Early Bitcoin Adopters Facing Extortion Threats 106
An anonymous reader writes Wired recounts the story of Hal Finney, one of the very first adopters of Bitcoin. Finney died earlier this year after a long fight with Lou Gehrig's disease. But for months before his death, he was a victim of constant harassment from somebody trying to extort his Bitcoins. He and his family faced a variety of threats, and had a SWAT team called on their residence. And it turns out Finney is not alone — other early adopters are being targeted with similar threats. "That's when someone using the names Nitrous and Savaged hacked into [early adopter Roger Ver's] email accounts and demanded that he cough up 37 bitcoins—about $20,000 at the time—in order to prevent his private information from being published online. Ver refused, and the hacker apparently backed off after Ver put a 37 bitcoin bounty on his head. Ver, who was himself sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for illegally shipping explosive across state lines, believes that Savaged is not only the same person who swatted Hal Finney, but also the person who gained access to Satoshi Nakamoto's email account earlier this year."
Told you so (Score:1, Insightful)
Unregulated currency FTW
Re:Told you so (Score:4, Insightful)
Bitcoin's not unregulated. Its regulations are simply enforced by technical rather than legal means. Or are you perhaps confusing currency regulations with regulations against extortion?
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DRM is enforced by 'technical' means; Bitcoin is enforced by mathematical means.
Would that be "butt-coin"? (Score:2)
> Your ass
Paying with your ass... would that be "butt-coin"?
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The only currency more corrupt, sleazy, and propped-up-by-bullshit more than Bitcoin is the U.S. Dollar.
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Really? US dollar? Swiss Franc is much more stable. Euro, is very spendable, mostly stable. Petro-Euro could easily replace Petro-Dollar (but ask Saddam Hussien how that turned out).
US Dollar is not worth its weight in paper.
China holds vast amount of US Dollars and the moment they decide to sell some or all of these, the currency will start to look like the Zimbabwe Dollar.
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Euro, is very spendable, mostly stable.
Then you've never watched it's 25%+ fluctuations up and down over the last 10 years.
Re:Told you so (Score:4, Insightful)
Euro, is very spendable, mostly stable.
Then you've never watched it's 25%+ fluctuations up and down over the last 10 years.
You can't measure the stability of a currency just by comparing it to your own currency. If we followed that line of reasoning, the only stable currency to you would be one which is pegged to the US Dollar. The price of one Euro fluctuates if you measure it in Dollars, yes, but that does not speak against the stability of the Euro more than it does against the stability of the Dollar.
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Similar then to the huge fluctuations of the dollar to the GBP then?
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Right, I see what you did there...
I am Mexican. We have been told the peso has been mostly stable for almost two decades... Well, lets say, a decade and a half. When Vicente Fox was appointed president (2000), one dollar was at about MX$10, and it has very slowly slided. This year started with the dollar at ~MX$13. (Our last couple of months notwithstanding, as we are now at about 15). You can look at the last 10 years' graph [xe.com]
However, when the Euro started circulating (2002), one Euro was at about 7 pesos.
Euro debuted at parity with dollar (Score:2)
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Nope. The peso floats freely; twice in the last five years there has been economic unstability, and the central bank "intervened" by selling a chunk of its reserves in order to keep the peso from falling further. It has worked: In the 2008-2010 period (remember, global economic recession), stable exchange levels jumped from 10 to 12, but we did at some point reach (for just a couple of days) 16, then went back to 12. And a similar thing seems to be happening now, as the dollar jumped from ~12.50 to ~15, and
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Oh - Sorry, I jumped to answering. You did say unoficiallyUS and Mexico work to keep the rates stable.
That's exactly true. It's not that the peso is artificially held at a fixed per-dollar level (as it happened in the past), but that it is kept in a relatively stable value through "real" action.
But, of course, this is because the USA is not only Mexico's closest economic partner but its neighbour country. But anyway, the reason I sent here my original comment is that in the 2002-2014 period, the Euro went t
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my original comment is that in the 2002-2014 period, the Euro went to over double of its original value against the US Dollar, then down a bit.
And how did the Euro perform against the AUD and GBP? Comparing two things doesn't prove one is more stable than the other. The USD fell against the Euro, then rose. It's the USD that's unstable. Compare them to the price of commodities.
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Petro-Euro could easily replace Petro-Dollar (but ask Saddam Hussien how that turned out).
Only when the EU decides to try its hand at keeping the Middle East stable. You might wish to keep the Brits (and French) out of it though, I hear they like to draw borders with no regards to ethic or tribal history. :)
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The only reason CHF is stable is because there are so many Europeans who want to get our of EUR denominated assets that the SNB needs to actively intervene to defend its currency. Neither capital flight (from the Euro) nor currency manipulation (from the CHF) is a particularly enviable position to be in. And Petro-Euro will replace Petro-Dollar when CDG ensures free transit around the Persian Gulf instead of the Fifth Fleet.
Lastly, a weaker US dollar (due to sales from China) would make foreign goods mor
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According to Wikipedia, a dollar bill weights around 1g [wikipedia.org]. According to Alibaba, a ton of offset printing paper costs around $600 per ton [alibaba.com]. That means paper costs around 0.06 cents per gram, or put another way, a dollar bill is about 16 times its weight in paper.
