Thread: The control of Bitcoin can't come soon enough

Like moths to the flame...


Hong Kong bitcoin site said to have been a Ponzi scheme


A Chinese trading website for the virtual currency bitcoin which was unexpectedly shut down and caused losses in the millions of renminbi for users, was allegedly operating a Ponzi scheme, Shanghai's China Business News Daily reports.

Nearly 200 users joined an online group within six hours after they found they could no longer access the Hong Kong-registered bitcoin trading site Global Bond Limited on Oct. 26.

According to unofficial estimates, the number of users affected by the website's closure was around 500, and their combined losses may exceed 20 million yuan (US$3.28 million), the newspaper said.

Several users also went to the police for help, although law enforcement authorities in different jurisdictions have different methods of handling the individual cases.

Local authorities in Shanghai have not decided on the nature of the cases, which are currently being handled by the economic crime unit, while a user in Kunshan in Jiangsu province said local police consider such cases to be embezzlement rather than fraud.

A Hong Kong government website shows that the Global Bond Limited website was registered on June 10 as a company that operates several businesses including virtual currency exchange, investment consulting, and international trade. However, since it did not acquire any license to operate financial services, its website, which facilitated the trading of bitcoin, was likely in violation of Hong Kong's anti-money laundering laws and securities and futures regulations, the newspaper said.

One of the services that helped the website attract a large number of users, according to experienced bitcoin traders, was the trading of futures contracts for the virtual currency, which allowed returns of up to 10 times the original stake.

Moreover, the design of the website's trading mechanism, left loopholes that users could exploit and profit from, which also led to suspicion among some users, who had pulled out early as a result.

That the website hired brokers to help promote the website, has been described as similar to the operation of a pyramid scheme, the newspaper said.

An official with another bitcoin trading site, BTC China, told the daily that it is risky to trade in derivative products of the virtual currency, when the currency itself is not officially recognized by the government.

Hong Kong bitcoin site said to have been a Ponzi scheme

Silk Road mastermind 'spent $794,000 on six failed murder bids'

IT WAS almost the Silk Road to serial murder.
Ross Ulbricht — the scrawny alleged mastermind of a notorious anonymous drug bazaar called the Silk Road — spent $730,000 on a failed attempt to have six of his perceived enemies bumped off, federal prosecutors said in asking successfully that he remain held without bail, The New York Post reported.

Ulbricht's supposed contract-hit currency of choice? Bitcoins, the feds allege, the same encrypted, digital coins of the realm that made Silk Road transactions devilishly tough to trace.

"It is not just fantasy — there was $US730,000 ($794,000) that this man spent to kill six people," Assistant US Attorney Serrin Turner told the judge in a packed Manhattan courtroom.

Turner said that his office has evidence that some $US80,000 of the alleged hit loot was paid out through wired cash, with the rest paid through the virtual currency, Turner said.

The recipients of this windfall and the six intended victims were not described or named; prosecutors have previously accused Ulbricht of trying to kill just two people.

As added incentive for the judge to withhold bail, the prosecutor claimed in court that Ulbricht — who allegedly moved mass quantities of drugs, including hundreds of kilos of heroin, through transactions as easy as in ordinary online shopping — was trying to become a citizen of "several' Caribbean countries, including Dominica.

Bogus documents Ulbricht sent in pursuit of those alternate citizenships were intercepted by Customs, the prosecutor said.

Ulbricht also allegedly had enough fake IDs for least ten aliases.

"He spent the last three years evading law enforcement and leading a double life," Turner said. "People around him had no idea what he was up to. He thumbed his nose at law enforcement."

Ulbricht was prepared Thursday to post $1 million in bail, through his parents, who "are willing to put up everything they have," offered defense lawyer Josh Dratel.

More than a dozen people have sent letters on his behalf, the lawyer added, in arguing for bail. Ulbricht is also traveling and living in LA under his real name, the lawyer said.

"The actual facts establish that he is not a risk of flight," he said.

