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Police search cryptocurrency trading firm after Turks say they were scammed
- rvz 6y agoAnd there you have it. A stunning exit scam executed to perfection. So brilliantly executed, that even the CEO disappeared. The great Houdini would be proud. /s As always, don't let your coins sit on an exchange. If you don't have the keys, it's not your coins.
- sashimi-houdini 6y ago#notallhoudinis
- peteretep 6y ago> If you don't have the keys, it's not your coins For the vast majority of people, if they do have the keys, their personal security is poor enough that someone will get a copy.
- tim333 6y agoOr more commonly lose them. I've got a friend who mined bitcoin back at the start and then the repair shop formatted the hard disk. Would probably be worth a few bob now.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hanniabu 6y agoNot the same. Back in the day it was treated as a novelty. If your friend knew it'd have value then he'd have protected it better.
- piva00 6y agoAgree, I had 12 BTC mined back in 2010-2011, I just did it because I was being part of other distributed computing networks like SETI@home and Folding@Home. I mined for a while, accumulated them on a wallet on my hard drive and completely forgot about it until the boom in 2014. By then I had already erased 2 generations of hard drives from that machine, it was my NAS for a while, etc. I don't feel bad about it at all, I never imagined or considered it would become what it is and it was just a toy app I ran for a while after SETI@home and Folding@Home got me intrigued with the concept of massively distributed computing.
- tim333 6y agoYeah true in my friends case though people losing keys continues such as the recent story "Man Has Two Login Attempts Left to Access $220 Million in Bitcoin Before It's All Lost" https://www.newsweek.com/man-has-two-login-attempts-left-access-220-million-bitcoin-before-its-all-lost-1560984 https://www.newsweek.com/man-has-two-login-attempts-left-acc... (see also Silicon Valley https://youtu.be/aKXqZh43OH8?t=11 https://youtu.be/aKXqZh43OH8?t=11)
- frombody 6y agoI lost many bitcoin early and predicted them to be valuable. The issue with someone security conscious like me is that, although you can make many backups, you have to secure each of those backups. The more copies you have the more opportunities for someone to attack, so every backup needs to be fully secure. Eventually I did such a good job of securing them that I locked myself out.
- arcticbull 6y agoPeople put them on exchanges because crypto is actively user hostile. You forget a word, you lose a scrap of paper, someone knocks over your bird bath - and boom you're broke. This is one of the many, many fundamental problems with crypto. It's basically just a digital obstacle course to see who can keep hold of their coins lol. You make fun of people who forget their passwords, you make fun of people who get rekked when an exchange exit scams. You send the wrong Elon bitcoin (both the fake and real ones now accept bitcoin) it's SFYL. Ransomeware? Whoopsie poopsie. SFYL. It's always the customer's fault, never the technology. I do wish this Turkish gentleman best of luck building that orphanage in India with Gerald Cotton though. With the billions between them I'm sure the children will be well looked after.
- Mordisquitos 6y agoExactly. Apart from the intrinsic wastefulness of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, the utopian evangelising on how The Algorithm is perfectly trustworthy and irreversible as an ultimate arbiter of truth is very far from what is desirable in the real world. It is not a feature, it is a bug.
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago> It is not a feature, it is a bug. What gives you the right to proclaim what a user wants their software to do? If it is a feature to some people they are perfectly fine to consider it as such.
- Mordisquitos 6y agoI am a user of currencies, and that gives me the right to proclaim that impossible reversibility of transfers is a bug for functioning as a currency.
- StavrosK 6y agoWhereas cash is much better! You can't lose it, it can't catch on fire, it can't be blown away by the wind, it can't be stolen, you can't give it to the wrong person! So good. That's why everyone keeps all their money in cash at all times. What's that? They put their money in a bank? What if the bank owner takes all the money and flees to Venezuela? "You should only use trustworthy banks", you say? Interesting.
- mancerayder 6y agoA few years ago I had some Monero and went through software hell getting it to work properly with a Ledger. Eventually being that my entire crypto portfolio wasn't in the millions, I moved what was compatible (eth, ltc, a few others) back to Coinbase and sold what was then incompatible. Lost my time and automated cost basis calculations. No thanks, digital wallets. Time > paranoia.
- cbsudux 6y agoNot your keys, not your crypto.
- tomglynch 6y agoYes everyone says this but managing your own keys is a bloody pain.
- rawtxapp 6y agoHardware wallets make it pretty straightforward.
- Ekaros 6y agoAnd always remember they aren't your keys if the hardware isn't by you and verified to gate level.
- Karunamon 6y agoIs losing coins to a crocked hardware wallet even a thing that has happened to anyone?
- sashimi-houdini 6y agoRelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- tluyben2 6y agoWhy? There are so many ways to store them, why is this such a pain? I don't get it but everyone here says so but in meatspace I never hear anyone complain about it.
- robjan 6y agoMost people in "meatspace" are not involved in crypto in any serious way
- 6y ago
- karaokeyoga 6y agoSee also: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/the-strange-tale-of-quadriga-gerald-cotten https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/the-strange-tale-of-...
- QuesnayJr 6y agoI had no idea that so much had come out about the Quadriga case.
