Millions of Dogecoin Stolen Over Christmas 132
Kenseilon writes "The Verge reports that millions of Dogecoins — an alternative cryptocurrency — was stolen after the service DogeWallet was hacked. DogeWallet worked like a bank account for the currency, and the attackers modified it to make sure all transactions ended up in a wallet of their choice. This latest incident is just one in the long (and growing) list of problems that cryptocurrencies are currently facing. It brings to mind the incident where bitcoin exchange service GBL vanished and took a modest amount of Bitcoins with them. While not a similar case, it highlights the difficulties with trusting service provides in this market."
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares?
Dogecoin was originally a satire "cryptocurrency" anyway, the fact that it got "hacked" just prove the point even more.
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty much this. After Bitcoin, it was inevitable that copycats would come about. But a cryptocurrency with only redditors who actually believe in its worth, and 4channers scamming each other as the user base? Come on. This is not news for nerds. This does not matter.
As an aside, Ripple [ripple.com] may actually be promising. If cryptocurrency is going to keep being a "thing", there ought to be more than one [wikipedia.org] further down the line.
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
This isn't about redditors, 4channers or any other human-like creature.
Think of the poor dogs effected by this! They can't exchange currency over the internet any more.
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Dogs only really value treats, pee and tummy rubs.
How could you forget (Score:1)
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Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really, the problem is that it drastically devalues the currency to have thousands of competing currencies. It made it a major PITA in the early colonial days as each colony had it's own currency and even banks had their own. So you would be paid in Bank of Fred Dollars but need to change them to Town of Funnyville dollars to spend them, oh and surprise there is an exchange rate where some of the value disappeared. It makes it trivial to start scamming people left and right as each currency competes.
I honestly don't see any of the current attempts (BitCoin Included) being a stable or viable long term digital underground currency. It's good now, but nobody has any expectations of it being around even 12 months later. It's starting to catch the attention of countries that do not like the competition and will start looking at it as a way to evade taxes and that will suddenly cause acceptance at legitimate traders to be limited.
I wish there was something that could come around, but if it competes with someone else that has a lot of power, it will lose in the end.
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The thing is though there really aren't lots of competing cryptocurrencies. There is Bitcoin which is like 1000 times more influential than litecoin and litecoin is like 1000 times more influential than any of the others.
I think it is likely that bitcoin and litecoin will probably both survive as they fulfill different 'niches' in the currency world with litecoin being a bit faster to process, etc. Beyond this though it is pretty hard to see what the value in any of the other currencies like dogecoin actu
What about service? (Score:2)
Maybe I lack "the vision thing", but as someone who uses PayPal and another similar service to accept payments, I don't see them being driven out of business anytime soon by Bitcoin.
I'm currently paying a couple of percent on each transaction, which seems fair for the service my customers and I are receiving. There are lots of alternative services in the payment sphere (I've used two others in the past), and the fact that they all have similar fees and offer similar services makes me think there's already
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The volatility is a problem at the moment, although if you are just using it like paypal that is not a huge issue. The customer buys on the market at the current price, sends you the coins and you sell at basically the same price. In the future though I expect the volatility to go down signifigantly, right now there are literally billions of dollars being dumped into BTC all at once so you can't really expect the prices to be stable.
Remember that if it is going to become a legitameate currency in the long
What are the other worth?! (Score:2)
Not really, the problem is that it drastically devalues the currency to have thousands of competing currencies. It made it a major PITA in the early colonial days as each colony had it's own currency and even banks had their own.
Except that: if you look closely:
- bitcoin is the most popular one. it's actually used for buy/selling only.
- litecoin is what comes as a distant second.
From that point onward, almost any other alt-coins is a very minor player, which is more or less only used for speculation, and only traded on exchanges. You have to convert them into more major coins (like Bitcoin or Litecoin) before being able to do anything remotely useful with them.
Same as in your colonial example:
Alternate currencies abound, scams are
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You really think that the governments around the world will allow it? It takes a LOT of power out of the hands that like to control people.
Power (Score:2)
You really think that the governments around the world will allow it? It takes a LOT of power out of the hands that like to control people.
It simply brings back the level of simplicity that cash transaction have (but makes them online. But just like cash, it's basically direct people-to-people transfers.)
Or put it into another way, the kind of simplification that SEPA has brought in Europe (strongly simplified Bank-to-bank transfers, with much lower fee [sometime even free], and relatively shorter delay [well, still in the order of days, but that's already better than internationnal wire transfers], and total freedom of choice: as long as your
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Peercoin interests me most of the list, because it claims to be energy efficient. Bitcoin is terrible because of the energy being consumed mining.
http://peercoin.net/ [peercoin.net]
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Congratulations: You have identified what kind of chump you are (you are a 'green' chump).
