Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[kehtolo]

Bitstamp leaked their customer email addresses by the way, that's why all the new phishing attempts. Reminiscent of Emptygox 2011. Fuck all the operating major Bitcoin exchanges.

This is just getting stupid. After Im confident of the reversal and fairly sure its choo choo time Im getting all of my funds off exchanges and not trading until im confident in a competent exchange.

I have Bitstamp verified account and I never received the gox scam mail neither the btcguild scam mail or any other bitcoin related scam or spam. I don't think those are connected.

Me too.. and i hate posting me too posts. But in this case, i'm in the same boat.. i also had a gox account (that i never used cos i never verified) and got none of these phishing mails.

[N12]

Actually, the OP that eleuthria replies to, is much clearer evidence since he claims to have used a unique email specific to Bitstamp only.

Interesting to know we have 3 people here who did NOT receive them (and probably checked spam folders). It would be good to get to the bottom of this. Maybe ask hazek.

[Hfertig]

Funny thing is as more and more people pull their coins off exchanges the supply will begin to dwindle 

To some extend correct. But you will have less fresh fiat coming to exchanges as people don´t trust them. This could result in less supply and demand, lower volume and higher volatility. There is also the possibility that more people will withdraw their fiat (before it is too late ?). I believe this can only add to the selling pressure we have seen in the last couple of month.

[Threebits]

Big or small exchange? Which is better? I doubt big ones more possibly hacked?

[Rannasha]

Actually, the OP that eleuthria replies to, is much clearer evidence since he claims to have used a unique email specific to Bitstamp only.

Interesting to know we have 3 people here who did NOT receive them (and probably checked spam folders). It would be good to get to the bottom of this. Maybe ask hazek.

I never got any of the phishing emails that people are talking about. The alias I use for Bitstamp has spam-filtering disabled.

[JayJuanGee]

The Doomsday Cult of Bitcoin
By Kevin Roose

On December 21, 1954, a woman named Dorothy Martin thought the world was going to end. Martin, a Chicago housewife, claimed to have received a message from aliens, warning her of an impending flood that would kill everyone on earth except for true believers, who would be carried away to safety on a flying saucer. For months, Martin had been gathering a band of followers who called themselves the Seekers and quietly prepared for their alien abduction. The Seekers left behind family and friends, sold their possessions, and on December 20, they waited. When midnight came, they waited some more.
When they realized the flying saucer wasn't going to come, and that Martin's prophecy had been wrong, something odd happened: Rather than giving up, the Seekers began furiously calling up newspapers and trying to spread their message as widely as possible. In order to overcome the cognitive dissonance of their situation and convince themselves their sacrifices had been worthwhile, they needed to proselytize.
This is, we now know, a psychologically normal response for prophetic groups whose central predictions fail to come true. And today, you can see something similar going on with another group of failing zealots. I'm talking about the cult of Bitcoin.
For months now, Bitcoin soothsayers have proclaimed that the virtual currency is going to Change Everything. The mass adoption of Bitcoin, they told us, would utterly transform the way the world stores and exchanges value. Government-backed currency would become obsolete. Farmers in Kenya would use the same Bitcoin-based payment systems as cafés in the Mission. With the future of money in the hands of Satoshi Nakamoto's brilliant protocol, inexact central planning would be replaced by algorithmic decentralization.
Of course, none of that has happened. And it's exceedingly likely that none of it will. (...)

it is really funny. first the nay sayers told us it will never work, the guys who try it are idiots. now, as they realize that bitcoin is still around they bring on the next move: ha, bitcoin hasn´t achieved what the bitcoiners say it would = must be bad.

it went kind of fast from: it will not succeed to see, it hasn´t succeeded  



http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/doomsday-cult-of-bitcoin.html

The above quoted article is such bullshit that it is hardly worth repeating.... Maybe I am guilty of the same but I just wanted to make clear my referent?   Surely, with any movement, there are going to be some people who are true believers, and they have NO basis in fact for their beliefs - however, to put bitcoin in that category and to suggest that a lot of bitcoin followers fall into cultish behavior attempts to poo poo and to minimize a large number of concrete and positive contributions of bitcoin.  

[N12]

What a mystery. I don't know what else could have been the source of leak on my email if not Bitstamp. It began in mid February.

Though I'm still pretty sure it is Bitstamp's fault, I'll withhold final judgement for now until we get some explanation for why only a subset of users is affected.

[Spaceman_Spiff]

I never received any spam either (unless my spamfolder already autodeleted the stuff, was it prior to Feb 23rd?).

By the way, what is the deal with Chinese exchanges these days?  I kinda lost track of the developments after the early banning news.   Can fresh money reach the exchanges nowadays?

