Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber currency

Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by mikeash on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @10:38AM (#7422151)

Surely the fact that the attack was so inane does comment on bitcoin's security. OK, not the inherent security of the basic protocol, but the actual real-world security of real-world implementations.

You'd never store $100,000 actual dollars in a place where the employees let anyone walk in and take it if they just claim to be you. Bitcoins are equivalent to cash but they are not being stored anything like how cash is stored. It's a fundamentally difficult problem that bitcoin requires you to solve, so I think this really is highly related to bitcoin's security.

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Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by jordigh on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @10:42AM (#7422180)

Although bitcoins are more like cash than like credit cards, their ethereal nature allows you to lock them up in ways that cash that cannot be: encrypt them (i.e. you encrypt the files that contain the private keys).

This is not a solution that bitcoin itself needs to build into the protocol. It's just something that we already have that should be used when using bitcoin. People are taking a while to get used to the idea of securing a decentralised currency.

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Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by sp332 on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @12:27PM (#7422873)

Encrypted wallet are already supported in most bitcoin client implementations.

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Re:Ottawa Bitcoin exchange defrauded of $100,000 in cyber cu... by dobbsbob on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @12:57PM (#7423137)

They could have kept the hot wallet req multisig to move coins, then backed it up somewhere else so even deletion wouldn't be a problem. It's all the low hanging fruit getting fleeced Bitcoin protocol offers plenty of safeguards if you use it

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