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An unidentified 36-year-old man who owns a Bitcoin account has lost more than 100,000 euros ($117,000) worth of Bitcoins while he was logged in on a public wireless network in a restaurant in Vienna, Austria.
The Austrian police, however, claimed that they are still investigating whether the victim's account was already hacked before he opened his account on the unsecured network, CBS reports.
This latest case reflects the growing concern over the security of digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum amidst their growing popularity as a mode of payment.
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Bitcoin Account Holder Loses $100K Over Public Wireless Network
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 26 2017, @05:09PM (13 children)
I wonder - do you know what fiat money is? "Real money", like the old Greenback dollars, were backed by something - anything. In the case of greenbacks, they were backed by either gold, or silver. (look up "silver certificates - not exactly the same as a greenback, but near enough for this discussion) Today's dollars are backed by - NOTHING. Fiat money. The only value it has, is that it measures the world's "faith" in the US government. Or, more accurately, the world's faith in the US Central Bank. Of course, we don't call it a central bank - we call it the Federal Reserve, but it is exactly the same thing that is called a Central Bank in most other countries.
The dollar has no intrinsic value - in that you are correct. But, it used to actually represent something of value. Today, it doesn't even do that.
(Score: 1, Informative) by nitehawk214 on Sunday November 26 2017, @05:18PM (2 children)
Bitcoin was cool before libertarians got a hold of it.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 26 2017, @05:39PM (1 child)
Not only were libertarian ideas about money baked into the very rules of Bitcoin, but Satoshi noted the usefulness of the libertarians as a vector for spreading Bitcoin, and most of the "core" developers would describe themselves as libertarian.
Bitcoin has direct connections to the Cyberpunk movement, which is indisputably libertarian is nature.
So... I guess you think Bitcoin was never cool, because libertarians have had control of it from the very beginning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 26 2017, @07:04PM
Firken poly-morphously perverse racists! Libertardiantari-ists!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 26 2017, @05:44PM (7 children)
When you have control of a Bitcoin key, you have control of a massive, global, decentralized network of computers; you also have access to a large network of resource flows that have been built around BTC, which can be interpreted as a money.
These are all real things.
They are made all the more real by the fact that people have built them by voluntary interaction instead of coercion.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 26 2017, @06:14PM (6 children)
Real things. Something "real" is something that I can pick up, and carry around. Or, load into a truck, and transport it somewhere. Bitcoin is as imaginary as a federal reserve note. It's less real than that federal reserve note. In the event of an electromagnetic pulse, those notes are unaffected. They still exist, they're still foldable, stackable, and transportable.
What if and EMP takes place near one (or more) of your more important servers? Yeah, I know, it's "distributed" - all the same, there is some small number of main servers, which are vulnerable. No, I don't know how many you would have to knock out to destroy bitcoin. Maybe it can't be destroyed, entirely. But, the system can certainly be paralyzed if those key servers are targeted.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday November 26 2017, @06:21PM (2 children)
Your post is not something that I can pick up, and carry around, therefore it is not real. Thus you are false data, and I shall ignore you.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 26 2017, @09:33PM (1 child)
Bomb 20, is that you?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday November 26 2017, @11:22PM
Let there be light.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 26 2017, @09:16PM
> Something "real" is something that I can pick up, and carry around.
You can't pick up zero and carry it around, but it's real. You can't pick up one and carry it around, but it's real. Bitcoin is complex. Bitcoin consists of many, many zeros and ones (the real part) and the social construction that they have value (the imaginary part).
The idea you have in mind is better expressed as "tangible" or "concrete."
(Score: 1, Troll) by arcz on Sunday November 26 2017, @11:04PM
bitcoin has no key servers. You'd need to wipe out basically all computer infrastructure on the planet to kill bitcoin. and at that point we have bigger problems.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday November 27 2017, @06:56AM
> It's less real than that federal reserve note. In the event of an electromagnetic pulse, those notes are unaffected. They still exist, they're still foldable, stackable, and transportable.
And what makes you think the USD (or any other fiat currency) would be worth anything in such a collapse scenario?
To actually disrupt the bitcoin network, you would need multiple massive worldwide EMP events, akin to a global level nuclear war.
Under such EMPs, peoples accounts, all ledgers, etc... which are held on computers go. Suddenly someone with millions in their current and brokerage accounts has as much money as the bum next to him, i.e. fuck all. Fiat is backed by the power of the government to coerce you to use it with violence. If the government went away or was weakened, so would the strength of whatever paper they push as "currency".
And in such a scenario, if I am a survivor, and someone comes to me and offers me what is basically bits of coloured paper to exchange for material things that are in short supply, I would think they were nuts. Hell, if you came and offered me toilet paper instead of paper money, I would find it a more appealing deal.
In such an "end times" scenario, the only thing I can think would work is barter, so either have something to trade, or some useful skills so you can trade your time+labour for whatever you need (or you are very good with weaponry and don't have a problem with murder to get your way, in which case becoming the local bandit/warlord is an alternative).
Whichever way you slice it, in your scenario, anything that takes out enough Infrastructure to ruin Bitcoin, will ruin pretty much all other currencies as well. If you want to "stack" something to use in such a scenario (apart from the necessities for living), stick to precious metals (Silver/Gold, I would go for Copper too, good conductor, and critical to modern living for its use in generators/motors and transformers), good tools / machining, toilet paper and medicines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 27 2017, @06:42AM
Greenbacks were the start of fiat currency in the US. Look up the history of it before you start lecturing others on it. Moron.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 27 2017, @07:59AM
Equally meaningless [wikipedia.org] or meaninful, whatever way you like it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford