Black Arrow Software recently had some of their bitcoin stash stolen and is now blaming it on bitcoin.
I would tend to fall on the presumption of believing these coins were not stolen by an outside hacker, as a more typical scenario in these cases is an inside job and than a manufactured story of guilt which is an old grifter ruse.
I agree. I would say that most companies likely have sufficient security that would generally protect them from outside attackers. Whoever stole the coins likey has at least some connection to someone who had access to the private keys.
At this stage in the game their should be 2 rules with mining hardware.
1) Only use multi-sig escrow with a trusted arbitrator
The thing is that pre-order funds were intended to pay for the research and development of the machines, so they needed immediate access to the money. Otherwise they could just wait until the machines are actually ready to be shipped to sell them.
or
2) Do not preorder equipment and pay with a credit card or use option 1 if its an untrusted company
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This is good advice. It would be much better for the community if people would force the mining companies to take some kind of risk when developing their new hardware. I don't think using a credit card would protect you though as the delivery timeframes is generally longer then the dispute period.