- tim333 6y agoThere's a more recent documentary "The Bizarre Disappearance Of A Canadian CEO - An Unsolved Mystery" (Feb 2021 I think) An interesting addition is his BlackHatWorld account shows as active in Aug 2019, a while after he was supposedly dead. https://youtu.be/NMDZcbkgpJA?t=1735 https://youtu.be/NMDZcbkgpJA?t=1735
- user_error 6y agoThat was a very nice read. I wonder how this is not a movie yet.
- companyhen 6y agoHere is the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcoazNFSliE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcoazNFSliE
- NicoJuicy 6y agoWhen I talked to some people in 2017 who were hyped about crypto. They just wired money to a bank account and thought they possessed bitcoin. A lot of similar cases like these happen all the time. Not everyone has the same competencies in IT.
- mrtksn 6y agoI know, "Not your keys, not your coins". However, most people have no idea about the technicalities of the crypto and because transfer fees range from not-zero to ridiculous, as long as the arbitrage between exchanges stays minimal there's no motivation to ever move crypto anywhere so for most people crypto currency is simply the number in their account on a website.
- knocte 6y ago> and because transfer fees range from not-zero to ridiculous This problem has been solved already: just stick to using exchanges that support Lightning (e.g. Bitaroo, Bitfinex, Bitnovo, etc)
- grey-area 6y agoBitfinex No danger of fraud there!
- joosters 6y agoCatch-22: To open a lightning channel, you need to make a transaction (and so pay the high fees), but to pay that fee, you'll need to already have coins in a wallet that you control - which you can only achieve by withdrawing some coins from the exchange. So your 'solution' is for people to withdraw some coins, paying a high fee, then open a lightning channel (again, paying another high fee), make a lightning transaction (beta software, coins at risk, barely functional, better hope you're running the lightning software 24/7 to ensure you don't get ripped off!) and finally you have your coins in your own wallet. What a bargain! Currency of the future!
- gruez 6y ago>Catch-22: To open a lightning channel, you need to make a transaction (and so pay the high fees), but to pay that fee, you'll need to already have coins in a wallet that you control - which you can only achieve by withdrawing some coins from the exchange. I'm not sure whether any exchanges implement this, but theoretically they can withdraw and open a channel at the same time. ie. instead of withdrawing 0.1 BTC, they deposit 0.1BTC to a channel and send all the funds to you. >beta software It's used in production by various merchants so I'm not sure how relevant this is. Speaking of which, isn't bitcoin itself "beta" as well? ie. the version number is still 0.x.x >barely functional ??? >better hope you're running the lightning software 24/7 to ensure you don't get ripped off AFAIK the period is somewhere between 1 week or 2 weeks (don't remember which), and you can have third parties do the monitoring for you.
- sashimi-houdini 6y ago"Not your keys, not your crypto" -- but only in the minds of "crypto-enthousiasts" that's a feature rather than a bug
- nathias 6y agoit's not a feature, it just a fact (the feature is that you can have it at all)
- arcticbull 6y agoMy program crashes if you look at it sideways, that's not a bug, it's a fact. The feature is that you can have it at all!
- nathias 6y agocongratulations on mastering the keyboard, next step: thought
- mmmmmbop 6y agoFrom HN guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. (...) When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
- CyberDildonics 6y agoAre you comparing the most fundamental part of crypto currencies (being able to make transactions yourself) to software crashing? How does that make sense?
- arcticbull 6y agoYes, I am saying the fact that someone can take your keys and you have zero recourse to ever reclaiming that value is a bug. It's one of the "original sins" if you will. Because that's not what anyone actually wants. I've never met anyone who was thrilled by the prospect that if anything went wrong nobody could help them.
- jpcooper 6y agoI'm in Istanbul, currently working on a couple of projects in crypto. Let me know if you're also in Istanbul (or not) and want to work on something fun together in crypto, betting or similar. Address in profile.
- tim333 6y agoYou'd think these years into crypto that someone would have figured out multi-sig with a custodian.
- bilekas 6y agoI thought crpto was recently banned in Turkey ? So the police are going to investigate the company providing illegal services ? Who could have imagine fintec companies not touching Turkey now /s
- anticensor 6y agoCrypto is not banned by that regulation, rather it is explicitly ruled out from being used like legal tender.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoOther than the security of your coins, the problem with crypto IMO is liquidity. If a bank sees a transaction from a crypto exchange they can freeze your account. Even if it is a good faith transaction where all the funds have documented sources. The real reason banks hate crypto is because it takes their control away. Banks can create money easily via fractional reserve banking. They also collectively control money supply via the Fed. They cannot do that with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, so now they want to extend the power of the "US" (pronounced Fed) dollar to the digital world via "stablecoins" that are pegged to the dollar and have built in fractional reserve support, replicating the dollar system on top of a phony blockchain that offers none of the benefits of a real coin other than making banks powerful and happy. Only then they will embrace crypto, while banning every other crypto.
- sebyx07 6y agoThis should be a warning for all who keep decentralized assets in centralized place. Tomorrow they might take it from you.
- ubermonkey 6y agoHonestly, that's nobody's business but the Turks.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]