pretty much the perfect crime. The police won't do shit because it'll take forever to explain to them what a "bitcoin" is. And even if they finally understand it they'll literally have no idea what to do.
Re: How? (Score:3)
It's around $100 billion, actually.
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I hate bitcoin but your example is beyond retarded. What would happen if every holder of US currency tried to liquidate tomorrow. Yeah, exact same fucking scenario, you mouth breathing moron....
No it isn't the same scenario. The USD is backed by gold reserves. Bitcoin is just a number on a screen, there's nothing behind it, it has no tangeable value.
Re: How? (Score:5, Insightful)
The USD is backed by gold reserves.
nope, not since 1971, but thanks for playing.
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"But but but it's backed by guns and economy and people and stuff."
Those are Government guns, Government licensed economy, and Government slave sheeple.
Cryptocurrency is backed by millions soon billions of Free Voluntarily associated people and their economies around the world, no Government guns licenses control or slavery uto them involved.
So sorry, crypto wins again.
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Are you trolling the GP, or do you really believe that to be true? The US went off the gold standard in the early 1970s.
Re: How? (Score:4, Insightful)
What would happen if every holder of US currency tried to liquidate tomorrow
You mean if they tried to turn their cash into liquid funds, such as cash?
Oh wow! They're doing it already! Constantly. It's almost as though it's the natural state of things.
Re: How? (Score:3)
Same thing happens during any currency collapse. Germany, Zimbabwe, etc. experienced similar dynamics when there was a run on their currencies. No currency is immune to that dynamic. Not even USD.
Re:Okay... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Interesting)
Who here owns bitcoin and has not had some stolen from them?
Raise your hand...
anyone?
I own bitcoin and haven't had it stolen. One of the reasons it hasn't been stolen is that I treat it as if it were money - I don't leave it laying around where someone can just grab it if I am not looking. I keep it in my own offline wallet, so I don't have to worry about some company that I don't really know anything about messing up.
No, I didn't buy it and I don't treat it as an investment, I mined it back when it was practical to do so. No I don't have much - I unfortunately sold it after I mined it and before it went nuts. I did keep a couple of coins for fun - and I keep them safely in offline cold storage (multiple backups of the wallet), where no one has stolen them, and no one is likely to. Yes, keeping an offline wallet is a pain in the ass - especially if when you need to download the blockchain. But since bitcoin is essentially money, you need to treat it like money if you want to keep it safe.
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I've always wanted to ask a bitcoin owner which they would rather:
Would you rather have your bitcoins lose 3/4 of their value or have half of them stolen?
You have to choose only one, but the possibility of both happening is non-zero. I'll wait for your answer.
Re: Okay... (Score:2)
I'd rather they lose 3/4 value. Shit, that's already happened to some of the coins. But I made fat profit on others. In the long-run, I see 3/4 value drop as noise in the long-term value. Loss of 1/2 my coins though, would be a loss of an actual asset, not just an imaginary paper loss.
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So it's only safe if you never do anything with it, never spend it, and never have it serve any of the functions that currency is supposed to serve.
Got it.
Fuck, I wonder why this cryptocurrency thing never takes off? Must be a government conspiracy.
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So it's only safe if you never do anything with it, never spend it, and never have it serve any of the functions that currency is supposed to serve.
Got it.
Fuck, I wonder why this cryptocurrency thing never takes off? Must be a government conspiracy.
No. When you want to sell it our use it as a currency, you take a limited amount of it (maybe similar to the amount you would feel comfortable carrying around in your real wallet or purse) and you put *those* (fractional) coins in some online wallet or service for your convenience. In the case of a large sale, you transfer it to the exchange, sell it, and then immediately acquire the cash. You keep the bulk of your holdings (especially if they are in the 10s of thousands of dollars worth or more) in safer o
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Who here owns bitcoin and has not had some stolen from them?
I do and have never had any stolen.
But I don't keep my wallet file online, and I don't stupidly let strangers hold it and the password on a pinky swear that they will give it back.
Keeping bitcoin in an exchange is like keeping a paypal balance in the early 2000's.
That is no longer yours, it's theirs, and they just pinky swear you'll get it back, right up until they don't.
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I have never understood why people use exchanges in the first place as a place of storage. I can see using them for tumbling, changing into another currency, or otherwise protecting privacy... but what does an exchange offer that a decent app doesn't? It seems that every few months, some exchange gets hacked and all the currency it is storing is drained off.
Cryptocurrencies don't need exchanges for storage. Exchanges are useful for moving between different currencies, but as a place where stuff rests...
Re: Okay... (Score:2)
I've been holding BTC for years. I have lost some coins during a phone crash and from an early wallet, but I've never had any stolen.
Security is expensive. (Score:4, Insightful)
Security is expensive because you either shell out a lot of money to get it or they take a lot more money because you don't have it. This is a good example of what happens when you don't take security seriously.
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There are good ways to protect Bitcoins. Paper wallets [bitcoinpaperwallet.com] come to mind as a method that stops all attacks via remote. It also doesn't hurt to have multiple wallets on different devices.
Also consider keeping multiple wallets on different devices, so a breach doesn't completely clean you out.
