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I know nothing about bitcoin, can someone provide a tldr about why it is (seemingly) so difficult to build a secure site around exchanging these things? I don'
by columbo 14y ago
I know nothing about bitcoin, can someone provide a tldr about why it is (seemingly) so difficult to build a secure site around exchanging these things?
I don't get how you can simply "Loose" a few hundred grand without a horse head winding up at the food of your bed.
- morsch 14y agoIt's difficult to write secure code. It's difficult to administrate a secure system. It's a new market where release early, release often is important. BTC transaction are largely untraceable and irreversible.
- sgornick 14y agoThat's probably the shortest yet most comprehensive response to "explain this". Nice!
- epscylonb 14y agoIf you run a service where you need to pay bitcoins out to users then that means your systems have to respond to user input and send money to them. It turns out this is pretty tricky to secure. The current popular strategy is to have hot and cold wallets. A hot wallet is online and can make payouts automatically. A cold wallet is kept offline (airgap) and brought online by a human being to refill the hot wallet when it is running low. This only really makes sense if your service needs to secure large amounts of bitcoin for a long time without using them. This recent bitcoinica hack is pretty inexplicable, they were keeping a large amount of coin in an account at an exchange called MtGox. This is effectively a hot wallet.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rmc 14y agoLots of the bitcoin hacks have been security amateur stuff. E.g. MtGox was just storing MD5 hashed passwords. Unix added salts to passwords decades ago. The people making this sites don't know about security.