[mmitech]

Perhaps I am being a little harsh with the exchanges; clearly they are the first attempts by hobbyists and we needed them in the very beginning. But now, we have moved on to a stage where we cannot afford to have experimental exchanges – perhaps even having such exchanges out there with the highest volume is detrimental nowadays. What is sorely needed is professionals who already have experience building financial infrastructure. Wall Street, not basement geek.

Bitstamp leaked their customer email addresses by the way, that's why all the new phishing attempts. Reminiscent of Emptygox 2011. Fuck all the operating major Bitcoin exchanges.

This is just getting stupid. After Im confident of the reversal and fairly sure its choo choo time Im getting all of my funds off exchanges and not trading until im confident in a competent exchange.

I have Bitstamp verified account and I never received the gox scam mail neither the btcguild scam mail or any other bitcoin related scam or spam. I don't think those are connected.

Same here regarding the Bitstamp account, plus my email was not leaked before all this and I only got those mails fairly recently, so I am near certain of eleuthria's conclusion. Have you checked your spam folder? Gmail for example has excellent spam filtering.

I checked the spam folder just before writing the message. There are no such emails from mtgox or btcguild in any of my email folders including the spam folder.

Same here. Doesn't rule out email leak, but I'm not convinced.

"In another email they admitted to it"...  My ass

ok I will share this with you, I do trust the guys who run Bitstamp, I can vouch for their trustworthy, I met some of them, but some of you may remember when I was investigating the issue, I was getting tons of phishing attempts and I am still getting them almost everyday, first I thought it was my fault maybe installing some infected android app, but then I asked effected users who got the same emails and they confirmed they do not use the same e-mail address for their android devices for bitstamp, then I thought maybe it was the mtgox security breach, and other users confirmed that they didn't use the same address as well, so this eliminated gox as well.

the other note is that bitstamp blocked BTC withdrawal from only effected accounts, how they knew about who was effected ? this raised my concerns, I didn't want to talk about this for 3 reasons, the first one is people would shoot about me trying to spread FUD, the second is I have no evidence while everything point out to this scenario I didn't have any prove to talk about it, the third is that I know the CEO personally, he is from my town, I know his mother she works with me, and know what kind of people they are, and I also know some of bitstamp's employees, they are all reputable and I have no second thoughts about that.

Disclaimer, I even have a job application sent to work at bitstamp, nevertheless being in IT administration and architecture for so long I can tell about some of the bad practices Bitstamp is using, well at least what I can think it is and concerns me, their design for the help desk system (support) is not the best secure practice, you can submit support tickets with attachments on the same platform (server) where you have your trading engine database and also the bitcoin daemon.

I am not worried about the phishing attempts but what worries me is the core site, big companies of this size use a different domain and/or different servers for help desk, where users can submit their tickets with attachments to a whole different server, so even if that server is compromised with an injection/upload or simply being infected by viruses it wont effect the customers funds and the database also it wont effect the trading.


and I really hope that I am being wrong...

[igi00]

Bitstamp leaked their customer email addresses by the way, that's why all the new phishing attempts. Reminiscent of Emptygox 2011. Fuck all the operating major Bitcoin exchanges.

This is just getting stupid. After Im confident of the reversal and fairly sure its choo choo time Im getting all of my funds off exchanges and not trading until im confident in a competent exchange.

I have Bitstamp verified account and I never received the gox scam mail neither the btcguild scam mail or any other bitcoin related scam or spam. I don't think those are connected.

Me too.. and i hate posting me too posts. But in this case, i'm in the same boat.. i also had a gox account (that i never used cos i never verified) and got none of these phishing mails.

Me3.. never got phishing mail, and I am verified user of Bitstamp.

[JorgeStolfi]

A> Hello, this is Alexey of Bitscamex-e. I'd like to talk to
     Carlos Trumffett of Graball Coins Investment, please.
C> Carlos speaking.
A> Hi, remember that I told you we invited a bitcoin hacker to "audit"
     our exchange? He is here.
C> So?
A> I gave him the list of addresses that you gave me.  He checked that they have the
     coins that we told him that we are supposed to have.  As we expected,
      he now wants us to prove that we own those coins.
C> I am ready.
A> He asked us to move 0.0001234 BTC from account a8fc... to account 76b0.... I told
      him we had to do it offline in the safe room for security reasons.
      Could you do the transfer and tell me when you are done?
C> I can do better.  Attached find the signed transaction request, you can send it out
     yourself under his nose.
A> Thanks! Bye...

