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from the keep-your-private-keys-offline dept.
There's a new contender for the largest theft of cryptocurrency ever:
A Japanese cryptocurrency exchange announced the theft Friday of $400 million in digital currency. Some estimates put the loss at the Coincheck exchange at over $520 million.
The stolen assets were stored in the cryptocurrency NEM, one of hundreds of digital currencies created in recent years. Bitcoin, the most well-known cryptocurrency, dropped precipitously on news of the hack but has since regained much of its value.
The incident could be one of the largest single losses of cryptocurrency ever, rivaling only the 2014 hack of online exchange Mt. Gox. Reports at the time put Mt. Gox's losses at over $400 million.
Coincheck says 500 million digital coins were lost. According to Cointelgraph, hackers stole the private key protecting access to Coincheck's accounts.
Does it matter that it was a $400 million theft if the value is going to collapse anyway?
Meanwhile, a stock trading app called Robinhood plans to allow users to buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum without any transaction fees.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 28 2018, @08:28PM (1 child)
Would you really feel comfortable entrusting your digital money to an app named for someone who got famous for stealing from the rich to give to the poor?
I mean, if you are trading stock, you probably don't exactly belong to the poor …
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2018, @10:14PM
Poor is relative (and don't we all have at least a few poor relatives?)
The IT guy who traded me a bitcoin for a piece of software back in 2010 ($4.50 nominal value at the time) was mining coins on whatever hardware he could lay his hands on - the company didn't have metered electricity in the lease so nobody cared that the server room was a little warm. I'd guess he was salaried somewhere below $30K per year at the time - not exactly poor, but poor enough to think that Robin Hood might toss him a bone once in awhile.
🌻🌻 [google.com]