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Topic: Freedom and Responsibility - or: why you FAILED if you lost money in MBC crash - page 3. (Read 9403 times)

smoothie

legendary

Activity: 2492

Merit: 1473

LEALANA Bitcoin Grim Reaper

Quote from: neofutur on August 02, 2011, 02:56:21 AM

Quote from: wumpus on August 02, 2011, 12:41:34 AM

Storing your wallet in a safe way (both against theft and loss) is not exactly easy nor user friendly at the moment. Even for the tech-savy it's hard. Please contribute to solving this problem instead of kicking dead horses...

I can provide backup of your wallet on 3 different dedicated server, hosted in 3 different datacenters ( wether you are an individual or an exchange ) .
For trust concerns you can check my gpg Wot and my otc ratings

more on my bitcoin services :
http://bitcointalk.org/?topic=1687.0

Seriously stop spamming this sh*t on the mybitcoin threads. We heard you the first time. Oh and put a shirt on please Grin

hawks5999

full member

Activity: 168

Merit: 100

Quote from: makomk on August 02, 2011, 05:35:28 PM

Quote from: lettucebee on August 02, 2011, 02:27:29 PM

Quote from: joepie91 on August 02, 2011, 12:28:54 AM

...remember how hundreds of accounts were cleaned out, all to the same address, and not a single automated red flag regarding fraud was triggered, letting through all the payments? How such an obvious fraudulent transaction went through, and was claimed to have been 'stopped manually', with no real security measures in place?

Can you tell me more about this event? Was it the one posted by "Todd Bethell"?

I'm guessing that joepie91's talking about the mass clearout of mybitcoin accounts where people had used the same password for as their Mt Gox account after the Mt Gox database leak.

Umm.. no. He's talking about MyBitCoin going >poof< and disappearing with everyone's money that was using the "service".

makomk

hero member

Activity: 686

Merit: 564

Quote from: lettucebee on August 02, 2011, 02:27:29 PM

Quote from: joepie91 on August 02, 2011, 12:28:54 AM

Can you tell me more about this event? Was it the one posted by "Todd Bethell"?

I'm guessing that joepie91's talking about the mass clearout of mybitcoin accounts where people had used the same password for as their Mt Gox account after the Mt Gox database leak.

edd

donator

Activity: 1414

Merit: 1002

Quote from: lettucebee on August 02, 2011, 02:27:29 PM

Quote from: joepie91 on August 02, 2011, 12:28:54 AM

Can you tell me more about this event? Was it the one posted by "Todd Bethell"?

I'm curious about this, as well. I don't recall this.

Inaba

legendary

Activity: 1260

Merit: 1000

Quote from: wumpus on August 02, 2011, 01:14:04 AM

His solution "keep it on a local machine" is just as bad advice (at least for most people). What if your hdd crashes? Do you make backups? After every send? Are they stored safe enough or can other people find it there? Do you encrypt it? What if you lose the key?

And so on. This is a hard problem.

Most solutions that work against loss do not work against theft, and vice verse.

This is just wrong, wrong and wrong some more.

You only really need one to two backups. Both encrypted with a secure password. One backup can be stored on site and one backup should be stored off site. As long as you use common sense in choosing your password (passphrase) for encryption and use a suitable encryption mechanism; I suggest Truecrypt or 7zip. You are adequately protected from everything but a major disaster of proportions that will make Bitcoin the least of your worries. As long as it's adequately encrypted, you do not have to worry about it being stolen.

You do not need to make a backup after every send, that is just ludicrous. Maybe every 75 or 100 sends or perhaps once a week at most unless you are really active. Regardless, it's not the sends you are concerned with but the receives. It's the other people job that you are sending to to back up their wallets to protect those transactions.

lettucebee

sr. member

Activity: 462

Merit: 250

Quote from: joepie91 on August 02, 2011, 12:28:54 AM

Can you tell me more about this event? Was it the one posted by "Todd Bethell"?

giantdragon

legendary

Activity: 1582

Merit: 1002

Using e-wallet runned by untrusted individual who even doesn't provide his real name is totally stupid. Who lost money here could only blame himself.

cypherdoc

legendary

Activity: 1764

Merit: 1002

Quote from: kiba on August 02, 2011, 07:13:17 AM

It seems that being an early adopter really is brutal and harsh.

