Bitcoin Forum

I guess I got my hopes up. So much drama and we're only in March! Although I still have full confidence in bitcoins future, I can't help but think the publics perception of bitcoin has been damaged a lot recently. Lot's of thefts/fraud/possible criminal activity being reported, of course that's all the media report on anyway. But damn, when do you ever hear of a 500 MILLION DOLLAR THEFT in the real world? Blows my mind! This has affected a lot of bitcoin users too. I for one lost all but 2btc of my holdings thanks to mtgox (and 50btc). Not only did I lose a fair amount of confidence but I am also no longer a strong holder of coins anymore. With no fiat to buy back in again I just feel like an outsider looking into the bitcoin world. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I wonder what drama will unfold next...

(No FUD intended)

the year is not over.

All these are not problems with bitcoin itself!!!!

It is unfortunate that you got Goxxed, but it would be downright shameful to let your one-time mistake of trusting a dishonest exchange turn you away from the most trustworthy financial tool ever created.

Yea I know that and I'm sure the OP knows that still we are both as he said outsiders looking in now. :-\

The little I have left I was going to get some mining gear but for the life of me I'm finding it hard to find some that's not vaporware/preorder/outright scam.

if you aren't the sole holder of your own bitcoin (private keys) then you don't own any.

Yeah I know, I still absolutely believe in bitcoin. It's just hard to get excited about it these days. I have requested a refund from blackarrow as ROI-ing is questionable and I really need the money. Unless I magic money out of my ass I'm going to have to call it a day with bitcoin some time soon. Will have to cash out my last 2btc soon! Sad times.

oh pls..... i can have sympathy for the OP, but you...? nah....

You lost money because of greed. The sooner you admit it the faster you can move on.

You were the one thats fcking wiring money into MtGox hoping to buy cheap coins....(after they stopped btc withdrawal) despite many warnings on here. Stop who gives a shit about your lost now?

I think we'll look back on 2014 as a decisive step towards shaking off the smellier elements of Bitcoin's past.

It may not set the world on fire in terms of prices, anything's still possible, but it will end the year with a much more credible and widespread ecosystem.

Sorry for your loss OP.

One large positive event could send bitcoin skyrocketing.. The public believe what ever they are told.  It's very possible a game is going on right now to drive the price low to open buying chances for the top %.  Then they release news such as the states will allow all bitcoin transactions, no regulation, just want tax on things bought with bitcoin.  I am just speculating but that's what I would be doing if I was in the top .001%.

Trusting a dishonest exchange?  Problem is/was, it became dishonest at the flick of a switch.  What is to stop the rest from doing the same? 

Like buying earthquake insurance, a small one hit, and the insurance company paid.  Premiums went up following, but they did their job.  People trusted them to do the right thing, so paid through the nose.  But, when a magnitude 9 earthquake hit, they packed up shop and disappeared into the night. 

Those earthquake victims just got Goxxed.

And people sit back and say, not all insurance companies will do that…

They are all in it for the money mang!  BTC-e, coinbase, they could all do the same!

The problem with the protocol is also what makes it valuable.  It is just too easy to steal, and trust is non-existent with third parties.

It should be pointed out (yet again) that saying the fraud/theft involved $500 million worth of bitcoins is rather meaningless, since it presumes to value every single lost/stolen bitcoin as worth the last trade price... whereas of course such a large amount of bitcoins could not have been sold at market value without significantly crashing that market value before even a small proportion had been sold.

And, as drrussellshane didn't quite say loudly enough,

if you aren't the sole holder of your own bitcoin (private keys) then you don't own any.

Being your own bank has its ups and downs buddy.  Having all your money in your house which could:

A.  Burn down.
B.  Be robbed.  If you had a lot of BTC then you might see family held hostage for ransom.
C.  Your toddlers could destroy paper wallets worth thousands experimenting with the shredder.
D.  Always being leery about using your computer with the QT funds for internet surfing.
E.  Using Hive, or Multibit?  Then read, new virus steals either wallet.  Then running home from work to move all funds.  Lotsa worry.