Use this information to avoid being scammed in the future.
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This is not news for nerds. This does not matter.
Blame the Asians and Europeans, because we in the Americas were asleep when this tripe was voted up. There ought to be a few good joke comments, though, so it's OK.
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So value, much currency, wow.
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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Such theft. Much mad. Very suprise. Wow.
DogeCoin for much funny [bitcointalk.org] in case you feel left out of the joke. The whole thing is just another bitcoin clone, with slightly different settings ("very scrypt" like litecoin), which are somewhat intentionally badly chosen to produce "many coin, wow!".
Millions of DogeCoin is still basically worthless. Its just a bunch of crypto currency folks screwing around. Its not a serious alternative to bitcoin. Blocks started with million DogeCoin rewards per block and very low difficulty.
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loved the "Adorable Ponzi Scheme game" part. registered on a latvian domain, too. gotta buy !!!1111one
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I had a fraudulent charge appear on my card this month for $600. Guess how much i'm out, zero. Got my replacement card in two days.
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That's nice. I don't pay interest charges on credit cards, ever, and the store charges the same price card or cash.
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That's not a bad deal.
I get 1% back as cash for everything that goes through my card.
It also means I've got two months of mortgage interest saved as well.
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Except for gas, everyone using anything to pay is putting up money for credit card fraud. The cash customers (mostly) pay just as much as the credit customers. Our local co-op basically begs you to use cash, but cannot charge a different price without violating their contract with the processor.
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I pay with cash at local businesses for that reason, but big chains? Who cares.
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The monetary system is designed to function like one bank. With one bank, deposits are just transferred around. There's no drain on reserves since the deposits are the reserves. So when something is stolen, the bank doesn't pay for it. It can simply create more deposits and transfer them to the victims. These are simply accounting entries. The bank likes to make you think someone has to pay for it, but that's just so they can whine about how much they're suffering when they're really not, the only cost is t
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No they just print more money when they feel like it.
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No, only the Fed does that, and they're very insistent about that monopoly.
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Fractional reserve banking - It's not printing money, it's a little more complicated, but the end result is not that different.
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Slashdot has fallen a ways, but is still a place where you should assume that people have a basic high school education and know what fractional reserve banking is.
The difference is enormous. Having only one place that controls the money supply, and one that's vaguely answerable to democracy, is a vastly superior plan to every bank creating money at a whim. No bank can loan out more than its deposits, while the Fed is a whole different beast.
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Sorry are you saying that fractional reserve banking does not increase the money supply?
Was that a little dig at my education or intelligence? (why must people grandstand themselves like that?)
The difference is enormous.
I never claimed it wasn't, but the end result is not. ie an increase in the money supply is an increase how ever it was achieved.
Anyway, you may want to read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking [wikipedia.org] Specifically the section titled "Money supplies around the world" and take note of the "Deposit creatio
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When you say people, presumably you mean other people?
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Why would that be? If you suddenly realize that I have more money, do you have to raise your prices even if your production costs haven't increased, just because ... you can? So inflation is purely psychological? What if your psychology changed so that you didn't measure your worth relative to me, but simply by what made you happy, independent of me?
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That's not even what the quantity theory of money says. Your theory is very naive and not supported by evidence.
When a bank creates a loan, it creates money out of thin air. There's no connection between money and assets.
When the stock market goes down, does that mean the value of my money goes up? Since assets just decreased? So prices at the grocery store should deflate?
You have $100 worth of goods. I have $100. Now someone steals my $100, and uses it to buy your goods, say. Then the bank creates $100 and
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Shouldn't competition nullify that?
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Say you write software, and you charge $100/hour. $100 is stolen from me, used to buy one hour of your time. I am given $100, created out of thin air. Why would you now charge me more than $100 for an hour of your time? If you did, why wouldn't someone else see an opportunity to undercut you and charge the same $100 that he charges now? So why would I pay more for your time than I could get from another who didn't raise his prices just because some money was created to reimburse me?
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Adding $100 to circulation makes little difference, because there is over 10 billion times that amount of currency in circulation [federalreserve.gov]. So you would expect, of course, prices to go up by around one ten-billionth, much less than noticeable.
The problem is if the government decides to manufacture tons of money. Let's go high for the sake of making a point, say $500 million trillion. So now the government can pay all its bills and then give everyone a billion dollars and we're all happy and rich, right?
