5 ms·

Sounds like Defcon got the excuse he needed to line his pockets with all of the Silk Road 2 money. I don't run a marketplace, but I would assume that an alarm

Sounds like Defcon got the excuse he needed to line his pockets with all of the Silk Road 2 money. I don't run a marketplace, but I would assume that an alarm protocol would be implemented and triggered when thousands of bitcoins start to drain out of "hot storage". Exploiting the transaction malleability bug wouldn't net you 4,500 BTC at once. It would take a lot of requests of broken transactions to drain the entire marketplace of thousands of BTC. Defcon and SR2 should have been on high alert for this kind of problem after the Mt. Gox announcement. Anyone who runs a Bitcoin marketplace would not be "slow to respond and skeptical of the issue at hand", especially not when the entire balance of the marketplace is in such a vulnerable state. Defcon has been around this business for years, he isn't an amateur. How could he make such a fundamental, incredibly ignorant error? Even if we believe the "bad luck, terrible timing" explanation, Defcon's lack of caution and general awareness is simply inexplicable. There is no way he would be so nonchalant about any kind of fault in the Bitcoin protocol with everyone's money sitting out in the open, just waiting to be stolen. I think the moral of this story is to not open an account with an anonymous exchange. Instead, open an account with a marketplace backed by some high-profile VC's who have some skin in the game. You can bet that Andreesen isn't going to be careless and ignorant enough to let the same thing happen to Coinbase. Not when he's got $25m and his invaluable image on the line.

gwern 13y ago
> I think the moral of this story is to not open an account with an anonymous exchange. Instead, open an account with a marketplace backed by some high-profile VC's who have some skin in the game. You can bet that Andreesen isn't going to be careless and ignorant enough to let the same thing happen to Coinbase. Great. Call me when Andreesen funds a black-market for highly illegal drugs.
- roymurdock 13y ago
  I think people are less worried about finding a source for illegal drugs, and more worried about finding a secure marketplace where they can trust the administration and exchange their funds securely. Theoretically, I would be relatively bummed out if my favorite drug dealer was arrested. Then I would get over it and find a new dealer. I would be livid if my drug dealer took my money, pointed a gun at my head, then got in his car and drove away, all the while claiming that he wasn't robbing me and that he had always had my best intentions at heart. So I'm not so concerned about a new marketplace popping up. The market demands drugs, and it will have them (SR3?). My point was simple: if you don't want to lose your money, don't store your money in an anonymous, drug-dealing marketplace. I'm not sure why this warranted such a sarcastic response?
  - gwern 13y ago
    I'm being sarcastic because your solution is a non-solution: using a trustworthy exchange does not solve the problem of centralized escrows being vulnerable. A real solution looks something like 'use multi-sig escrow'.

gwern 13y ago

> I think the moral of this story is to not open an account with an anonymous exchange. Instead, open an account with a marketplace backed by some high-profile VC's who have some skin in the game. You can bet that Andreesen isn't going to be careless and ignorant enough to let the same thing happen to Coinbase. Great. Call me when Andreesen funds a black-market for highly illegal drugs.

roymurdock 13y ago
I think people are less worried about finding a source for illegal drugs, and more worried about finding a secure marketplace where they can trust the administration and exchange their funds securely. Theoretically, I would be relatively bummed out if my favorite drug dealer was arrested. Then I would get over it and find a new dealer. I would be livid if my drug dealer took my money, pointed a gun at my head, then got in his car and drove away, all the while claiming that he wasn't robbing me and that he had always had my best intentions at heart. So I'm not so concerned about a new marketplace popping up. The market demands drugs, and it will have them (SR3?). My point was simple: if you don't want to lose your money, don't store your money in an anonymous, drug-dealing marketplace. I'm not sure why this warranted such a sarcastic response?
- gwern 13y ago
  I'm being sarcastic because your solution is a non-solution: using a trustworthy exchange does not solve the problem of centralized escrows being vulnerable. A real solution looks something like 'use multi-sig escrow'.