It could be a bit of a hassle, generating/hiding all these paper wallets, usb backups, updating them all with every change.

2013 was AMAZING... 2014 is not the year for bitcoin... I have my doubts that we'll even reach our ATH from last year.

Look forward to 2015 and 2016... you can't have 2 amazing years in a row (3 if you consider 2012 amazing)

Being your own bank has its ups, if you:
A. Take backups.
B. Use encryption.
C. Take backups.
D. Don't be stupid.
E. Use cold storage/Don't use Windows.

Don't keep all the copies of your keys in your house. Keep them offline. Make backups and encrypt them. There are ways of planning for all the issues you've raised. As for the ransom bit, I would suggest not letting on to people that you have a lot of bitcoin - that's the beauty of it, you could have 1000 20BTC accounts and no one in the world knows.

2014 started off Bad for Bitcoin, hopefully the price is going to rise and people get over the Mt.Gox scandal.

If you want to focus on price then the best thing for Bitcoin is for the price to be stable. Assuming price matters (and assuming a very broad definition of "price"). Bitcoin functions just fine at any price.

It seems to me that people tend to forget that it's not 100% one way or another.

All funds in an exchange - stupid, clearly.

All funds in personal cold storage - an ideal system for the purist, up to a point. It has security risks in the physical world.

But there are more sophisticated approaches that can be combined. Use of multisig, in particular, helps. It means, for example, you can create convenient online wallets where (a) the website has no ability to spend and (b) you can still recover from losing a particular private key.

Then there's Neo/Bee's approach, using 2 of 3 from customer, bank and a third party.

As well as a number of different multisig approaches, you can use two modes of cold storage for safety - one paper, one brainwallet. There's secret sharing schemes to split private keys.

For now, I think it's clear that a simple cold storage approach for the majority of funds is right for most people. It's equally clear that exchanges as currently implemented are not safe at all and one should never entrust meaningful funds with them except for the brief time you use them (doesn't help daytraders, but sorry - daytraders are taking huge gambles anyway).

In the future multisig and some other technologies will give you a broader set of choices if you happen to have a lot of money.

I'm not sure this is all such bad news. I think amounts like this mentioned in the media gets some financial heads turning and can lend some credibility to the seriousness of bitcoin. With that much money moving around, it no longer looks like a geeky hobby or some libertarian dream world. Good news or bad, bitcoin is slowly becoming a household word.

hope BTC price stable and increase (slowly) 8)
wow i just know any virus steal from multibit
try googling it
thanks

Lolz not after sympathy was my own fault for trusting anyone but myself and yes I traded my way up from £1000 to 73 goxcoins because I wanted to have some money and ( yea it paid for me to live too) call that greed sure I suppose it was. That was my job and I can tell you its kinda hard work day trading if your a noob with no trading experience like me.
Only thing i ever sent to gox was 2 years ago I was not one of those wiring in money looking for more cheep gox coins.  I already had more gox coins than I wanted. So kindly fuck right off ;D I'm moving on and trying to get back into bitcoin.

We need more charitable stories.  Like the Dogecoin bobsled story.

More stories like this:

"Learn how Bitcoin donations helped one lucky family fulfill their dying teenage daughter's last wish!"
"Thanks to Bitcoin, a local mom and pop store were able to stop Walmart from taking away their business an closing their doors"
"Thanks to crowd-funded Bitcoin donations, a former meth addict was able to fix his teeth, and is starting his first day at his new job"

Bitcoin is amazing...but it has a public perception problem.  The Bitcoin foundation should hire a PR firm to right the ship.

good point, i'm sure btc will be more famous and in value in future cuz it's just great thing.

Are we to judge bitcoin based on its price at the exchange or how often it is used to pay for services and goods?