EDIT: "the coins we are supposed to have" --> "the coins that we told him that we are supposed to have"

[tailor]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/doomsday-cult-of-bitcoin.html

The above quoted article is such bullshit that it is hardly worth repeating.... Maybe I am guilty of the same but I just wanted to make clear my referent?   Surely, with any movement, there are going to be some people who are true believers, and they have NO basis in fact for their beliefs - however, to put bitcoin in that category and to suggest that a lot of bitcoin followers fall into cultish behavior attempts to poo poo and to minimize a large number of concrete and positive contributions of bitcoin.  

Your outright dismissal of the article is exactly the type of cultish behaviour the author is talking about - dismiss anything that doesn't fit the faith view.

What concrete contributions has bitcoin made? It certainly hasn't changed the world yet, and it's highly unlikely it will without some drastic change to the limited exchange problem. The killer app for BTC could be transferring money online, but that only works if it can be easily converted to local currency.

 

[Spaceman_Spiff]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/doomsday-cult-of-bitcoin.html

The above quoted article is such bullshit that it is hardly worth repeating.... Maybe I am guilty of the same but I just wanted to make clear my referent?   Surely, with any movement, there are going to be some people who are true believers, and they have NO basis in fact for their beliefs - however, to put bitcoin in that category and to suggest that a lot of bitcoin followers fall into cultish behavior attempts to poo poo and to minimize a large number of concrete and positive contributions of bitcoin.  

Your outright dismissal of the article is exactly the type of cultish behaviour the author is talking about - dismiss anything that doesn't fit the faith view.

What concrete contributions has bitcoin made? It certainly hasn't changed the world yet, and it's highly unlikely it will without some drastic change to the limited exchange problem. The killer app for BTC could be transferring money online, but that only works if it can be easily converted to local currency.

Give these things time for pete's sake.  A little over a year ago disbelievers were saying that no serious company accepted bitcoin, that you couldn't buy food with it etc. , and that therefore it wasn't useful and had failed....  Now look at overstock.com, food delivery services, etc. ..

[soullyG]

...scammy scam scam...

GTFO scammer

[oda.krell]

Perhaps I am being a little harsh with the exchanges; clearly they are the first attempts by hobbyists and we needed them in the very beginning. But now, we have moved on to a stage where we cannot afford to have experimental exchanges – perhaps even having such exchanges out there with the highest volume is detrimental nowadays. What is sorely needed is professionals who already have experience building financial infrastructure. Wall Street, not basement geek.

Bitstamp leaked their customer email addresses by the way, that's why all the new phishing attempts. Reminiscent of Emptygox 2011. Fuck all the operating major Bitcoin exchanges.

This is just getting stupid. After Im confident of the reversal and fairly sure its choo choo time Im getting all of my funds off exchanges and not trading until im confident in a competent exchange.

I have Bitstamp verified account and I never received the gox scam mail neither the btcguild scam mail or any other bitcoin related scam or spam. I don't think those are connected.

Same here regarding the Bitstamp account, plus my email was not leaked before all this and I only got those mails fairly recently, so I am near certain of eleuthria's conclusion. Have you checked your spam folder? Gmail for example has excellent spam filtering.

I checked the spam folder just before writing the message. There are no such emails from mtgox or btcguild in any of my email folders including the spam folder.

Same here. Doesn't rule out email leak, but I'm not convinced.

"In another email they admitted to it"...  My ass

ok I will share this with you, I do trust the guys who run Bitstamp, I can vouch for their trustworthy, I met some of them, but some of you may remember when I was investigating the issue, I was getting tons of phishing attempts and I am still getting them almost everyday, first I thought it was my fault maybe installing some infected android app, but then I asked effected users who got the same emails and they confirmed they do not use the same e-mail address for their android devices for bitstamp, then I thought maybe it was the mtgox security breach, and other users confirmed that they didn't use the same address as well, so this eliminated gox as well.

the other note is that bitstamp blocked BTC withdrawal from only effected accounts, how they knew about who was effected ? this raised my concerns, I didn't want to talk about this for 3 reasons, the first one is people would shoot about me trying to spread FUD, the second is I have no evidence while everything point out to this scenario I didn't have any prove to talk about it, the third is that I know the CEO personally, he is from my town, I know his mother she works with me, and know what kind of people they are, and I also know some of bitstamp's employees, they are all reputable and I have no second thoughts about that.

Disclaimer, I even have a job application sent to work at bitstamp, nevertheless being in IT administration and architecture for so long I can tell about some of the bad practices Bitstamp is using, well at least what I can think it is and concerns me, their design for the help desk system (support) is not the best secure practice, you can submit support tickets with attachments on the same platform (server) where you have your trading engine database and also the bitcoin daemon.

