News - A quarter million US$ looted from Bitcoin exchange

[HEXUS]

Bitcoin founder says lax security was “a very serious mistake”.

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[shaithis]

I cannot believe they are even admitting to lax security.....glad I never got into it now (was holding off waiting to see how it panned out) and it's going to put me off any other schemes like it.

[Tpyo]

I'm kind of surprised that Switzerland (or more realistically, some country that would like to be the new Switzerland) hasn't tried to set up its own non-traceable currency with backing.

Something like bullion vault (to buy credits, gold is bought and held in a secure location - it could be currency but it'd have to be a reliable one[ hence me thinking of Switzerland], so gold would be more secure) and are given the credits. The credits can be traded anonymously online/internationally a la bitcoin. The value of the credit is then guaranteed as at any point, the holder of a credit could cash out against the gold/currency held as the marker from when the credit was issued (in reality, this would be selling the credit to a new user. The big difference is, if you are the last person using this currency, it still has worth). Yes the overall flow could be tracked (who bought credits and who cashed them in), though no more than as with bitcoin. Trades with credits only would remain invisible.

as for the 'mining' aspect if required, a distributed computing program could be used. Credits (or the gold/currency to create more new credits)could be bought by companies wishing to borrow processing power based on the otherwise idle time of users computers. These new credits could then be distributed based on the user's contribution to the distributed computing projects (or similar - I'm sure they'd be welcome to new ideas - the point is that the credit-generating task would be doing something of worth itself, and that worth would be directly added to the currency in proportion to the new currency created - hence countering inflation. The link/risk to the price would then be limited to the market value of whatever currency or commodity the virtual currency was secured against).

[Agent]

I cannot believe they are even admitting to lax security.....glad I never got into it now (was holding off waiting to see how it panned out) and it's going to put me off any other schemes like it.

Not much point hiding it once you've been compromised I guess.

Bitcoin itself is awesome, it's the exchanges that are the weak link sadly

[pctech2012]

Seems to be any net currency is doomed

Anyone remember Beenz?

[funke_munke]

I'm kind of surprised that Switzerland (or more realistically, some country that would like to be the new Switzerland) hasn't tried to set up its own non-traceable currency with backing.

I'm sure I read Switzerland has had to hand over it's secret financial records to the Fed or the IMF now? Some large, dodgy body anyway.

I'm sure the exchanges will be strengthened after this. About time too. At least the government isnt forcing us all to pay them for failure.

[pctech2012]

If people dodge taxes that they should pay, a country will end up like Greece eventually.

[Tpyo]

I'm sure I read Switzerland has had to hand over it's secret financial records to the Fed or the IMF now? Some large, dodgy body anyway.

I'm sure the exchanges will be strengthened after this. About time too. At least the government isnt forcing us all to pay them for failure.

Indeed - they had to in order to be blacklisted as a haven for tax evasion. However, all they would hand over is the records of physical transactions (as in, 'real world' money that was converted to or from the virtual currency). Holdings and transactions made entirely in the virtual currency would be anonymous/untraceable in a similar same way to Bitcoin.