Hi fellow escrows. I would like to get advice on how to handle a potential risk that I experienced lately.

I had a trade worth 260€. Everything went normal, deal ended with the seller sending the goods and the buyer telling me to release the coins. Only shortly after I received a pm from the buyer that he never received anything. I answered, only to get the message that I was blocked for answering the buyer. Shortly after I saw a scam accusation thread.

Well, first accusation was that I was scammed by the buyer who sent a message including our quotes from an account looking similar to the buyers one. First fright was gone when I realized that the pm came from the exact same account that the buyer owns.

It turned out he never blocked me from receiving messages so the only explaination was that his account was hacked by the seller so that he can get his coins back.

Next thing was that the seller claimed that he was scammed by sending the digital money to another account the seller told me. So the possibility was there that the buyer faked it and let it look like he was getting scammed. So that he had received coins and digital money.

At the end the story of the seller did not sound perfect and finally he was being revealed as the scammer.

Anyway the risk was there that the buyer would have faked it.

Third theory was that a third party was involved though this would have needed the other account being hacked too. So unlikely.

For information here the accusation thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1386622.new#new and the thread where the scammer finally was revealed surely: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1389494.new#new

It's the first time I hear of something like that where a hacker did not instantly change the password.

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Now my question. How can an escrow prevent this?

Well, normally I would think that the trading partner would have to be cautious and that the escrow would have to assume that the trading partner was not hacked. But it seems there were voices like "so what will you do to prevent this?".

Well, I don't know. Some suggested that I demand a signed message when the seller sends me the address he wants the coins released to as well as the buyer sends one with his message that I can release the coins. Though surely that will scare away users. Even suggesting it... I know that it is a hassle only to start that topic, even with shorena's link on how to do it. Everyone who tried to explain signatures know that it can take ages.

Others claimed only to release coins when the escrow receives a screenshot of the payment. Well, that might have helped in this case, since I doubt the hacker sent anything at all, though I would not know if the screenshot is faked and investigating this surely would take time too.

And asking the trading partners to change their password because they might have been hacked sounds way too far fetched too.

So does anyone has an idea what an escrow potentially could do there? I mean it would have to be done in each trade only on the assumption that a trading partner could have been hacked.

In fact people are afraid of sharia that are not religious. Only because others think that an old book plus interpretations of various humans needs to lead to death for homosexuals then surely that is oppression.

You claim sharia is only for the bad. The problem is who defines who is bad.

Well, christian countries had the same problem. Only they overcame them and way more people now live a more free life free of fear.

Only because the majority is chosing to suppress the minority that thinks differently doesn't make it democratic.

Well, you are right... foolish fiat fans now calculate millionaires in US-Dollars... they should give up and subjugate under the new rising dark overlord BITCOIN. He already has the underworld in his hands, now he moves on to take over the banks... no one can resist his power. Bitcoin will define what a millionaire is. Or throw away that word totally.

rJanku, hear what this guy says... he knows what he speaks of...

But I saw you removed the "NO SPAM" tag. Well, you got me pretty uncertain again. Can you add it again so I feel more safe please?

Unfortunately electrum servers does know much more. They know all the addresses of a wallet and can connect them. They only would need one address to be known belonging to a user and they would know that all these addresses belong to that user.

It is not a good idea to use the autoconnect feature on electrum since you will spread your information over all the servers and you never know if one of them is a not so nice guy.

I wonder if that is there are more wallets of that kind.

Well, I hope there are not many malicious servers but surely someone checked out what he can get. And since the wallet connects to the server it might be good to hide your ip with tor. Works fine for me though I think even when they would not know the real IP, they can know who someone is if he posted one of the addresses connectable to a person and what addresses he has in that wallet.

There was at least one case of a successfull phishing through a faked bitcointalk.org URL. See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1389494.new#new and https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1386622.new#new

The URL that the phisher owns was bitcointaIk.org. The L was replaced with the big i.

Is there an automatic replacement feature that is able to exchange such words automatically because of a proven scam word? So that it automatically routes to the real domain here? Maybe even showing a 404 page that shows a red alert that the user might have wanted to visit a phishing page? At least when bitcointalk's url was being tried to fake.

