Topic: Bitstamp will easily recover from this hack - page 3. (Read 4103 times)

I guess a potential vision of what Bitstamp is like 6 months down the road is vircurex.com  


... diehards and tumbleweeds...


They are supposedly paying back lost funds from fees, but they've done absolutely nothing to promote or improve the place to be an attractive exchange in the now, so there's very little action and very little fees to refund from.

I think a lot of you are overly optimistic and downplaying this.

5 million dollars is a huge amount to cover out of pocket unless they were making insane amounts of yearly revenue off fees.

I've seen this play out one too many times in the past.

I hate to think it, but I'm anticipating another 'we're investigating' excuse for a few more weeks or possibly even months while they halt withdrawls and lead customers on.  When in fact it's an inside job and they know damn well they're just buying time.

As stated before, they know everyone will be in a rush to withdraw their funds, and their trade volume will go significantly down as they lose customers. 

TLDR: 

-Current customers panic and want to pull out funds immediately
-Bitstamp issues BS excuses saying their still investigating...keep halting withdrawls for months trying to buy time
-Lose significant trade volume and new customers, resulting in very little fees to pay back any losses
-Issue a 'we're insolvent' message a month or two down the road
-Everyone losses their shit...CEO moves to the bahamas

New exchange launched.  Repeat cycle.

A lot of people are saying that this is the end of Bitstamp. That they've been goxed and that any bitcoins held on the site are now gone. This isn't true. Bitstamp WILL easily recover from this hack. It sucks that this happened, but this isn't really a huge disaster and it should by no means affect the survivability of the company.

On the 5th of January, Bitstamp lost 18,000 BTC from a 200,000 BTC reserve. That's about 9% of the total reserve.

Percentage-wise, this is very similar to the hack that Poloniex suffered in 2014. It lost 12% of its bitcoins due to a technical glitch which was exploited by a hacker. That exchange was able to recover its reserves in just mere months. It has enjoyed a spotless security record since then.

In August 2014, Bter also lost 50 million NXT worth about $1.6 million due to a hacker. After a while, they were eventually able to recover 42 million NXT making their net loss 8 million NXT and a couple hundred BTC which they sold to the hacker for bargain prices in exchange for the return of the bulk of the stolen NXT. Today, they're still operating perfectly fine.

Bitstamp has had $10 million injected into it from venture capitalist/hedge fund firm Pantera. So as a last resort, they could use this money to refund its customers. Bitstamp earns millions of dollars every year from trading fees. The majority of their coins are held in cold storage. Mike Hearn, a trusted Bitcoin dev audited their BTC reserves several months ago and confirmed that everything looked OK. The fact that only 9 percent of all funds were stolen means that the security benefits of separating hot and cold wallets is working. Services like MyBitcoin, inputs.io, and Mt. Gox that failed to properly separate the two have seen the majority of their funds disappear. From the look of this hacking incident, it is clear that Bitstamp is not making the same mistake.

TL:DR; Your deposits are safe. There is no need to worry.

I doubt they were making anywhere near the 19k BTC to cover the loss.
Its not a big problem there are other exchanges and more will be coming up. Unlike Gox which at some point held 80% of al the trades, Bitstamp was another exchange.

I hope what is more important is that after the incident at least they know where the loopholes are and have taken the measures to upgrade their security. Also, what I'm interested is how the coins get lost to the attacker? SQL injection, I'm not sure... but certainly it's not that easy to get hacked in the first place.

possible. most multi-million dollar heists in history are inside jobs.  i'm not saying the bitstamp hack is, but it is something to consider and think about.

edit:  i'm pretty sure law enforcement officers are investigating bitstamp employees too.

after such incidents the price will go down again and again and confidence too in btc world..that's a pity..

after such incidents the price will go down again and again and confidence too in btc world..that's a pity..

Bitstamp hack was an inside job, same as Mt gox

Everyone is way too optimistic, I don't think they will even re-launch

That is what I would like an answer to. There should be no directly linked reason to the btc hack that involves USD/fiat wires being halted.
Another big red flag.

Why did Stamp shut down all fiat withdrawals, if this was just a "bitcoin hack"?   

question is: will they be able to survive a withdraw run after they open? And will people keep trading on Stamp, so they can get profits to pay the losses?

Before the hack they had around 100% of reserves, now they have only about 90%. If they are not hiding other losses