But Magistrate Judge Kevin Fox said that regardless of the letters of support, "the accused has attempted to secure the murder of several people," and has "the means to flee."

Would that be a perceived $1,000,000 in bitcoins for bail? lol

Originally Posted by Whip

Would that be a perceived $1,000,000 in bitcoins for bail? lol

Nah, he was probably planning on Liberty Reserve...;->

How thieves stole $1 million in bitcoins from a 'Bitcoin bank'

Hackers have broken into a bitcoin bank, wiping out customers' wallets. Now the affected company has explained their tactics.

Thieves have broken into a company that stores bitcoins for people and stolen $1 million worth of digital currency.

The crooks walked away with 1,295 bitcoins from BIPs, one of Europe’s biggest bitcoin payment processors, founder and CEO Kris Henriksen, told his customers via a post to the company's online forums.

That's about $990,00 based on today's value of Bitcoins on Coindesk (about $760 per coin).

BIPs offered a service that lets merchants accept bitcoins and exchange them into other currencies.

As part of that service, it stored people's bitcoins for free in what's known as a bitcoin wallet.

That's akin to a bank account. Hackers broke into that service on Friday and wiped out people's wallets, Henriksen said.

The company explained how the hackers broke in: First they created what's known as a denial of service attack, which is when computers on the Internet send a website so many hits that the website can't handle all the traffic and it shuts down.

That hack let them discover a weakness in the website.

Then they did a second attack two days later, broke into company's network, controlled the company's computer storage systems where the bitcoins were stored, and transferred the money into their own bitcoin wallet, Henriksen said in his blog post.

After the robbery, Henriksen tried to shrug off some of the blame, telling his customers, "Web Wallets are like a regular wallet that you carry cash in and not meant to keep large amounts in."

Needless to say, the people who were using BPS's free web wallet to store their Bitcoins are not happy that they were robbed.

Yahoo Finance

Originally Posted by littleroundman

[B][SIZE=1][I][B]
Needless to say, the people who were using BPS's free web wallet to store their Bitcoins are not happy that they were robbed.

This is quickly turning in to the online version of a case full of diamonds. The things that people are trying to avoid by using Bitcoin are the very reasons we now have well regulated banks and organized exchanges. It will be interesting to see when the first bank run hits how the system handles it.

Although, I will admit the run up in value has gone a lot further than I ever would have imagined. I fully expected a crash when Bitcoin started to make the main stream press.

Originally Posted by ribshaw

... I fully expected a crash when Bitcoin started to make the main stream press.

But there is always China.

Shh, US is paying it's national debt to China in bitcoins, do not tell anyone, they need to think its good ****.

You can see the ponzi pimp Brian Spatola whining about his investment he made in the very questionable "currency". It really is too funny to watch a pimp whine!
Bitbillions - Bitbillions.com

Looks like he is getting exactly what he deserves.

When the serial ponzi pimps start complaining on the usual suspect HYIP ponzi forums, you just KNOW the writing is on the wall:



Brian Spatola whining on the MMG HYIP ponzi forum

Poetic justice at its' finest.

Originally Posted by ribshaw

Although, I will admit the run up in value has gone a lot further than I ever would have imagined. I fully expected a crash when Bitcoin started to make the main stream press.

That or the bubble would grow even larger when the general masses began to pour more money into bitcoin, I wonder how "loud" the pop will be when it eventually burst.

Ironically this is what some strong proponents of bitcoin would have wanted.Some of them believed that the current worth of bitcoin to be artificial and that this cryptocurrency needs to be severely devalued for it to serve its original purposes.

Originally Posted by busttheblock

You can see the ponzi pimp Brian Spatola whining about his investment he made in the very questionable "currency". It really is too funny to watch a pimp whine!
Bitbillions - Bitbillions.com

Looks like he is getting exactly what he deserves.

Originally Posted by littleroundman

When the serial ponzi pimps start complaining on the usual suspect HYIP ponzi forums, you just KNOW the writing is on the wall:



Brian Spatola whining on the MMG HYIP ponzi forum

Poetic justice at its' finest.

