Bitcoin Forum

From a "Newby" Kind of sight
I remeber some posts, most likely i didn't read them all to the end, but this is how i see it:

- I read about people, complaining that their account at MTGox got hacked and they lost bitcoins.
- there was a post, about a putting a lot of Bitcoins into one account @Mtgox i think
- there was the big saleoff, resulting in crash and MTGox shutdown
- MTGox Userdatabase got public


For me it looks like:

- MTGox got compromised
- Bitcoins were stolen from a lot of users and put together to one account, most likely with a lot of internal transactions (is this possible to trace?)
- this account cashed out and crashed the marked.

Spekulations:
- the hacker made some money, but didn't know what to do with all the stolen bitcoins in a very short time, so they sold them all at once to have some "fun"...

Am i affected:
not really,
i changed my password at the 18th to 20Chars (and it is in the leeked data)
i had less then 10$ / 10BT at MTGox. When the crash happend i tried to buy some for 0.2 but failed. ;)

Another newbie, thumb twiddling till his online time ticks over to 'not-newbie'.

So this should be posted elsewhere, but what the hell, don't blame me.

Quoting from http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7269.0[/url
New to BitCoin? Start here!

"In conclusion:  All this mathematical technology may be a bit of a mouthful, but what it means in practice is that BitCoin works just like cash.  Bitcoin transactions are intentionally irreversible--unlike credit cards or PayPal where chargebacks  can invalidate a payment that has already been made.  And there are no middlemen.  Transactions are completed directly between the sender and the receiver via the peer to peer network."

Well apparently that is all flat out untrue. If MtGox can 'roll back' a series of transactions they don't like, then clearly Bitcoin transactions ARE reversible. Which also means Bitcoins do not 'work just like cash'. Also that MtGox ARE acting as a middleman, with all that implies.
The reasons MtGox decided to rollback are irrelevant. Sure, they were hacked and 500K bitcoins sold into the market by someone who didn't own them. Doesn't make any difference, MtGox is still doing something that was supposed to be impossible, and so one has to wonder. What _else_ is untrue in the theory of Bitcoin?

we are forced to troll in this section to prove we are not trolls, remember?

Looks like you failed at making this thread too

@Prommah, so you're saying no transaction actually took place at the BitCoin level, only in the MtGox DB?

User security:

The real key with security is to have fairly complex passwords (16+ random characters will do it), making sure to have a different password for every email / online banking / forum website.  Hacks will happen, but the key to ensuring serious damage can't be done is to spread your eggs across multiple baskets and prevent hackers from grabbing them all with a single password crack.  This is how Lulzsec was able to dominate the FBI and its third party affiliate, Infraguard - Infraguard's CEO was using the same password for most of his company-wide logins across both organizations.  Most hacks are due to user stupidity or negligence, and most of the time it's from using either one password across everything, or just really bad passwords across everything.

If you have to write them down, make sure to lock the list up securely, and if you really have to store them on a computer, make sure the file that holds them is password-protected and encrypted.  It's just common sense.

MtGox security:

I was about to start buying bitcoins on the exchange a few weeks ago but read too many reports of users getting hacked.  About a week ago, Buttsec claimed, via pastebin, to have compromised the entire MtGox database, so I never transferred any money or btc to MtGox.

Your best bet is to completely avoid online btc exchanges, and only trade btc between trusted known individuals for the time being.

clear