Bitcoin Forum

I know it is possible to sign up as a company to invest in Bitcoins on almost all exchanges where they sell Bitcoins.

But I am just wondering, what is preventing companies to invest big in Bitcoins and then pretend that someone stole their private key and stole the funds, but in reality they just send the coins and exchange them through a bunch of different currencies and Monero etc that is "impossible" to trace? Will there not be a lot of money lost this way? I mean hacks etc are happening all the time so how would someone prove they did not get hacked?

Every respectable online cryptocoin exchange has experienced at least one security breach and has had funds stolen in their existence  ;D
They can certainly fake getting fleeced out of their hard-earned investment money by hiring an inside man acting as the hacker. This has happened before on multiple occasions and it sure as heck can happen again.

the question is not why they are not doing it, the question is why should they even bother doing this.
i mean there are a lot of other easier ways of achieving the same result but why should anyone go through all the trouble of using a third party exchange which is not regulated i should add, and take all the risks just to hide their money and say it was stolen/lost.

not to mention all the fees that is going to cost! each transaction will cost 0.2% fee on average to exchange fiat > bitcoin > different currency > bitcoin > fiat. and on a large sum of money that is a lot.

The volatility is the one that keeps the bitcoin not getting included into the big companies. Also big companies make larger transaction which will cause a major financial collapse as the bitcoin price varies with regards to the time. Another reason is that right now the acceptance is not that high to grab a big profit through cryptocurrency.

Price volatility of bitcoin I think is one of the reasons and of course bitcoin is not regulated at all.

A company can't buy bitcoin just like that because they think it is nice to have. There need to be whole business plan associated with buying bitcoin, storing and managing it.
The purchase needs to be documented, and some sort of countermeasures set. Bitcoin is not some regulated asset and most money mangers can't touch it.
Buying bitcoin by some company can be compared to buying Baseball cards just because someone at the company thinks that they are cool.

That is not true, at least not in my country. You can invest in pretty much anything as a company.

Also why have a third party or an "insider" to the "hack". Why not just move the coins to another address, no one can prove who moved the coins anyway?

That is not true, at least not in my country. You can invest in pretty much anything as a company.

Also why have a third party or an "insider" to the "hack". Why not just move the coins to another address, no one can prove who moved the coins anyway?
[/quote]They will focus on tracking that address，Prevent virtual currency transfers

You look more legitimate if you claim to be "hacked" when you're having problems or you stole your customers' coins.  Mt. Gox is a prime example of this, with "all your coins are safe" being the classic line.  No one can prove what you did but if you haven't already provided some kind of explanation, the authorities will rapidly be on your ass.

I think you mean hedge funds by companies, a team of experts will be there to make any investment decision and I don't think everyone on that team will agree to do what you have suggested above  ;)

Talking about other companies like exchanges themselves, yes they can do it but they can't use those funds because every team member will be monitored. Bitfinex got hacked recently and many believes that this is just an inside job and team members of the exchange are the one who are involved in this shit show, but nobody can prove that.  ;D

I think these companies have the financial muscles to skip their way through challenging times and so might not be directly affected by the losses they've incurred through cryptocurrencies. I know major exchanges hedge both Bitcoin and Altcoins  in their line of business and they have their ways around with the help of financial investment experts who minimizes their losses in cases of major tumbles and maximize their profits when its soaring.

Just like the traditional banks, to avoid losses from the money that they have from their depositor they just use their money to invest it into something so they can have a chance to get profits from their crypto money and because most of the coins are pumping they can easily make money from it and they can both avoid getting losses and also earn profits at the same time.

Most companies don't invest in Bitcoin. They may receive Bitcoin but most of the time they exchange said Bitcoin almost immediately so that they don't lose on value, and most of them don't hold beyond maybe a few days' worth.

What would they gain from pretending that all of the coins were hacked to begin with? If there is no benefit to them, and it just results in bad PR, then what is the point? It'll just drive people away from their services. They won't be able to pretend they got money if they exchange it later and the tax agencies now ask the companies where all this money suddenly came from.

If the companies commit fraud by declaring they got hacked, then the authorities just have to flag the addresses the money was sent to. In one point, you have to move the fund or exchange it to fiat. The authorities will follow that trail and soon the company will be busted. Nothing is totally anonymous especially if you have to use exchanges to exchange to fiat.

I love how you morons only read the title of the thread. 

OP, most companies are responsible to far more people than their customers.   Shareholders,  regulators, etc.  So that's one reason why your scenario doesn't happen.   Nobody is going to read what I write anyway,  so you can all suck me.

There are more big companies investing in Bitcoin day by day and also many other start up companies now using the blockchain in various ways to crowd fund their projects so e can see the progress but many early adopters cashing out and speculators playing the markets account for Bitcoin volatility.

Yes exchange allows any company to open business account to trade bitcoin but they can't just sell off all their bitcoins or send out those bitcoin and claim that their account got compromised. Exchange themselves will conduct investigation on those situations and if exchange doesn't have any security flaw than the one was responsible for handling companies account might have to bear all the losses.

That can surely happen no doubt in that but if you are trading on a us based exchange someone would surely investigate this issue and they can get caught big time. Another reason I'm not pretty sure but i have heard bitfinex had payed all the hacked funds back to the investors and big exchanges already make 1000's of bitcoin per day i don't think this step would be required at all

Hackers are trying to steal other's money all the time, same way thieves in real life are trying to steal banks, stores, etc. But it's not so easy to do, the hackers have intelligence and skills and the companies have security measures to prevent successful attacks. Sometimes it fail, and it's a real risk, but doesn't happen all the time.

What prevents companies to from losing money in crypto is the technology, security measures.