Seems to me a lot of us, myself included, judge it based on price and that may be why we become negative in our way of thinking. Perhaps it is time to start using our bitcoins instead of hoarding them. Even if that means selling for fiat and doing something with the money if you cannot find something to buy directly with bitcoins...

for E, just cold storage, changing OS is not a smart move.
If enough people uses Linux thinking it is safe from virus attacks, hackers will move the focus to develop Linux virus instead.
Remember the only reason windows has more virus is that there are more users. period.

Don't forget the more bitcoin survives the tougher it looks and/or is.

I have a few friends who heard about bitcoin a few years ago come to me recently and say wtf that bitcoin stuffs still around? Wait didn't gox kill it all ? Didn't it like crash already?

I just say yea it crashed a few times since you last looked hey take a look at the numbers for your self.

They mostly then say wtf its worth that much now ?  Fuuuuu I could have got in when it was £2... but I don't get it after all this bad stuff has happened why is it not close to zero if its all over.


I do agree tho some cat getting urgent heart surgery funded by bitcoins or other news might be nice once in a while.

I'd say 2014 is starting out pretty great:

The market price is about the poorest indicator of Bitcoin's health. Yes it took a dive, but mostly because of Mt.Gox, again. Now they are finally dead and we can all move on, it's only a matter of time before bullish sentiment returns to pre-Goxxing levels. Distributed exchanges will debut this year to displace the private exchange issue once and for all, circumventing FinCEN and other financial regulators with it.

These are all tests of Bitcoin's resilience, and it keeps coming back stronger than it was before as the holes are exposed and plugged.

Overall though, we are seeing 1000's of new businesses entering the fray from small to large, tons of development work on the protocol itself and surrounding technologies. Mining itself is a multi-million dollar industry in of itself now.

Beyond Bitcoin, we're seeing 100s of new currencies coming out of varying merit, and a lot of dev work there too. This is all bigger than just Bitcoin, this is the emergent birth of an entirely new kind of economy.

We're at "Internet in 1990" stage with all of this, just give it some time to mature, and watch the entire world change around it into something much better.

How about "Thanks to bitcoin and no thanks to Newsweek, Dorian Nakamoto is now a millionaire"  :D

Remember how 2013 seemed total crap in April?

1. Usually you don't hear about $500 million nationally or around the world.  Usually it takes a lot more.  Madoff took $18-65 Billion.  Banks take billions in bailouts.

2. You lost confidence?  In what, your ability to protect your coins with a non-exchange wallet?  Losing confidence in bitcoin is like saying you lost confidence in the Euro because the convenience store was robbed.

No one likes the fact that Mt Gox was either incompetent or criminal, but with the Euro/Dollar/Yen/Yuan, you KNOW that every year someone is going to be stealing money from you via inflation, bail-outs, and bail-ins.  At least with bitcoin, you have the ability to protect yourself - provided you don't use an exchange as a bank.

Remember: if you don't have the private keys, you don't own bitcoin, you have an IOU from someone else.

:-)

Sorry you got gox'd

This. If you got GOX'd, it's your own fault for not paying attention. The red flags were visible since summer 2013.

B doesn't apply to BTC, it applies to every currency.
C no. If you leave it laying around just about anywhere, there is no point in making them.
E no.

There is a positive event in the works: Jimmy Wales may be buying BTC now, getting in position to have Wikipedia accept bitcoin donations. Via testing the waters, he personally garnered $12K+ of BTC, of which he said will be donated to Wikipedia after being converted back to fiat.

In fact, it's not a stretch to envision a myriad of millionaires buying bitcoins now to easily earn at least a million dollars profit this year, some of which probably not paying taxes on their windfall due to creative accounting practices, read omission.

They said that about 2013 as well.
In January it was at around $40 and by December it had reached $1100.
Be patient. Good things come to those who wait.

Jesus Christ, you back again.  :o

Lets just make this saying a sticky at the top of BitCoin Discussion. Sorry to hear your one the many who's funds were stolen by MtGox.

let's pray the btc go up to 10K! ;D

I made quite a bit of money shorting bitcoin frequently throughout most of Q1 of 2014. Not complaining.