I am not worried about the phishing attempts but what worries me is the core site, big companies of this size use a different domain and/or different servers for help desk, where users can submit their tickets with attachments to a whole different server, so even if that server is compromised with an injection/upload or simply being infected by viruses it wont effect the customers funds and the database also it wont effect the trading.


and I really hope that I am being wrong...

Right, I remember you being one of the affected account some weeks ago.

Thanks a lot for that little bit of insight. You're right about the part where, from the looks of it, they blocked withdrawal for only those account who had received the mails. How they would know this, is either if they knew which accounts were affected because they were the source of the leak, or because of irregularities with the account itself (like multiple failed logins, IP address suddenly changing to a vastly different geolocation).

I admit, there's at least a real chance that Bitstamp was the source of the leaks.

In essence, I trust them too. My biggest gripe with them is not how they run their exchange, but their "only say the bare minimum" approach to PR. That's what I would like to see changed before anything else.

[podyx]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/doomsday-cult-of-bitcoin.html

The above quoted article is such bullshit that it is hardly worth repeating.... Maybe I am guilty of the same but I just wanted to make clear my referent?   Surely, with any movement, there are going to be some people who are true believers, and they have NO basis in fact for their beliefs - however, to put bitcoin in that category and to suggest that a lot of bitcoin followers fall into cultish behavior attempts to poo poo and to minimize a large number of concrete and positive contributions of bitcoin.  

Your outright dismissal of the article is exactly the type of cultish behaviour the author is talking about - dismiss anything that doesn't fit the faith view.

What concrete contributions has bitcoin made? It certainly hasn't changed the world yet, and it's highly unlikely it will without some drastic change to the limited exchange problem. The killer app for BTC could be transferring money online, but that only works if it can be easily converted to local currency.

 

the irony of the whole fucking thing, u ask?? his behaviour is the exact same LOL

[c2391118]

"Kiev snipers hired by Maidan leaders - leaked EU's Ashton phone tape"
http://rt.com/news/ashton-maidan-snipers-estonia-946/

buy buy buy!

wait, that means less chance of war as the west was caught out once again..

sell sell sell!!

The Russian propaganda is strong with this one.

If you learn history of breakdown USSR in 1991, revolutions in Lybia, Egypt, doings in Syria and other - all there where "unknow snipers". And, trust me, they was from the West.
And brainwash wery strong in West countries. Because you need resources and control for maintain high standard of living without economy crash.

[dreamspark]

    Yeah thanks for that mmitech, I too have been concerened with the upload ability with the support tickets but its good to know the feelings of someone who has even spoken to these guys.

   The thing to think about though is these slight vunerabilities absolutely and categorically should not be present. These exchanges are dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars there is no excuse for not having seperate support servers, updating people when there was an obvious glitch and pushing out updates to a live environment. If they cant invest a small % of the HUGE amounts of money they are making then it beggars belief, it gives the whole industry a cowboy look because at the end of the day these exchanges werent built by financial programming experts and aren't run by people qualified to run global business' that deal with such vast sums.


    All the current exchanges will be dead in the water once a US based proffessional exchange is released. There is literally no reason to continue to use bitstamp et al once this happens. The only exception really is btc-e who will continue to cater for the people not prepared to give out any identification.

[Richy_T]

Actually, the OP that eleuthria replies to, is much clearer evidence since he claims to have used a unique email specific to Bitstamp only.

Interesting to know we have 3 people here who did NOT receive them (and probably checked spam folders). It would be good to get to the bottom of this. Maybe ask hazek.

I never got any of the phishing emails that people are talking about. The alias I use for Bitstamp has spam-filtering disabled.

Bigger exchange, bigger target.

I think Blitz is right and there is a lot of amateurism in the field. What's OK for a blog is not OK for something holding large quantities of other peoples money. That MtGox could let that many Bitcoins (and $) slip through their fingers (if it wasn't an inside job) is unthinkable. 1BTC, heck *any* kind of discrepancy should have triggered alarm bells and all BTC transferred immediately to cold storage. But it seems they weren't even looking.

The sad thing is, it's not that hard to do right. But it requires delegation of responsibility and bringing people with the appropriate skills on board. All the problems Gox experienced even before this event indicate that the needed mentality was *not* in place. The news about MK's escapades in France did not surprise me in the least.

[billyjoeallen]

I was complaining to CampBX on chat about their lack of volume. They responded "We don't think we have low volume." I pulled all my BTC out an hour later. F@!$%ng amateurs.

Why would you complain about that? Clearly its a tiny exchange.

They've been around for three years! You'd think they'd reduce their trading fees or court VCs to expand or something. They just don't act hungry for my business.