I think we need to be careful to separate bitcoin and the ponzis(don't we already have a separate thread for bitbillions?) that uses them/ purportedly investing in them.

Bummer!

$9M Bitcoin haul buried in U.K. rubbish tip - Yahoo Finance


$9M Bitcoin haul buried in U.K. rubbish tip

CNNMoney.com
By Virginia Harrison
November 29, 2013 11:08 AM


Hoarders everywhere may be feeling smug after a British man threw a hard drive containing more than $9 million in bitcoin into the trash.

The device is now buried under a mountain of garbage at a landfill site in Wales. It will be almost impossible to find.

James Howells got rid of the drive, which holds a digital store of 7,500 bitcoins, between June and August this year.

The IT worker mined the virtual currency four years ago when it was the exclusive domain of tech geeks.

Back then bitcoin was worth very little. On Friday, the cryptocurrency broke through $1,200, making the missing hard drive worth around $9 million.

Howells had been hanging onto it for several years before deciding to clean up his home.

After discovering the mistake late last week, a "devastated" Howells began a frantic search through computer files and other drives for a backup. There isn't one.

A trip to the garbage dump was the only option.

"As soon as I saw the site, I thought you've got no chance. The area covered is huge," he told CNN.

A spokesperson for Newport City Council said an item thrown away in the summer months would now be buried under 25,000 cubic meters of waste and earth.

The council, which operates the dump, said it has helped retrieve items in some circumstances "but this would have to be done very quickly after it was thrown away."

Howells said he's had all sorts of suggestions emailed to him about how to get the drive back.

But well-meaning individuals shouldn't bother heading to the tip on his behalf - it's closed to the public for safety reasons.

Speculators have helped power bitcoin's dazzling rise this year.

A growing number of businesses now accept bitcoins, including some Subway sandwich shops and Richard Branson's Virgin Galatic space travel venture, though critics claim it's unlikely to become a legitimate currency.

The program behind bitcoin was created anonymously and introduced on the internet in 2010. Unlike traditional money, bitcoins are not managed by a central authority and exist only in cyberspace.

After discovering the mistake late last week, a "devastated" Howells began a frantic search through computer files and other drives for a backup. There isn't one.

So let's say he did find a back up. Wouldn't that make their alleged value half? If you throw away $20, it's gone. If you had another $20 in your pants, it's not worth the original $40.

Originally Posted by Whip

So let's say he did find a back up. Wouldn't that make their alleged value half? If you throw away $20, it's gone. If you had another $20 in your pants, it's not worth the original $40.

if he had a backup, he would have the full sum back, it does not mean if you have multiple backups it will multiply your bitcoins :)
when a bitcoin sent to another wallet, you cannot claim you still have it, keychain will invalidate all duplicates.

With Bitcoin interest (and prices) spiking, you might be considering investing in your own little cache of digital currency. But before you set up a Bitcoin wallet, you should think long and hard about who will watch over your digital wealth. In its relatively short lifespan, Bitcoin wallets and processors have been a target for hackers -- and old-fashioned fraudsters. In fact, within the last week, one of the most prominent European exchanges reported it had lost over $1 million worth of bitcoins to hackers.

An academic study published earlier this year by Tyler Moore at Southern Methodist University and Nicolas Cristin at Carnegie Mellon about the risks associated with Bitcoin exchanges reported that 18 of 40 services they studied over three years closed "with customer account balances often wiped out." In that study, less popular services were more likely to just disappear than popular exchanges -- but popular exchanges were more likely to suffer security breaches, which have also been blamed for disappearing bitcoins.

Their research supports the anecdotal evidence about the security of various Bitcoin services -- or lack thereof. The forum Bitcoin Talk has a relatively comprehensive list of incidents, but here are a few of the most notable (and costly) stories about investing in Bitcoins going bad.