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The trick is not to play the attacker's game. If you know a PC is easily compromised, use a hardware wallet like Trezor. If worried about online compromise, use a paper wallet and store that in a physically safe (as in resistant to water/fire/insects) and secure location. If you need even more security, go to www.bitaddress.org, generate a key, split it so you need "x" of "y" segments to recover your original key, then go and stash the pieces in various secure locations. That way, if someone cracks your
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This is what happens when some fiscal get rich quick scheme fad hits the skids. Imaginary millionaires see their imaginary millions disappearing and feel they are entitled to grab more then their share of the fad as it slowly but surely implodes and seek to purloin others pieces of a shrinking pie to make up for their own losses.
Everyone of the cryptocurrency hacks an inside job, some from the top and so low end underpaid security types, seeing the employment coming to an end and being paid in shrinking wo
Re:Security is expensive. (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is this coming from? The tech has many tangible real world uses for money transfer across international borders. You don't even really need to hold it. Buy for currency A. Sell for currency B. You can even do it on the same day and chances are the market won't even really change the value of it.
But let's ignore that value proposition for a second. Would you rather have Venezuelan cash or Bitcoin?
If you live in a place where the fiat currency is stable sure it's not really much of a replacement but stable western countries do not make up the whole world.
This is why there's a floor to the value of Bitcoin. There's always someone in the world that needs to transfer some funds or hold the value of their existing funds in a more stable currency than what they have available to them. There's many places in the world where even having USD is a crime.
My mother likes to tell this anecdote of leaving Russia in the early 90s. People were being searched for currency before being allowed to board the plane. It was illegal to take more than a few hundred USD worth with you. She had way more than that sewed into her jacket. The only reason they didn't pat her down more is because she was holding me standing in line while I was sleeping. Now imagine if she could have moved that money days prior through the internet with no one knowing?
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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So the only good thing for Bitcoin is using it in illegal activities (Smugling in this case).
Only on the internet would someone say "smuggling" to a refugee fleeing a country with money that they actually earned through labor. A few years after said country had a literal revolution. The laws they were breaking were meant to penalize them leaving. No shit?
Coming from someone with a quote that says
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The problem with the government knowing everything is how easy it becomes to abuse the common person. We're talking about people who are coming to a new country with everything that they posses in this worl
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Nobody knowing? You have to convert your fiat money to Bitcoin somehow, and if the government really cares they can easily regulate all exchanges and demand they keep records.
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You can send someone bitcoin and exchange cash. There are IRL markets where people buy and sell bitcoin this way.
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The tech has many tangible real world uses for money transfer across international borders
This is not a benefit of the technology, it's a reflection of the practical reality that you are less likely to get caught at the moment. If caught doing it, you are in as much legal trouble as you would have been if you were caught doing this with other currency. There have been repeated examples where bitcoin is hardly anonymous in practice and people have been tracked down.
Would you rather have Venezuelan cash or Bitcoin?
If I'm in Venezuela, I'm screwed either way. The Venzuelan cash problem is a symptom of a bigger problem that bitcoin doesn't real
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There is absolutely not a floor to the value of bitcoin.
I promise you that one of two things will happen in the future. Either the price of 1 BTC hits $1,000,000 USD or the protocol breaks down as it becomes possible to bruteforce a wallet certificate. I don't know how long this will take but it will eventually due to the deflationary nature of the protocol. (Meaning the amount of coins in circulation drops over time due to losses of the wallet (containing said cert) and the inability to mine more.
Same for Bitcoin. Certainly in the use you champion repeatedly (government-free international money transfers) it's pretty much illegal everywhere.
This is completely wrong in every way. As long as you report your
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This is completely wrong in every way. As long as you report your profit / loss properly to the tax authority in the jurisdiction you are in, follow applicable laws, and pay proper taxes there is absolutely nothing illegal taking place when you exchange cash for Bitcoin.
If you do that, then you don't need bitcoin to facilitate it. The stories I've heard have been focused on international transfers while staying under the tax authority (or in some cases the authorities in general) radar. I've done plenty of currency conversion without bitcoin.
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Citation needed, very badly. I can't even find fake news to back that up, let alone anything from a reliable source. Even North Korea not only recognizes it, but some shops there use only foreign currency including USD, and DO NOT accept the local currency North Korean 'wons'.
That's rough (Score:2, Offtopic)
What will happen with these bitcoin now? (Score:1)
So as soon as someone transfers something away from it, they will pounce on that other address for money laundering, trafficking in stolen goods, whatever. This means it is actually worthless for the thieves, right? They stole it but they can't actually take i
Re: What will happen with these bitcoin now? (Score:2)
It's easy to launder small sums of money with mixing services, but large sums are big enough to be heuristically tracked.
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I dont know a lot about bitcoin but i wondered that as well since everything is really tracked on there... What about one of those bitcoin ATMs? do thoes still exist? can you really not launder bitcoin at all?