At least in the preview of my post the url is not replaced. So I think it might be worth to consider to raise the security on the forum.

The url's you posted actually ARE the same. They all lead to this forum here.

You should have been cautious for having to login again. You should have been even more cautious when your firefox password was not autofilled. It surely wasn't and you had to manually login.

It was harder to see that the L in bitcointalk was replaced with an I. The little L looks very similar. And still it is a completely different URL and domain.

So the http is not a real problem. That the domain name was different, that was the problem. That domain had nothing to do with this forum except that it copied the contents from here and caught your password.

Though I surely don't know how he still could access it after you changed pass. Does your password change show up here: https://bitcointalk.org/seclog.php

Maybe you forgot to change or changed it to the old ony by mistake.

Theymos might put that domain name in autocorrect so that it automatically gets corrected.

So I got it wrong that you was offended by adressing you, you only are aggressive... well, fine for me.

It's fine for you when you don't trade it, I never said you have to. But you claimed that you failed at trading and that it is not possible to win. You are simply wrong on that. There are enough people that win constantly. Only because you did not have the patience to work things out does not make your statement true.

You think you need a hundreds of fluctuations, well, you might be right. But a few thousands of a ten thousand dollaer investment, well, I wonder how many years your secure investments need for that.

I still don't get what you want to show with your table. You raise the profit by 26 coins each coin the bitcoin price is rising? The bitcoin price is way more volatile than the steps you show. I don't get what you say. Daily spikes of 10% are not seldom, trading on a bit longer term is not much different. I really wonder how you can speak about something you admit not having tried at all.

On top you can trade with leverage if someone wants and is sure of the profits. I don't care if you were not able to predict things. Trading is not gambling on dice sites. It's more like sportsbetting with knowledge or poker. Gaining an advantage.

By the way... secure investments should have been known by google in the first search result. Instead it seems to be only stocks that people say are safe. Well, I have seen enough safe investments that went down. Doesn't matter then anymore what was promised.

If this is really a stck type of it's own then let me know. I already have read alot on trading topics and I never came about this.

Well, I'm not someone who needs to convince your choleric personality. Maybe I'm wrong though it looks like you miss the ways to educate people normally. Take it as you wish and life safely with your secure investments. I won't get down to your name throwing level.

Lauda



I wonde actually in which type of country you live in. A democracy it surely isn't or you are the type that thinks "the guys at the top will do the right thing, they probably know better than me". Which lets me ask what kind of government you would chose.

Core fans always tell everyone that bitcoin is no democracy, well, it should. It has proven way too often that democracy is the best choice of governments. Even though our current democratic countries only have a homeopatic democracy. The democracy is so thin that it is practically not existing anymore. What is it worth when the citicens (demo-cracy = ruling of the citicens) has the right to make a single choice once every couple of years and the rest of the time they have to delegate their voice to others?

Anyway... you surely should have realized that most bitcoiners are not the kind of subservient and obedient citizens you might be.

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arcticlava and sturle




These miners are pools too. So the question is what happens when the miners that mine on that pool direct their hashpower elsewhere, if they can? Would that have an effect?

I agree that the users have the power at the end. Though I fear most users are ignorant and would simply use whatever client they get handed out with an update.

Miners mining worthless blocks... well, that would only be true if the price of the bitcoins on that chain is falling down. That only happens by selling. Who will sell? Will the rich guys on one side sell their coins on the other side to bring the chain down? Or the other way? Worthless is only that is not wanted anymore.

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Quantus



I think if the chinese government probably would simply take them out of the game. That would be not a big problem since the only harm that could do would be bigger timeframes between confirmations. It would be a hassle for up to two weeks minimum. The remaining miners would still earn the same that they earned before the pools were taken out. Though with the next diff update they would earn alot more than before. It would mean a new goldrush with miners prices rising very high.

It could not harm bitcoin at all. Only maybe some other forms of attack might be.

If they actually would force them to mine empty blocks then this reminds me of something. Wasn't there a rule of some kind that asic producers would implement a slightly different form of calculation into their miners? That was a precaution in case the algo had to be changed to keep some asics out of the game. I think at the asic goldrush times there was something like that. I'm not sure who dealt with that. The core devs probably.