LOL. and we have a bunch of whiners here on the forum always complaining about how early adopters assumed NO RISK.

kiba

legendary

Activity: 980

Merit: 1020

It seems that being an early adopter really is brutal and harsh.

jackjack

legendary

Activity: 1176

Merit: 1280

May Bitcoin be touched by his Noodly Appendage

Quote from: tvbcof on August 02, 2011, 12:50:34 AM

+1 for joespie91 AND +1 for John Smith. I feel that they both make some good points.

I think there are a whole lot of possible tests that each one of us would fail and there is a realistic possibility of any number of them coming to pass.

Gabi

legendary

Activity: 1148

Merit: 1008

If you want to walk on water, get out of the boat

Quote from: wumpus on August 02, 2011, 12:41:34 AM

So... now you're gloating that lots of people lost their coins and you still have them? Do you feel proud? Do you feel lucky? Should we be laughing if you fail the next "test"?

It's already bad enough, there is no need for a zillion topics rubbing it in to them. It has already happened, and the people involved are obviously aware that they made a mistake.

There is no need for rude and unfriendly comments like yours. Can we at least pretend to keep the community a nice place?

Storing your wallet in a safe way (both against theft and loss) is not exactly easy nor user friendly at the moment. Even for the tech-savy it's hard. Please contribute to solving this problem instead of kicking dead horses...

So false.

People who made this mistake made it for some reasons and these reasons are WHY they probably will make again that mistakes again and again.

Something bad happened, and? We must shut up about it and ignore and forget it?

Or maybe we should speak about it and analyze what went wrong and why people lost money? I think the latter is the better way to face the problem.

We have people who sent their money to an unknown guy and guess what? They lost everything. First time it happens? No, not in bitcoin and not in the world!

This remind me EVE Online and the epic IPO/investment/shares scam. People "invest" their ingame money in these things cause omg it give me like 5% interests each month omg. And guess what? Every some months one of them come out to be a scam. Huge lossess happened, one scam stole enouff ingame money to make like 170000$. And yet everytime you go read the forum another scam just happened and so on again and again

People KEEP repeating their mistakes.

neofutur

full member

Activity: 146

Merit: 100

Quote from: wumpus on August 02, 2011, 12:41:34 AM

hugolp

legendary

Activity: 1148

Merit: 1001

Radix-The Decentralized Finance Protocol

Quote from: wumpus on August 02, 2011, 12:41:34 AM

Honestly, while he has been harsh the MyBitcoin debacle was something easily predictable. There were several threads in the forums warning about the bad service. Specially about not answering emails. Why would you keep a big part of your bitcoins in a place that does not even answer emails? I dont get it.

People need to understand Bitcoin is not reversable, therefore you need to secure them. Bitcoin has a lot of advantages, non-inflationary (when the first phase is done), decentralized, pseudo-anonymous and not reversable (which is an advantage for a lot of things). But in exchange it has its drawbacks, the main one that you really need to secure them. I try not to leave too much time bitcoins at a third party. I dont even have more than 50 bitcoins in the linux machine I have connected to the Internet all the time. The rest of my bitcoins are offline.

Its not that hard to secure your bitcoins.

tvbcof

legendary

Activity: 4690

Merit: 1276

Quote from: N12 on August 02, 2011, 01:27:00 AM

...

PS: I store considerable funds at MtGox, but they have real identities who I trust attached to them, and I feel comfortable with the security measure in form of a Yubikey.

The (potential) trouble is that you cannot get blood from a turnip. The exchanges are one screw-up away from being insolvent, and your Yubikey is only partial protection against one form of possible problem. Should any one of a number of possible problems happen it will not matter what the disposition of the operators might be.

For my part, if I have excess funds in the form of BTC, I take them home ASAP. And put them in encrypted storage wallets with backups and all that jazz. If/when I want to sell, I'll crack some of the savings wallets open and transfer them right back. I limit what cash I store with the exchange (Tradhill primarily in my case) to a realistic minimum.

If an exchange wants to hold my BTC, they can pay me interest. In fact I would be happy to let them hold a portion of my stash to perform futures operations and what-not...but I want a cut of the action. And at this point none of them are even close to meeting my criteria for confidence in this part of the game.

But, of course, do as you see best. These are just the ways I do things.

hawks5999

full member

Activity: 168

Merit: 100

Quote from: N12 on August 02, 2011, 01:27:00 AM

Thanks for this thread

Agreed. If it wasn't for this thread I wouldn't have known I was so quotable as to be part of a sig file.

