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chachazz
Premium Member
join:2003-12-14

chachazz to Snowy

Premium Member

to Snowy

Re: Chinese Bitcoin Exchange Vanishes ($4.1m)

Another one...
An online exchange that trades the digital currency bitcoin in the Czech Republic says it has been attacked by hackers.
»www.washingtonpost.com/w ··· ory.html

Snowy
Lock him up!!!
Premium Member
join:2003-04-05
Kailua, HI

1 recommendation

Snowy

Premium Member

I could fill volumes with the inherit fatal flaws of bitcoin but I'll keep this brief.

It's success was that of a curiosity.
Flying under radar if you will.
Once it grew up it went from being a curiosity to being a target.

e.g., what do hackers need?
Resources.
The cloud is an excellent resource for all that it is as well as well as for all that it isn't.
Hackers don't access their PayPal accounts to pay for these services. They use other peoples PayPal accounts. They don't bust out their credit cards to pay either - well actually they do since they temporarily see other peoples credit cards as their own.

That created a problem for both hacker & service provider.
It was just a matter of time before the fraudulent payment caught up with hacker.
The service provider would get hit a charge back getting debited whatever amount they had assumed was income.
The hacker's problem was losing access to a service that may have vast amounts of important data on it without warning because of the service provider immediately terminating access due to the charge back.

An acceptable work around to this was Liberty Reserve where a hacker could legitimately pay a service provider eliminating both the charge back as well as loss of access issues. Of course the source of those funds wasn't legit but it didn't matter.

With the Feds shutdown of Liberty Reserve the pressure to find an alternate anonymous "legit" payment platform helped bump bitcoins appeal.

That it appeals to hackers/ecriminals can't be overlooked when discussing bitcoin issues.