There are many of him.

Just my 2 cents.

For me personally as a relative n00b it has been a bad year so far LOL :)

I got Goxed and Butterfly Lab.ed. My excuse for the goxing is when just about every ticker appa and widget has MTGOX label on it you kind of think they must be the trusted standard.

Surely things can only get better?

I hope so but consider this:

Lots of new people came on board when the price of BTC was going skyward, many wanting to invest and earn. Since the latter part of 2013 there has been more bad news than good, there are many burnt fingers. People will now be shy of having anything to do with Bitcoin in the future and if the price hits $1000 again I think there will be a massive amount of people who didn't get GOXED will simply get out and maybe not come back.

I hope I am wrong, we really do need some good news stories about how Bitcoin is doing good in the world!

Indeed. And the Bitcoin evangelists actually expect the Average Joe to go through all that hassle.

Ain't gonna happen.
This is the reason BTC will never go mainstream. (I.e.: It will never be used by, say, as many as 20 million people.) It's just way too user-unfriendly.

I completely agree. Someone who is good at simplifying things, like an Apple, needs to step forwards and make the process easier. There should be 100% security in what you own, and 100% accuracy when you move bitcoins around. Right now, it's the wild west where nothing is secure, and the geeks pick on average folks telling them, 'well you should have done xxxxx' when an average person loses their bitcoins. An average person doesn't understand security risks - they need a company to help them, where they are charged a fee, like .05% a month to guarantee security. THIS is where the money should be made, not on speculation.

There must be secure apps written, like on a cell phone, where you can simply type in a dollar amount, touch phones, and the person on the other end gets your bitcoins, instantaneously with no problems at all. No possibilities of using bitcoins twice, no problems with them being stolen. We're not even CLOSE to being there. Nobody cares about making the system WORK, they just care about increasing their profits making bitcoins worth 10k each, 100k each, etc. Completely ridiculous.

There are already few services as you described. For example: Blockchain online wallet.

Exactly. But try telling this to the BTC evangelists. They'll just close their ears and continue ranting about the importance of supercold storage and other extremely complicated, user-unfriendly ways to "safely" store this "fast, reliable money of the internet".

As you correctly pointed out, what's needed is a company like Apple. But apparently they're already busy inventing their own type of currency ... I suspect that one might achieve mainstream adoption, since Apple are good at marketing and building hype. And creating user-friendly, simple products.

Which is exactly why you use Electrum or other deterministic wallets. You never have to update backups. You just keep the 12 word seed and that's it.

Then you should pray that Electrum has a decent security team.

How Ironic wold it be if Apple did launch a crypto currency especially after people were smashing up their iphones.

It would be a bit like Linux and Windows, we all know which system is better (I would hope ;) but which one is on more home PC's?

Bitcoin could be left behind is a major player like Google or Apple can encourage the masses to use their payment system.

All wallets are in the process of going deterministic as it's an obviously superior model.

Once you go deterministic, you never go back.

and android bitcoin wallet (schildbach), too ...

Please interpret. Deterministic?

You have a seed which generates a master public key. Then an algorithm generates an infinite list of keys from that. It means that, instead of randomly generating keys/addresses when you need new ones, the same list is generated every time.

This means that if you delete your wallet, but remember the seed, you can recover the entire same set of addresses every time. Thus, backing up and re-backing up your private keys is not necessary.

I lost my BTC to Gox as well. How many is irrelevant, but at the end of the day I lost $2500 invested. Thankfully, I spent $1500 on retail before the crash.

I think that we need to stop worrying about how big bitcoin becomes. Let's just use it as a means of payment when required. If I need to have BTC for some purpose, I will buy what BTC I need and use it. As we have seen, the explosive growth in value only raises eyebrows of the PTB and lead to more trouble than it's worth. Just quietly use your BTC when you need it and stop worrying about getting rich on it as an investment.

Oh, thanks for the explanation.
That's the better way in this case. Much easier.