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Posted on 02/13/2014 7:20:59 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The same bug that has plagued several of the biggest players in the Bitcoin economy may have just bitten the Silk Road.
On Thursday, one of the recently-reincarnated drug-selling black market site’s administrators posted a long announcement to the Silk Road 2.0 forums admitting that the site had been hacked by one of its sellers, and its reserve of Bitcoins belonging to both the users and the site itself stolen. The admin, who goes by the name “Defcon,” blamed the same “transaction malleability” bug in the Bitcoin protocol that led to several of the cryptocurrency’s exchanges halting withdrawals in the previous week.
“I am sweating as I write this… I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community: We have been hacked,” Defcon wrote. “Our initial investigations indicate that a vendor exploited a recently discovered vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol known as “transaction malleability” to repeatedly withdraw coins from our system until it was completely empty.”(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Ping
NSA.
What do you want to bet that the NSA was involved in this...
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I don’t understand anything about bitcoin. I know it is digital currency, but what is backing it?
Same thing backing the US dollar.
Nothing, the same as Federal Reserve notes.
If there exists a dollar alternative, then this diminishes the ability of the gummint to control.
I, too, think the NSA was behind this.
Just google it.
At least the US dollar has ink and paper—both of which will be worth more than the face value of the bill in due course.
State sponsored, or banksters, or both, IMO. A lot of the bank executives meeting with mysterious deaths lately (4 - 5). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the same are involved in the DOS attacks on the exchanges are as well.
But not China?
Check out the comments as well.
Yeah, isn't it odd? Maybe it's just a statistically fluke, though.
I googled it, yahood it, binged it, .... still don’t understand it.
It was created out of nothing by a hacker.
That's not entirely correct. The USD is backed by the enormous mass of goods and services that are ready to be exchanged for it. BTC is backed by hardly anything because there are virtually no goods or services that are exchangeable for a BTC. No merchant would want to hold the BTC, which is not a surprise considering BTC's volatility. A few vendors sell stuff "for BTC," but in reality they convert your BTC into USD and then sell you the product for those USD.
Have you forgotten about the German gold?
Except malleability is not going to transfer coins. This is pure theft, not some conspiracy. They just took the money and ran.
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