European payment processor and wallet service loses over $1 million worth of bitcoins

BIPS, a Denmark-based Bitcoin payment processor with a free online wallet service reportedly lost 1,295 bitcoins over the course of a few days earlier this month -- just over $1 million worth at current exchange rates. Coindesk reports that the service was the subject of a series of DDoS attacks that appeared to be connected to the heist. The company's CEO said most of the missing funds were from the company's own holdings, but a statement addressing the incident noted that some users also took a hit

BIPS has been a target of a coordinated attack and subsequent security breached. Several consumer wallets have been compromised and BIPS will be contacting the affected users.

Inputs.io loses $1.2 million worth of bitcoins to apparent hack

Another online wallet service, Inputs.io, was compromised in late October. Hackers reportedly made off with 4,100 bitcoins, then worth $1.2 million, during two separate attacks -- despite an extensive list of security measures. TradeFortress, an individual associated with the service, said that it was a social engineering attack that allowed the adversary to reset the passwords for the system's cloud-hosting provider. Users are eligible for a partial refund of their losses out of its remaining funds on a sliding scale that decreases based on how much was stored, likely cold comfort for anyone storing significant sums with the service.

Chinese Bitcoin trading platform disappears -- with $4.1 million worth of bitcoins

A prominent Chinese Bitcoin exchange that claimed to be based in Hong Kong, GBL, disappeared in late October -- along with $4.1 million worth of bitcoins. The platform had only launched in May, and there were a few other red flags, including that it did not obtain a license to operate financial services, according to the Want China Times.

Alleged Bitcoin Ponzi scheme faces SEC suit

In 2011, an individual started advertising returns on Bitcoin investments that sounded too good to be true -- 1 percent interest daily via an investment scheme eventually called Bitcoin Savings and Trust. The whole thing looked like a bit of a pyramid scheme and shut down without returning some 500,000 bitcoins (then worth more than $5.6 million) to investors in 2012. And an SEC suit alleges that it was too good to be true, saying the proprietor of the service "falsely promised investors up to 7% interest weekly," but the actual offering "was a sham and a Ponzi scheme" where he used new investments to pay off outstanding returns and pocketed the rest.

When bitcoins go bad: 4 stories of fraud, hacking, and digital currencies.

here is what was behind the recent dive in bitcoin prices

Baidu and China Telecom Stop Accepting Bitcoin, Price Slumps Again

Certainly good for speculators if they are on the right side of the trade, but as a currency this is a nightmare. What is someone who sold something on Friday supposed to do? Honor the transaction, back away, try to renegotiate? One thing if it is a bag of apples, but something costing a few grand really presents a problem.

The best article on inner workings of the Bitcoin protocol so far:
How the Bitcoin protocol actually works | DDI

How not to mine for Bitcoin.

Apple's Mac OS X Does Not Contain Secret Bitcoin Mining Software


There’s a particularly horrible “joke” floating around out there that claims that Apple AAPL -0.02% has installed secret Bitcoin mining software inside Mac OS X. If you follow the instructions given you can then start your computer mining and you will, obviously, thereby become rich. The problem with this is that the commands you’re given actually wipe the system:

Apple’s so-called secret mining feature, which 4channers claim has been present in Macs since 2009, can be unlocked by opening a terminal command line and running the following command: sudo rm -rf/*, viral images falsely claim.

Do not try this at home – or anywhere else, come to that. In reality, typing rm -rf/* on a Unix system (including Mac OS X) tells your computer to delete all of your files and folders.

Obviously this is not something you want to happen. So, do not do it.

The source of this is obviously the 4chan forum, latterly the home, or at least the starting point of, Anonymous.

It was also the starting point for the hoax about how to make an XBox One backward compatible with an XBox 360. The instructions there simply bricking the machine altogether. And there’s also been a refinement of that trick, where instructions are given for using a PC to revive the bricked XBox One. And yes, you’ve guessed it, those instructions just end up ruining the PC.

