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My old physics teacher always said: "It's the dumb criminals who get caught; you never catch the smart ones." He was a really smart guy, and he did live a nice lifestyle, hmmm...
Anyway, so IOTA. As with any digital currency, you need some random information - a passphrase typically - that is used when you create your wallet. In the case of IOTA, which is supposed to be IOT friendly, this means a string of 81 random characters, the generation of which could be pretty easily automated.
That's great, and the OSS world being full of helpful people, someone wrote a handy generator, put the code for all to see on GitHub, and put their generator onto a website where you could easily make use of it. Nice.
Actually, diabolical. The code on the website really was identical to the code on GitHub, except for one tiny, almost insignificant change: at some point, the owner swapped out the random seed to a value that he knew. Not even constant - that would have been too obvious - but known nonetheless.
And for many months, many people used his friendly little service. Until January 19th, when he emptied their IOTA wallets, erased his presence from the Interwebs, and quietly disappeared. $4 million or so richer.
This one won't be caught.
tl;dr for anyone who doesn't get it: The point of having a secret password, secret passphrase, or secret key is that it's secret. Which means that you don't have it generated for you by a public web service.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:09AM (3 children)
If there exists a person who will for some reason hand you real money for play money - it still is play money.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:48AM (1 child)
if a large, monopolizing force goes around threatening to kill you if you don't use its play money, is it still play money?
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:53AM
NO ONE EXpects! The violent imposition of a fiat currency! Those who do expect it, um, . . . come in again. I am now very curious about who bradley12+1's teacher was. Kevin Spacey?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:28PM
If pretty much anyone will exchange you some widely-recognized money you call "real money" for the stuff you call "play money," then it's all as real as money gets and you are an idiot.
Things like IOTA, Bitcoin, and the US Dollar are inherently worthless and only have value because people esteem them to have value. Because they are divisible and transferrable, and people esteem them to have value, they are by definition money.
If your "money" is only useful as a token counter when playing a board game, or in teaching money theory to children, then it is "play money." As soon as a market appears to pay you for that money, it's not play money anymore, even if you personally don't approve of same.