The US government seemed surprisingly warm to bitcoin in the senate hearing. I suspect that if governments end up getting involved in bitcoin, each merchant will require some form of ID for each wallet that they interact with. This will mean that tracking down crimes like this will be fairly easy, since there's a record of each transaction. Trace down the chain, find the people involved, and if an anonymous wallet shows up, you investigate the people that it transferred to or from.
Sure, it erodes privacy, but bitcoin has the potential to make things much easier for law enforcement (and anyone else interested in money transfers) by causing registration of endpoints, giving very strong leads to investigators.
There is also factoring in the complexity added to associating any form of ID to a particular coin, if CoinJoin or similar trustless anonymizing mixing services reach widespread adoption.
This is all assuming Bitcoin continues it's mainstream course.
Any automated website or tool will require a "hot wallet" of some kind. The more funds in the hot wallet, the longer the website / BTC Bank can go automatically.
Customers like having funds available to them immediately... among other things.
I've seen fast food joints and parking lots with 24/7 attendants, it can't possibly cost more than $100,000 a year.
That's why I said that it would be manual. Actually, it could be semi-automatic - a script could generate all relevant transactions, and a human operator could simply confirm them few times a day by signing the transaction with his password protected private key.
> Customers like having funds available to them immediately... among other things.
Either security or convenience. This service was aimed for merchants, which are used to get their funds from payment processors much slower than in a matter of hours.
Also, that's only one of the solutions that I mentioned. Second one, which is convenient and more secure at the same time, is using multisignature wallets.
Yes, you can. You can have the hot wallet only deal with multi-signature outputs, and have these approved by separately locked down servers running behind TOR, for example, using out-of-band mechanisms for approving transactions.
But then again, the headline made it to the front page and got me to comment...
2) The article title becomes immediately obsolete due to exchange rate fluctuations. On the day of the theft for instance, the BTC/USD rate was hugely volatile, fluctuating between $522 and $788.
We could go dig up the old Bitcoin Forum posts about people losing 25k coins and mark-to-market those losses for more sensational headlines. Or we could simply post the BTC amount in the headline along with present fiat value.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6783710
granted, i don't present these things very tactfully
The thing is, if you want to use bitcoin, you cannot trust third parties to hold your coins for you. If you want to support bitcoin in your business, you cannot trust other sites to handle the payment for you. Yes, it is not convenient. But you have everything available to handle this yourself and, yes, you will need someone competent to do that for you if you are not into it. Bitcoin is not meant for the average user or the unaware merchant and it might never be, people need to start accepting this fact.
I enjoyed the bit at the end about a potential lawsuit to get the BTC back. Sounds awfully familiar to the legal posturing after some other BTC heists--none of which got anywhere AFAIK.
Do people still think the irrevocability of BTC transactions is a good thing?
While Bitcoin is stolen from some exchanges from time to time, it's much more diffused and it's enormously harder to take bitcoins massively from population than gold.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
By the way, these "insured" USDs that you have in your account are not owned by you. Try to cash out everything in paper. Or move anywhere at once without asking for permission. Or what would you do when they impose capital controls like in Cyprus or Argentina? Or when your % of total USDs in the economy is going down while Fed is printing more dollars? Or when some new taxation is applied retroactively? Or when some bureaucrat didn't see your tax return papers in time and your entire account is frozen during investigation?
Bitcoin reduces systemic risk like the one present in banking system and shifts the burden on individual users. You can still create a bank if you want, but that's totally optional and you have many other options as well. In the future people will develop hundreds really different devices, services and tricks to store your coins securely. Compare that with monopolised non-innovative heavily regulated banking.
As bitcoins are so cheap to store, security is asymmetrical: it's much harder to take, than to hide. Gold, or any physical commodity, are as hard to protect as to take from you. Hence, most brutal guys end up owning precious metals over the course of the history. Average Joe can only have as much gold as he can hide in his pants.
Yes. Third parties will provide escrow/insurance services if there is demand for them. Transactions been irreversible "by default" is a core benefit of bitcoin and merchants may preffer that over chargebacks at 18€.
Just ignore or downvote next time.
Bitcoin is a hot topic these days, tons of people are interested in what's going on.