But then if you think about it, criminals migrate to countries with less stringent laws all the time. You would need to get co-operation from the country to prosecute. Could it not be broken up in somalia or russia or something and traded for gold there? then all the small pieces would be effectively l
Re:What will happen with these bitcoin now? (Score:5, Informative)
But some companies have devised tracking methods to determine and track the origin of coins. Coins tracked from dubious sources are known as 'tainted' and some exchanges value these coins less by refusing to convert tainted coins back to fiat.
An example would be Coinbase who use the blockchain intelligence platform Neutrino to keep track of tainted coins.
In the end, as long as there are some exchanges willing to ignore taint then thieves have a method to convert stolen coins into another currency that can't be tracked, eg monero, and avoid linking their converted funds with the original stolen funds.
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Coinbase retains centralized control of your private keys. It's a non-starter in the crypto-currency world.
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Can some legal court in some country tell and force the miners who create the blockchain for transactions to do a specific transaction where they transfer they bitcoin to a court specified address so Binance has their property back or is this actually not possible?
They can't make a new transaction using that address because they don't have the key, and cryptographically brute-forcing it would take centuries.
If most of the miners agree, they can 'undo' every block that happened after the money was transferred (and of course the block with that transaction, too), but it would have to be much more than 51% because they are unwinding so many transactions.
They could also agree to delete that transaction without changing anything else, but then they would need to for
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They may never get the coins back. Nobody except the hackers can make it happen. There's no centralized authority that can just print another 7000 coins to reimburse the losses. Police might seize computers with wallet files, but they'd need cooperation from the hackers in order to unlock them.
On the other hand, blockchain evidence sticks around forever, so the criminals could potentially still be caught years later. That's already happened in at least one case.
The other unfortunate possibility is that the
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Just shapeshift it to a more anonymous currency, run some anonymous transactions, and move it back. Even if tumbling doesn't fully clean things, the fact that the audit trail is completely broken by the currency shift is enough to ensure any currency isn't tainted.
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It would require 51% of all the miners out there to reverse transactions, and because the coins have passed through so many hands already, this may be difficult to impossible. Even if were doable, there would be an uproar from people who committed no crime, but had tainted coins. It would get people to abandon the currency, then make cryptocurrencies which are more resistant to this.
I would say it is pretty much impossible for Binance to get their stuff back.
Moral of the story: Maybe exchanges need some
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Banks have been around long enough to sort out the incompetence issues. Bitcoin exchanges haven't.
Of course there's greed but they both have that, so 2-1 on aggregate.
Security is hard, news at 11:00 (Score:2)
Exchanges have got to be - by now - some of the most security conscious companies on the planet. And yet, stuff like this happens.
At my work, we are continually bombarded by ever-more-sophisticated phishing and spear phishing attacks. Just yesterday a colleague was discussing one such email that was essentially indistinguishable from a legitimate internal email from our accounting department. Only the timing was a bit off, so he picked up the phone.
Security is hard; if you are a valuable target, security is
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> Exchanges have got to be - by now - some of the most security conscious
Why would you think this? The exchanges lack _motive_ to keep their transactions and behavior traceable. Since so much of the allure of bitcoin and the similar currencies is the _lack_ of traceability of private transactions and so much of the traffic is illegal (for tax evasion, illegal goods on the dark web, or extortion), why would any but a few exchanges want good record keeping? Especially when poor record keeping or customer p
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WTF? Record-keeping has nothing to do with security, at least not in this case.
As for motive: how about *not* losing $40 million to a hack. That's plenty of motive for you.
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But if it's not *my* $40 million, how is that a motive?
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WTF? Record-keeping has nothing to do with security, at least not in this case.
This is why bitcoin goes to zero. 90% of what bitcoin does is "record keeping" that is primary use case its all about ownership and transference of ownership and keeping records about that. The other bit is mining but that is far and way the less important part.
Fact is bitcoin does not work. if it did work, it would deliver on its promise of direct currency exchanges without the middle man. In practice its turned out there are major technical hurdles that make transactions to slow and expensive. The so
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> As for motive: how about *not* losing $40 million to a hack.
As for motive, how about being the one to _steal_ $40 million at one bite? It may be a distasteful motive, but deliberate theft from their own clients has been unsurprisingly commonplace among the crypto-currency exchanges.
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Exchanges have got to be - by now - some of the most security conscious companies on the planet.
All the evidence says this is false.
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If we want to move parts of civilization fully online (as with cryptocurrencies), we have to find a solution for criminality - specifically, we need to find a way to add risk to criminal activity. Possibly through law enforcement, possibly through vigilantism, possibly through some other means.
There's always Israel's solution.
Once again, exchanges are convenient but insecure. (Score:2)
Keep your bitcoins offline in a hardware wallet.
Convenient, secure, cheap. Pick two.
Well who would have guessed. (Score:1)
Worked as expected (Score:2)
Ha ha ha ha (Score:2)
Ha ha ha ha, err, I mean, "Goodness gracious, that's terrible!"
Seriously, playing with cryptocurrency is hilarious until you lose it to a scammer/hacker/insider/whatever.
I admit, I find it extremely entertaining to watch a rat find the cheese and then lose it to another rat who promises to "store it securely." That shit just never gets old.
She can handle it... (Score:2)
Doesn't the ledger protect? (Score:1)
Misread the headline (Score:2)