What prevents people from robbing their own businesses? It happens and it is usually done to fck over the insurance companies. They will have to

prove to the insurance that their was a breach in their system and that it was not a in-house job. The insurance investigators will have to hire

some developer with the knowledge to investigate the matter... or sub-contract a company to do it for them.  ::)

Am i reading it wrong,acceptance is not that high to grab a big profit through cryptocurrency,have you checked the price of bitcoin and the market capital for the rest of the crypto currencies and you think you really cannot profit big time through crypto currency  ;D  i am sure you have a good idea about crypto currency in general. :P @OP what is the point you are trying to prove here. ::)

Some of these exchanges are insured and you actually can never tell in reality whether the exchanges are truly hacked or not. Even big companies/bank can fake a hack/robbery and get away with the funds of users. It's ultimately the loss of the insurance company who pays the users their funds.

I believe that bitfinex and MtGox were truly hacked and lost millions but most of the users ended up becoming bankrupt due to their security breach.

Well, the only thing that's going to stop them is the shareholders who're probably going to pay a shit ton to ensure that proper investigative work is done to find out what REALLY happened if someone like this was to occur. So, this type of thing wouldn't happen for a good amount of reasons. Plus, I highly doubt that shareholders would ever allow a company to put a substantial amount of money into a volatile investment like Bitcoin when they could easily get into something more sustainable which would be stocks.

People are usually dumb when they go about doing things like this, so they'd probably get caught through some sort of online correspondence when it comes to working with the people who are "hacking" them. So, the only thing that stops this is other people fighting for a fair investigation on the loss of money.

If we're talking about the companies that are directly link to legal issues, it's not easy to integrate into the crypto market system. So we cannot blame them. Most of the laws are very strict about crypto for legal companies.

Companies are free to invest big in bitcoins but this would discredit them should the be found staging this and pretending that someone stole their private key and to trace them, data forensics can be used to help prove that they are innocent or guilty of the  act.

These companies will always do these things unless they are legally bound to refund all bitcoins that were stolen, because the security breach is their fault, A person will not lose his savings at a bank if the banks get robbed.

Cryptocurrencies are one of the most secure forms of payment out there.

As long as companies keep their database secure, store most of their coins in cold storage, and make sure that there is multiple secure backups of their private keys/recovery seeds available in remote locations so that if one gets destroyed there are still others, then cryptocurrencies are actually much better for companies to use. There is a much larger chance that a person's paypal is hacked and the hacker deposits stolen paypal funds to buy something at a store than a company's cold storage wallet getting hacked.

The thing is bitcoin is backed up by maths. Large bitcoin colliders have only found like less than 4-5 addresses containing bitcoin over 10 years, now compare this to the amount of chargebacks/amount of paypal accounts getting hacked in the same amount of time.

In terms of being a big company it is not that easy for them to get hacked because they already made a plan for it so they can be prepared very well and they also have what we called hardware wallet which is very common right now as a secured storage of their bitcoin and i think all of the big companies does have that wallet which is for security reason so they were not be able to lose money in crypto.

What prevents an exchange to do that? Nothing, that is the sad truth and many of the hacks have been put in doubt by the community, so while we don’t have proof it is very likely this has happened already, this is why we need decentralized exchanges where you are the only one that controls your private keys.

I see that not everyone is understanding your question, some peoples yes but not everybody ie take advantage of a situation where a site were stolen funds  of some users and not those of that company that surely ran with luck because theirs funds could remain intact, what I think is that a serious company could not do that or try to invent something like this.

How is this possible? I haven't actually seen any sort of platform that allows a company to simply "sign up" and invest in bitcoin automatically. I think you mean a company signing up on an exchange? This can be done by anyone, not just companies. And I haven't really seen any major companies invest in bitcoin.


take a look at all the recent hacks. a repeating pattern will be found, only hot wallets will be hacked. Cold storage if stored properly has an extremely low chance of getting hacked, unless it is an employee accessing the bitcoins from the inside. Monero is a real issue, because bitcoin is at least semi-transparent. But that's how it works, things come at a cost. And BTW, what do you mean by how would someone prove they did not get hacked? Why would anyone or any company need to prove that they didn't get hacked?

The companies fear that they would lose due to difference in bitcoin price due to volatility nature of bitcoins.Also transaction fee is becoming higher and higher which would not be economical for big companies to carry transactions.They fear that their accounts would be compromised by hackers and they have to face huge losses.

Are you asking why companies are not investing in bitcoins? Any company can invest in bitcoin if they want to, provided the shareholders really want that. I guess that's one of the first hurdles if it's a legit company, how do you manage to invest heavily in bitcoins. Unless the company simply manage bitcoin investments (like stockbrokers), most other companies would have a hard time justifying buying large amount of bitcoins from every exchange. Bitcoin has to be part of the business model.

As for them pretending to have their coins stolen, that's a bit more complicated but I suppose they can just hire hackers and try to launder it. The big if here is if you are willing to trust someone who stole your money to give it back to you.


Yup, true. Some unscrupulous people do this even for assets that are not cryptocurrencies. How many times have we heard of people purposely having their stuff stolen or destroyed for insurance money or to be able to use those without much regulation.

A company would transact with a larger transaction, and the unstable bitcoin price would make a company not want to use bitcoin, the volality would only lead to a deterioration of the profits from one of those companies. It is different if it is not mixed with the assets of the company, for example the company is willing to invest profit earned on invested in bitcoin. So instead of using bitcoin to transact on a company, this is a mistake when it's done by a big company.

Companies don't integrate one part of investment and salary in bitcoin form, fluctuations that occur will be very vulnerable for employees and companies, better allocate bitcoin to tender bonus just because bitcoin can't be understood stably, if you want to avoid losses then equate bitcoin with equivalent value with fiat and explain to employees that this is an optional option for employee salaries and they should understand all the risks.