So it might be possible to keep miners from these producers out.

Are you sure that there is no big influence of religion on laws and politicians? In fact I think even western secular countries keep stupid religious rules.

For example the US. Many stupid laws are created because christians insist of it. Some schools even teach creationism, so that god created the mankind instead evolution was at work. Well, one could combine both things too somehow but still it is religion.

Or germany. There are religious days everony has free for work. Well, other religions members don't have that. They should be able to spend a similar amount of free days on their important religious days.

In fact there are christian days where it is forbidden for every german to dance... because christians might be offended. Well, pretty stupid that such laws still exist.

Religion should be something of the individual. It should not be allowed to force others to the rules of a religion.

I wonder what you wanted to say? That you welcome centralization or seeing it as a problem at which point we would have to change something?

I mean you are right that the network is something you surely can't name decentralized. The worst thing for me is that satoshi awaited this from the start. I only can assume he thought that the companies would not meddle with the network at one point because the potential profits coming from that could never outweight the profits they would get from mining. Beside that it looks like a central point of attack vector.

Though even POS is no solution. The whales rule there too. There is no real decentralization yet because of the reward.

I wonder if it will be a problem at one point.

Well, for some centralization of development of bitcoin protocol looks like a problem at the current point in time. Decentralization is left with nodes and with the userbase. Both groups have some form of power. Nodes by being able to chose which blocks to forward, though that does not help when miners connect to nodes that forward and maybe reach over 50% that way, and the userbase who theoretically has the choice to fork when they want.

Well, I think interesting times we bitcoiners live in, we have at least. I feel like Yoda got me here.

I wonder why the app is downloaded from somewhere else than the appstore. Sounds like an attack vector and the appstore should be way safer too. Not to speak that their downloadserver is slow as hell.

Why is okcoin doing that?

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Old post below to prevent doubleposting...

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Though once you want to start trading with leverage then you will miss okcoin. It's the best place for that since the fees are very low (or no at all?) and very important, the spread is low too on the orderbook.

Some things you correct I can agree, but not all.

Why should empty or partly filled blocks be an issue? They only are an issue when there is a backlog of transactions that is not worked on because of such a block.

If there would be an issue then something bad should have happened when bitcoin implemented 1mb blocksize. Or way more dangerous, the uncapped version of bitcoin before.

Blocksize raise is a simple concept because it is an abitrarely chosen amount that now is raised high as an important setting like 21 mio coins cap and 10 minute blocks. It's simply not.

The rise in the bitcoin price only means that it is the only bitcoin we have. There is not even a choice in switching to a fork of bitcoin or something like that.

It's like giving inmates bad food and say to an observer... see, they eat it... it must be good food. Well... sure, maybe it is not yet as bad but cockroaches are often enough in the bitcoin meal. Surely bitcoiners would like to use a system without regular backlogs.

You might be right. I once hosted some miners in my living room. They heated the whole flat...

I think some miners will take that into their calculation of profitability.

Well, so all his non matching stories had a reason.

Amartin99, at least your password manager should have warned about it. No autofill of passwords would happen on the phising site.

Yeah, it's an old trick to replace l and I. It's not that bad on this forum but if you have bad luck then the website you receive this on has another font. It can be then that both signs look indistinguishable and you will click it without noticing.

He already used that trick once successfully. See my trust rating for him. Damage 0.62 bitcoin.

At least website bitcoin addresses can be connected to that websites wallet as long as the website is using a shared wallet. So you have deposit addresses but the addresses you pay from are addresses you can't chose.

I'm not sure how it is done on zebpay.

Well, though it might be that you are not the only one who thinks the same way. You might observe the hashrate development in the next days. Might very well be that it is rising now because many hopes are awakened.

Um, you know what trading strategy means at all? Making profit is even worse than buy low sell high. It can't be named a strategy, it's the process of trading. The strategy are the decisions before.

Didn't know you think so too. You did not take part in any of these discussions. Though I have to say they are pretty tiring and mostly fruitless. It's better to avoid as long as you don't see someone is really interested into getting informations.