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Cybercriminals are increasingly moving away from bitcoin as their preferred digital currency in favor of lesser-known cryptocurrencies because of prolonged transaction delays, surging transaction costs and general market volatility, experts tell CyberScoop.
Although cybercriminals have been slowly moving away from bitcoin for months, researchers say a noticeable shift towards alternative coins — such as Monero, Dash and ZCash — occurred when bitcoin's value skyrocketed over $19,000 for one bitcoin in mid-December. The price has drastically fluctuated between $12,000 and roughly $19,000 since then.
"Many cybercriminals emulate the operational best practices of legitimate businesses in order to minimize their overhead costs and maximize returns, and in the case of high transaction costs with bitcoin, it makes perfect sense to look at other coins with smaller overheads," said Richard Henderson, a global security strategist with endpoint cybersecurity firm Absolute.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday January 05 2018, @03:35PM
So this year, I thought I came up with a great idea.... I'd buy some Bitcoin, print up a bunch of paper wallets, and then transfer value to each of them. Then I give the wallet as a gift. So I purchased about $40 in BTC from Coinbase. I was charged like $2.00 for the transaction which I thought was fine. I then transferred $4.00 to the first wallet.... but I totally misread the decimal place for the fees. And I was charged $30.00 for the transfer. *eeek*
After a couple of days and of looking around I decided to repeat my experiment with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) instead of Bitcoin (BTC). So I bought $20 of BCH. And I sent $2.00 to the next user and it told me the fee would be $0.05.
And, as far as I can tell, while you're told what network fees will be before you actually execute the transaction, you can't know what the network fee is until after you've got the coin in and and want to transfer it.
I still had fun, and I learned a lot, but feel like I wasted $30. (And the point of this was to create a fun gift, which was successful. Not to be invested in cryptocurrency...)
This sig for rent.