Morning folk. Just woke up and got creeped by the MP news.
What really bothers me there, is that it was not user account, but MP themselves... so why on earth only Vericoin were stolen?
If it was a service exploit, they would have gone straight to BTC, LTC and heck, even DRK.... why Vericoin?
Mintpal are bent. Always have been, they're just smart and subtle about it. They run bot armies price-fixing and shorting the coins that every other fool in cryptoland leaves lying there like it's a fucking bank. This time they screwed up somehow, their gamble didn't pay off, and the vericoin devs are in cahoots with them.
Seriously, forking back a blockchain to cover an exchange's stupidity is a horrible precedent. An honest exchange would take the loss and learn from it. Blockchains are not supposed to be fucking time machines to magically repair the screwups of big players.
Someone please explain to me how what was done here is different than TBTF.
What's TBTF?
Too Big To Fail, AKA USA banks circa 2008.
Edit: AKA, the most centralized you can get.
Ah thanks. I'm not sure it's quite the same though.
The exchange model is very similar to the casino model - the house takes its cut, so with plenty of customers, the house makes good money, they don't need to cheat.
They always cheat.Why? Because they are greedy fucks and because they can.
Anyone can see the rampant bot activity on Mintpal just by looking at the order books for a few minutes. Mintpal thus have to admit to having a 'closed beta' trading API - good luck getting access to it without paying them a small fortune.
Basic reason suggests that the biggest users of this 'closed beta' trading API are Mintpal themselves. Since they have mountains of coins that idiots leave on their exchange, it becomes trivially easy for them to bot coin prices up, down or sideways as it suits them, and to long and short at will with other peoples money.
Mostly this works, because they are mostly competent and very experienced at this. They make fortunes and we are all none the wiser.
In this case they fucked up somehow, and as they probably either had the vericoin dev by the balls because he'd paid a large sum to get listed on Mintpal in the first place, or he was in on their scheme from the beginning - think for a moment who's providing the funding for all these shitcoin launches that exchanges benefit from the frenzied trading on! - they jointly decided to do the unthinkable and FUCK WITH THE BLOCKCHAIN for their own benefit.
So, not so much 'Too Big To Fail,' more like, 'We Don't Give A Shit, So Fuck You.' (WDGAS,SFU)
