Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down

Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by Johnie on Sunday February 15, 2015 @03:47PM (#9054042)

If you lose my money that I trusted in your startup, I would file a lawsuit. Whether or not the law is murky, you'll be tied up in legal issues for a long time. Even if the law says you're not legally liable (unlikely), your legal fees would put you in a world of hurt for a long time.

When you're transacting in something of value (whether that be money, digital currency, or pokemon cards) for your users, you better be sure to take it seriously.

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by sillysaurus3 on Sunday February 15, 2015 @04:27PM (#9054198)

If you lose my money that I trusted in your startup, I would file a lawsuit.

I lost money to Mt. Gox, but filing a lawsuit won't get anyone anywhere. Want to see a sad pdf? https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20150202_tibanne.pdf

Sad for the customers. Not for Karpeles, the owner of Mt. Gox. He's still a millionaire and still free, and might even have the customers' bitcoins. No one will probably find out.

I know you're talking about Bitcoin startups founded in the US or EU, but the same applies: If the startup goes bankrupt, the customers won't get anything back. There's nothing to get back except empty coffers.

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by Johnie on Sunday February 15, 2015 @05:37PM (#9054458)

It's not about getting my money back. It's to prevent you and others from making the same mistake in the future. It's also to prevent any fraudulent activity from happening (ie paying out to some creditors while not to others).

We have courts and bankruptcy laws for a reason.

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by sillysaurus3 on Sunday February 15, 2015 @08:36PM (#9054927)

How it works: set up an exchange. Attract users. When enough coins have been deposited into your exchange, steal them. Bitcoin makes this easy to do untraceably. Post a message saying you've been hacked and are shutting down.

You're now a millionaire, and no one can ever take that way from you. No court matters. As long as the price of bitcoin doesn't go down by more than 10x, you'll still be very wealthy. And no one can prove a thing.

This is business as usual in the bitcoin world. Bitcoin has made it very easy to separate people from their money, and courts have no power to do anything about it.

Would you go to prison for a few years to be a millionaire? There is no shortage of people willing to risk this.

As you can see from the rest of the thread, people are willing to believe almost any cover story, no matter how implausible. Even that an exchange could be DDoSed by search engines.

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by blacksqr on Sunday February 15, 2015 @11:39PM (#9055328)

Welcome to the libertarian paradise.

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Re:Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down by dogecoinbase on Sunday February 15, 2015 @03:53PM (#9054067)

So, if providers were responding correctly to incentives in the Bitcoin exchange marketplace, they'd be both ignoring security, and making themselves difficult to find or identify. Got it.

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