Well, if I
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The $100 reimbursed to you is not created out of thin air, it is subtracted from the balance sheets of the credit card company. The hour of bought time represents extra assets created (this part is out of thin air). The asset:dollar ratio has increased, meaning the dollars per asset has decreased, i.e. you can now buy more with each dollar and the next hour of software development will cost you $99.9999999999.
Of course that is the situation under perfect knowledge. What really happens is that it takes ti
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Why does knowledge have to change the value of the dollar? If the number of assets increases or decreases, why does that have to affect the value of the dollar? What physical necessity ties them together?
My position is that there is no physical connection. It's purely psychological. We don't think of dollars as tied to the number of assets. Even if some of us do, that's a choice, not physical necessity. It's psychology, and can change.
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Funny, the only one ranting about "obvious falsities" is you.
Provide a reasonable counter-argument or go troll somewhere else.
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I'd love to throw a </satire> on that, but it's more or less true at this point. I didn't think it was a year ago when I had shit for credit, but now that I have credit limits that, combined, could buy a small country, and I'm starting to interact more with that system, I see just how much benefit I receive from these accounts when things go
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Dogecoin (Score:1)
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Dunno, I kinda dig EARLY doge coins, like these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinage_of_the_Republic_of_Venice [wikipedia.org]
Headline of the friggin' year. (Score:2)
They shoot unicorns, don't they?
This has been done. (Score:3)
Reductio Ad Absurdum is not a defense (Score:4, Insightful)
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
At least this time it's of a currency worth very, very little, so losses aren't that great and there are even more great minds thinking about how to solve cryptocurrency security problems. The end-user human will always be the weakest link, and the trust that the end user places on others always the most vulnerable part.
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Haven't people learned by now . . . (Score:4, Informative)
And as usual, people who trust their Crypto Currency to a web based service (especially one with such a short history to it, and no clearly defined security practices) end up getting their shit stolen. Really now, if you want your crypto coins (be they BTC LTC or whatever) safe keep them in a private wallet and encrypt it, don't load your fortunes onto some website, then complain when they get hacked.
This is kind of like carrying around a giant wad of cash in your pocket and then being mad when someone mugs you, keep a small amount of 'working cash' readily available, and keep the rest of it in a safe place. The same logic that you'd use with real money should apply to virtual money.
Re:Haven't people learned by now . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say it's more like carrying around a wad of cash and getting pissed off because it fell out of your wallet. You have no idea what the qualifications are of the people who design and build these crypto-coin websites. It's not like they have any regulatory and testing requirements you can point to as any assurance that they're at all secure.
The same goes for any black or grey market website. So what if the site uses SSL and is "Verisign Approved" -- that tells you nothing about their back-end security (or lack thereof.)
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But I keep most of my money in the bank. Unless the entire country collapses my money is guaranteed.
If that happens, crypto currency would be pretty useless without an internet connection.
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More accurately, it's like handing your wallet to a completely random stranger on the Internet and saying "can you hold on to this for me?" Only this stranger has a whole wheelbarrow full of people's wallets and a sign that says "please rob me" taped to his back.
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Well, to be fair, it's pretty hard to do much trading of crypto-coins at all if you're just going to keep them in your private wallet all the time.
That's one of the problems with this whole thing, IMO, and I hope better solutions are developed for it soon. I can't really trade my LTC, for example, until I move it to a wallet sitting on one of the web sites where it can be bought and sold. Being in the USA, my options for that are very limited if I want ways to convert it into US dollars. I've used www.li
wallet to wallet (Score:2)
Well, to be fair, it's pretty hard to do much trading of crypto-coins at all if you're just going to keep them in your private wallet all the time.
But not impossible. And actually been done.
There are services like localbitcoins or bitcoin.de, which aren't exchanges per se, but help bitcoin users find each other and trade bitcoin for fiat money.
localbitcoins has an optional escrow services (but you're still allowed to do private-wallet-to-private-wallet transaction if you want).
bitcoin.de is only exclusively wallet-to-wallet.
There are also people trading via forums, via chatrooms, etc.