These sorts of tricks have been around since the earliest days of the consumer computer industry including the old favourite of advising people to wrap their floppy disks in magnets in order to protect them from solar flares (or, in a variation, from airport screening scanners). Given that we no longer use floppies that’s no longer going to work but it’s the same impulse giving rise to this Apple hoax.

No, Apple really has not included Bitcoin mining software in Mac OS X. And you really do not want to follow those instructions and wipe your files and folders to find that out.

Reasonably basic advice is that you shouldn’t believe what you read on the internet. Further, it’s probably not a good idea to run an instruction if you don’t know what it’s going to do. And to find out what an instruction is going to do it’s best to read the manuals. At least that way if disaster does strike you know that you’ve got someone to blame.

Apple's Mac OS X Does Not Contain Secret Bitcoin Mining Software - Forbes

Leaked AWS key in one of open source projects, was used to hijack Amazon AWS account for crypto currency mining.
Hit the developer with $3000+ Bill for usage of Amazon services.

more: My run in with Unauthorised Litecoin mining on AWS | Luke Chadwick

Crypto currency mining was linked to deficit and global increase in prices of computer parts, specifically Video Cards and DRAM.

LiteCoin is Causing Shortages of AMD Radeon GPUs - Bright Side Of News*

Price trends on DRAM memory chips:

the recent drop in BTC prices is in connection to China's government position on Bitcoin use.
The exchange of BTC to/from national currency is not authorized from now on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/bu...its.html?_r=1&

Oh no, here we go. Illegal gifting scams are coming BitCoin Mining is Dead | BitCoins Gifting Lives!

Indian Bitcoin operator halts trade after warning on risks of virtual currency

INDIA'S biggest Bitcoin trading platform said on its website Friday it had suspended operations after the central bank warned against the risks of using virtual money.
BuySellBitCo.in closed its platform, citing an advisory by the Reserve Bank of India issued on Christmas Eve highlighting the risks of trading in digital currencies.

"We are suspending buy and sell operations until we can outline a clearer framework with which to work,'' BuySellBitCo.in said on its website, adding that the move was ``to protect the interest of our customers''.

The central bank's warning comes after Bitcoin, which can be stored either virtually or on a user's hard drive and offers a largely anonymous payment system, had begun gaining popularity in India.

The emergence of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies in India has come despite a traditional preference for assets backed by property and other tangible goods.

"There is no underlying or backing of any asset for virtual currencies and as such their value seems to be a matter of speculation,'' the central bank said in its December 24 advisory.

The "huge volatility in the value of virtual currencies has been noticed'', it added.

The central bank stopped shy of issuing a ban or any curbs on Bitcoin or other virtual currencies.

However, because the currencies were not authorised by any central bank or monetary authority there was no established recourse for customers in the case of problems, it said.

The move comes weeks after the People's Bank of China ordered financial institutions not to provide Bitcoin-related services and products and cautioned against its potential use in money-laundering.

Bitcoin was invented in the wake of the global financial crisis by a mysterious computer guru using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamotoby.

At the last rate posted by BuySellBitCo.in, which was conducting about 12 million rupees worth of Bitcoin transactions monthly, according to Indian media, one Bitcoin was selling for 48,039 rupees ($872).

The dollar worth of a Bitcoin has rocketed from just cents in 2010 to a $1200 peak in early December, but has since fallen back.

News.com.au

Originally Posted by busttheblock

Oh no, here we go. Illegal gifting scams are coming BitCoin Mining is Dead | BitCoins Gifting Lives!

It's Merlin's Magic Bitcoins, repackaged under a new name to keep robbing people. I traced a few of the members and associated websites.

Originally Posted by ProfHenryHiggins

It's Merlin's Magic Bitcoins, repackaged under a new name to keep robbing people. I traced a few of the members and associated websites.

IM(very)HO it's this sort of thing that is going to bring Bitcoin undone.

First China, now India and I can't imagine the other governments of the world standing by and having illegal activities using Bitcoin flaunted so very publicly, without acting.