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Cryptocurrency YouTuber Ian Balina hacked out of $2M during a livestream
- tomglynch 8y agoLots of talk about this being setup and a way to get out of taxes (which are apparently due tomorrow in the US). Any chance this could be the case?
- ebbv 8y agoDefinitely possible but kinda hard to know for sure.
- txsh 8y agoLosing money in 2018 would not affect 2017 income tax.
- AznHisoka 8y agoHow would this affect 2017 taxes though if it happened in 2018?
- csomar 8y agoAren't you taxed on money you lost?
- cpplinuxdude 8y agoNope. Offsetting losses is therefor a very commonly used loophole. Hence the speculation.
- toss1 8y agoTrue. He'd just better be very careful to have an explanation when he starts cashing in the 'lost' funds... or titrate them very slowly into his lifestyle. Tax Evasion is often caught not only by transactions, but by inexplicably high lifestyle.
- berberous 8y agoThe livestream had nothing to do with it. Here's how he says he thinks he was hacked (from the bottom of the article): "This is how I think I got hacked. My college email was listed as a recovery email to my Gmail. I remember getting an email about it being compromised, and tried to follow up with my college security to get it resolved, but wasn’t able to get it handled in fast manner and gave up on it thinking it was just an old email. I kept text versions of my private keys stored in my Evernote, as encrypted text files with passwords. I think they hacked my email using my college email, and then hacked my Evernote."
- danso 8y agoThe time stamps of the purported transfer took place during his livestream so the headline ("during a livestream") is correct
- berberous 8y agoYes, understood, but it seemed to me like an irrelevant and misleading detail, as if he accidentally revealed his passwords or some other security detail on camera.
- trumped 8y agoI thought the same, but it's still a bit of a "funny" fact
- zellyn 8y agoAssuming he ever types his passwords, and you can hear the key-clicks in the audio track, he did.
- tjoff 8y agoIt seems like a very interesting detail considering that we don't know how it was done. Maybe the last (seemingly innocent) clue (or just confidence of previous clues) the hacker needed was present. Or maybe it was just the hacker wanting a distraction (though I could think of better ones...) or doing it for fun.
- bredren 8y agoKeys kept in plaintext on Evernote.
- mcjiggerlog 8y agoFrom the article: "I kept text versions of my private keys stored in my Evernote, as encrypted text files with passwords."
- sambull 8y agoDon't worry he encrypted them with a winzip password
- trumped 8y agoI used GnuPG, is that good enough (assuming a 16 char random password)?
- mcjiggerlog 8y agoIf it's just a random string, how do you store your password?
- simias 8y agoIf you have a lot of money in your cryptocurrency wallet you should at least consider using a hardware GnuPG "smartcard" like nitrokey or yubikey. This way even if they get your passphrase they still need access to your hardware token (and vice-versa). There are also hardware wallets specifically meant for cryptocurrencies which I suppose have the advantage of not requiring you to decrypt your wallet on your drive before you make a transaction.
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- noir_lord 8y agoI'd embed them into QR codes, print them out on high quality acid-free paper and put them in a fire safe. I don't trust anything electronic to store data in the long term, I do trust that a QR code will be readable in 50 years even if you have to decode it by hand (or at least write a program to do it) (in a temperature controlled safe with no UV I'd expect laser toner to last 50 years). Other methods I can think of would be etching the QR code into a stable material (glass for example). That said I stay miles away from cryptocurrencies, I find the technology interesting but the actual 'market' hilarious.
- rajacombinator 8y agoSounds like a great marketing hack / donation scam quite honestly.
- curiousgal 8y agoA comment on the article also raises a valid point: >Could it be that he made it up to avoid taxes? Perhaps we'll never know
- rajacombinator 8y agoYea I ignored that one thinking the IRS would just laugh but I suppose a naive crypto youtuber might try such a thing.
- sspiff 8y agoAt the risk of sounding pedantic, can we not use the term crypto for cryptocurrency or blockchain related stuff? Crypto already has a well defined meaning that is in common use, which is related to cryptography, not cryptocurrency. Edit: Post title was changed to use the full word "cryptocurrency", great :)
- marak830 8y agoAs much as I agree (and I upvoted you), I do think that ship has sailed. Same as hacker has different meanings when used here on HN and on most news articles.
- camgunz 8y agoI'm fine with it being a shibboleth for people deeply embedded in the cryptocurrency world, whereas for people in the wider world of software engineering (and hopefully the world at large) we stick with the original meaning. It's also worth saying the prefix doesn't really make sense. "crypto"-"graphy" means hidden writing. "crypto"-"currency" means hidden currency, and nothing about Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. is hidden.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoI’ll go one further and call the cryptocommodities.
- csomar 8y agoI don't think it is going to work. Maybe in HN but as some other commenter said the ship has sailed. Most people don't know crypto and know cryptocurrencies. They associated them with that word.
- cpplinuxdude 8y agoAt the risk of sounding pedantic too, crypto is short for both cryptography and cryptocurrency. Knowing which one it refers to is inferred from context.
- jasonwen 8y agoI think its an exit scam. He will not be able to sell coins without upsetting his following, because he sells and then announced it on his channels. This will be followed a major dump and his followers will lose significant value during this dump. Perfect cover up to liquidate his assets while covering his ass. No person seriously into crypto (especially with his amounts) does not keep it in a hardware wallet.
- roflchoppa 8y agoBack in my day when we made wallets on air-blocked computers, that had the single purpose of just generating wallets. Not sure if I would trust hardware wallets//online wallets in the same way. The other benefit to this is if you misplace a wallet, and find it years later it’s like finding cash in your dress pants you don’t really wear all the time.
- tonyztan 8y ago> The other benefit to this is if you misplace a wallet, and find it years later it’s like finding cash in your dress pants you don’t really wear all the time. There were also some who accidentally threw their old computers / hard drives away. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/bitcoin-value-james-howells-newport-landfill-hard-drive-campbell-simpson-laszlo-hanyecz-a8091371.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
- girvo 8y agoI found some BTC change on a backup drive. Said change was now worth a few hundred dollars. Was neat!
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- loceng 8y agoInteresting theory. One point towards another bad behaviour that incentivized crypto-assets can lead to..
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- capoditutticapi 8y agoI thought Gmail required a phone number as well when 2FA is configured and someone is trying to recover their account. Otherwise it would be to easy to bypass. But maybe the dude just likes to live dangerous by keeping his millions in a cleartext evernote file.
- Crosseye_Jack 8y agoWhile they do make you add a phone number to the account first when enabling 2FA you can remove it afterwards though (iirc) you have to remember to not just remove the number as an auth method but also remove it as a recovery method. Failing to do so opens you up to getting your phone account transferred to a different phone/sim and using that to do the recovery process to gain access to the account.
- jiveturkey 8y agonot to lack compassion, but lolol
- n3dm 8y ago>I kept text versions of my private keys stored in my Evernote, as encrypted text files with passwords. I think they hacked my email using my college email, and then hacked my Evernote. >Storing private keys for wallets worth $2,000,000 online... A fool and his money are soon parted.