The only current problem with wallet-to-wallet trading, is the *curr
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As far as I'm concerned I've thought of cryptocurrency as play money. What's to stop you from "item duping" to use a gaming phrase?
for example: backing up your wallet, transferring crypto bucks to some online wallet, restoring your local wallet, transferring those same crypto bucks somewhere else
I have read enough to believe that there's a verifiable way to know that some series of bits is a valid crypto buck. Since there's no "central bank" who's to say who owns any certain crypto buck or that any certai
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Keep multiple copies of your wallet. Keep them password protected. Keep them in separate physical locations.Keep nothing in a wallet that is not YOUR wallet and which you control.
such crap... digital currency is here to stay. (Score:1)
This latest incident is just one in the long (and growing) list of problems that cryptocurrencies are currently facing.
FUD!
Tip: HOST YOUR OWN WALLET!
It's digital currency and one of it's greatest features is that nobody can take it away from you. Trust online repositories and wallets as un-secure for the next few years and keep as little as possible in them.
Transfer coin to off-line storage with backups and you're golden.
Internet in a nutshell (Score:4, Insightful)
I still can't tell how much of this is a joke and how much is real...
What's next? Dolancoin, featuring a crudely drawn homicidal duck? Frycoin, urging people to quietly and quickly accept the "money"?
Regardless, any of these is basically the same as Monopoly money. Next, we'll have reports of how a truckload of monopoly money got stolen. It'll be just as relevant, if not more, since something happened to someone (said truck was stolen).
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Wow. Such skeptic. Much insight. Many original thoughts.
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So in other words they are stocks which pay no dividends. Seems no one cares as someone will always pay for it
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Bitcoin started as an attempt at an actual currency, the earliest adopters wanted it to become such, and there are a few places now (and many illegal ones) where it can be used to purchase goods. It's spiraled into being mostly speculative - I think if it were only used as a currency it would be trading around $30 - but there's a fundamental element of an actual currency.
Dogecoin started either as a shitty joke, a shitty meme, or an attempt to cash in on the Bitcoin hype bubble. I know of nowhere that actua
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I'm pretty sure Dolancoin is the one that zeros your account when you try to build a competing stadium or internet service in New York, or join a union [nydailynews.com].
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Frycoin, urging people to quietly and quickly accept the "money"?
Well guess I know what I'm doing this weekend.
Not news (Score:2)
I wouldn't expect to see a report like this if someone had managed to steal 15 bitcoins.
My Plan for Wealth (Score:3)
1) Create Dogecoin miner client.
2) Get other people to install miner
3) Client also secretly finds Bitcoin wallets and sends them to me.
4) Profit? Yes profit!
Already happened (Score:2)
This has already happened.
There are so many alt-coins, that few people actually take time to check the source code. Or even compile their own.
some are just in for mining and/or for speculation.
They quickly download a pre-built exe of whatever is the latest minor trend du jour.
Unscrupulous persons HAVE packaged malware in some of these installers.
And you've seen regularily complains poping up on bitcointalk forums of users who got their bitcoin/litecoin/peercoin and a few other wallets emptied.
Thus currently
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I figured something like it had happened already...
I guess if you were really smart, you would write a miner that actually worked - but skimmed 10% off the top for the miner writer starting a week after it started running. Probably almost no-one would ever notice...
Underhanded C code context (Score:2)
I think a hack involving crypto-currencies would be the perfect next subject for Underhanded C Code Contest (the current one involves social networks with "friend distance" calculator in an imaginary "ObsessBook").
And I'm almost expecting that the winning entry for such a subject will be under the form of a link to an old commit on the git of some popular Joke-Coin.
Ironically this gives Dodegcoin legitimacy. (Score:2)
Some found a need to steal DOGE. It is tradeable and actually worth something... this only bolsters that conclusion..
I think Dogecoin is a joke and was intended as such but with all the alt coins I stay confused...
I am mining Bells. I thought they were more fun anyway...
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It's trading at over 300% of its original value. Granted, when you figure in that it's only worth a fraction of a penny, it doesn't sound like much. But it's one of the faster growing altcoins right now.
Wrong conclusion (Score:3)
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Yes, and there's this thing called FDIC insurance that makes sure that if my bank gets hacked, my balance remains the same. Same thing if the bank suddenly disappears. The same features that crypto currency proponents tout as ways to avoid the supposed evil of central banks are precisely what makes this kind of attacks easier to get away with, and therefore much more likely.
A world with banks working on crypto currencies requires real life contracts and huge amounts of non-crypto collateral.
Just one note (Score:3)
This is not a problem unique to cryptocurrencies. This particular incident is one that can be chocked up to kids not using php properly. Bad website implementation is not the fault of any cryptocurrency, be it one for pomeranians, or human beings.
What ever happened to honor (Score:1)
Well this is verification that...... (Score:2)
...this is a doge dog world.