Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down

Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by sp332 on Sunday February 15, 2015 @03:31PM (#9053975)

Bitcoins are not sequences of bits. There is a global blockchain that keeps track of transactions in the network. Each block contains transactions. Since a transaction is the fundamental unit, if you want to know the balance of a particular address, you have to look at every transaction since the beginning of time and add up all the ones that involve that address. You can't just edit the books to say that an address has more or less money. And to add a new transaction to the chain, whoever has the private key for the originating address has to sign the transaction, then the transaction is checked by a miner and added to the global chain.

So to get the money back, you would have to get the private key for the address where it all ended up. Our have the owners of the majority of mining power commit fraud on your behalf, that could work too.

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by mlvljr on Sunday February 15, 2015 @03:57PM (#9054086)

So what was stolen, exactly?

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by vertex-four on Sunday February 15, 2015 @04:42PM (#9054243)

Somebody managed to trick the exchange into signing a message saying "move this amount of money from this address to this other address" (signed by the private key associated with the first address, with the second address being owned by the attacker) and submitting it to be added to the blockchain by a miner.

The blockchain is the only record of who owns what money, and transactions on it can't be reverted. Therefore, the attacker stole money by causing a transaction that shouldn't have happened.

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by baddox on Monday February 16, 2015 @02:15PM (#9058618)

Bitcoins were stolen, not a sequence of bits. It's not much different than if you steal USD from my electronic bank account. Bits are obviously involved in the process, but the USD in a bank account is not "just a sequence of bits." No physical property was stolen, but most of us can agree that this qualifies as theft.

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by sp332 on Sunday February 15, 2015 @05:02PM (#9054333)

This is more a case of fraud than burglary. The attackers tricked the exchange into sending then tons of money.

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by baddox on Sunday February 15, 2015 @05:30PM (#9054417)

Burglary traditional implies physical entry of a perpetrator into physical building or space. I assume it would not apply to "breaking into" a computer or network in most modern legal systems. Regardless, this would almost certainly be considered larceny, as well as computer fraud.

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