Like my sig quote(s)? 1Pt1bHvfu9knJfRFMVKLSCEhkhzwhhf3Av

Cheesy

joepie91

sr. member

Activity: 294

Merit: 250

Quote from: wumpus on August 02, 2011, 01:24:40 AM

Quote from: joepie91 on August 02, 2011, 01:18:35 AM

That is what (encrypted) backups are for, something I explain to everyone who cares enough. And some of those who don't.

Encrypted backups work against loss (as long as you don't lose the key), but not hacking the PC and stealing the coins when in memory.

And how does this in any way describe a scenario that could not happen to a proven insecure service again?

Quote from: joepie91 on August 02, 2011, 01:18:35 AM

Quote

Do you make backups? After every send?

As far as I am aware you need to make a backup 'every 100 addresses' because the Bitcoin client pregenerates 100 bitcoin addresses and always makes sure there are 100 in reserve. This is perfectly feasible, especially for a beginning user who doesn't use it a lot yet.

That's extremely confusing to a new user. If you forget it, and have done 101 sends, you might have lost everything.

Quote from: smoothie on August 02, 2011, 01:24:21 AM

AGREED! I too believe people need to be smart about their investments and if they are not smart enough to find someone they trust to be smart enough for them to secure their investment.

If you only hoard it's easy.

But the idea of bitcoin is not to be an investment. It is to send and receive payments. If you are actively using your coins (like if you have a store) it is very hard to keep all the backups up to date, bother with decrypting/encrypting all the time, mounting volumes, and so on.

Security vs. Convenience.

N12

donator

Activity: 1610

Merit: 1010

Thanks for this thread, I completely agree with you. Storing Bitcoins with a third party is not storing Bitcoins. It’s only trusting that the third party stores them for you.

"Hey, have you heard of this new p2p currency? Noone can seize any funds or revert transactions!
You should buy some and if you’re too lazy to actually handle them, just store them on a shady e-wallet site."

Quote from: wumpus on August 02, 2011, 12:41:34 AM

I think it would have been clever to ask/pay someone to create an actually secure wallet for them, or even put up some bounties for easier solutions or whatever. We are not talking about negligible sums here, I have heard a figure of 25k BTC on NPR with regard to what Bruce Wagner had stored their.

PS: I store considerable funds at MtGox, but they have real identities who I trust attached to them, and I feel comfortable with the security measure in form of a Yubikey.

wumpus

hero member

Activity: 812

Merit: 1022

No Maps for These Territories

Quote from: joepie91 on August 02, 2011, 01:18:35 AM

That is what (encrypted) backups are for, something I explain to everyone who cares enough. And some of those who don't.

Encrypted backups work against loss (as long as you don't lose the key), but not hacking the PC and stealing the coins when in memory.

Quote from: joepie91 on August 02, 2011, 01:18:35 AM

Quote

Do you make backups? After every send?

That's extremely confusing to a new user. If you forget it, and have done 101 sends, you might have lost everything.

Quote from: smoothie on August 02, 2011, 01:24:21 AM

AGREED! I too believe people need to be smart about their investments and if they are not smart enough to find someone they trust to be smart enough for them to secure their investment.

smoothie

legendary

Activity: 2492

Merit: 1473

LEALANA Bitcoin Grim Reaper

Quote from: wumpus on August 02, 2011, 01:14:04 AM

Quote from: smoothie on August 02, 2011, 01:03:22 AM

I beg to differ based on the first amendment. He can say whatever he chooses and I suggest you reread his first sentence.

My point is that it is better to be constructive.

His solution "keep it on a local machine" is just as bad advice (at least for most people). What if your hdd crashes? Do you make backups? After every send? Are they stored safe enough or can other people find it there? Do you encrypt it? What if you lose the key?

And so on. This is a hard problem.

Most solutions that work against loss do not work against theft, and vice verse.

To prevent losing your wallet you want to mirror and distribute it to as many places as possible. However, to keep it from being stolen/hacked you want to put it only in one place and heavily encrypt it.

AGREED! I too believe people need to be smart about their investments and if they are not smart enough to find someone they trust to be smart enough for them to secure their investment.

geek-trader

sr. member

Activity: 294

Merit: 250

Quote from: wumpus on August 02, 2011, 01:14:04 AM

Quote from: smoothie on August 02, 2011, 01:03:22 AM

I beg to differ based on the first amendment. He can say whatever he chooses and I suggest you reread his first sentence.

Yes I made backups. I have a Mac and I backup via TimeMachine every few days.

Plus

I have my wallet.dat encrypted via Truecrypt and the resulting file copied to several places, including burnt CDs.

What boggles my mind is that anyone with more that 10 BTC doen't also do this.

Are you idiots?