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Or 1600 times its weight in paper, if you remember that a cent is not a dollar :p
China owns 8% of US debt. Just 8% (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? US dollar?
Absolutely.
Swiss Franc is much more stable.
The Swiss Franc is the currency of a relatively small country with a GDP around $350 billion. That is not big enough to protect itself against heavy currency speculation and certainly isn't big enough to be as safe as the dollar, yuan or euro. The Swiss economy is increasingly dependent on foreign investment and that should be worrisome if you think it is some sort of safe haven.
Euro, is very spendable, mostly stable
The Euro may not even exist in 10 years and it is anything but stable. Have you paid NO attention to the currency crises in Europe for the last 5 years?
US Dollar is not worth its weight in paper.
Really? Because the people who actually put their money where their mouth is completely disagree [wikipedia.org] with you. If the dollar wasn't considered safe then interest rates should be going through the roof. Instead interest rates are near all time lows meaning that investors consider the dollar to be among the safest places to invest.
China holds vast amount of US Dollars and the moment they decide to sell some or all of these, the currency will start to look like the Zimbabwe Dollar.
Who do you think China is going to sell them to? Seriously, who? The answer is no one. There isn't another buyer that can buy or wants to buy $1 Trillion in US debt. China owns that US debt so that they can keep their currency cheap and thereby support their export driven economy. The moment they sell a substantial portion of their US debt holdings, the yuan will appreciate in value and every single export from China will immediately become more expensive overseas. There is NOTHING China can do to dump their US debt holdings that will not hurt China worse than it will hurt the US. China only holds about 8% [about.com] of US debt. It's a nice sound bite but the notion that they somehow now "own" the US is absurd to anyone who isn't clueless.
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In the history of bad IT ideas, bitcoin is near the top of the list. The nerd factor is the only thing going for it.
I don't think that's true. It's an incomplete, awful implementation with a community made of a bunch of sometime technically-adept, usually socially-inept, often blinded by greed fanatics.
That doesn't mean the idea of a trustless distributed ledger isn't completely useless, just that none of the current implementations are ever going to be successful in the long term. They've done pretty well at transferring money from 'little people' to Chinese mining operations and scammers around the world, though. Th
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And... yeah, read that the way I meant it, and not with the error in the second paragraph that totally reversed my intended meaning. Damnit.
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I think that a government-issued and controlled crypto-currency would be much better. The central issuer would lose control when they "spend" it.
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How do you avoid essentially useless computation with a trustless distributed ledger? If it's computationally easy to verify the ledger, it's computationally easy to verify a fake, and if not many computrons are spent on verification it's easy to outspend the honest folks.
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If the US really wanted to take down bitcoin, they should build $10B of mining gear. Then push through piles of fraudul
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Oh, so the US Government can be trusted to not fuck up a monetary system? I mean, it's worked so well with USD, why wouldn't it work with another version of it?
You are the reason there is a problem. You don't even understand what the problem is, so how can you be expected to form an viable opinion on it?
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You do realize that it takes much more energy to create and distribute the US dollar than it does to create and distribute bitcoins, right? So if Bitcoin is anti-environment, then the US Dollar is super-anti-I-fucking-hate-all-living-things environment.
So why are you using USD, since that is so anti-environment?
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I buy and earn in USD, but haven't seen paper money in 7 years, aside from a $2 bill I keep around as a curiosity. So your assertion that paper (or coin) is required for the USD to be useful is provably false.
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Still can't believe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still can't believe (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Still can't believe (Score:5, Insightful)
That assumes they even are "departments". Here in MA swat teams are private companies, which seems to have gone unnoticed until someone tried to file FOIA requests for information about how often they are deployed; and they refused to answer.
Because of course, knowing how often and why they are deployed is only reporting to the public on exactly what we pay them for, its not something the public has any right to know or anything.
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What happens when you file a FOIA against the police/911 office that dispatched them?
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It's still not up to the private company to tell you that. In fact, disclosing those details might be a violation of their contract with their employer.
Ask the public office that hires and pays the team how often they are deployed and what for.
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.... Here in MA swat teams are private companies, ...
Not gone un-noticed. I know about it clear down in Maryland. So do others. Last I knew they did that so they wouldn't have to answer FOIA requests. You know, try to hide their stupidity. I thought there was legislation to remove their ability to do that. MA is way out of my zone to care about, other than it could spread. Look into it and get it outlawed if that's not already under way. Understand that your life if you live in MA may depend on it. Less Rambo, more Sheriff Taylor.
The end point to this po
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Because if someone calls in and they don't break your house and kill your dogs, someone will sue them?
Whereas if they follow procedure, heed the call, break your house and kill your dogs, they're in the clear.
Doing this creates wealth (jobs).
It's Capitalism 101.
Captcha: misuses
Re:Still can't believe (Score:5, Informative)
Suing the police for not responding to actual violent crimes has been tried. The courts ruled [wikipedia.org] that the police have no obligation.
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While the general snark in this comment is evident, I have to protest about conflating private ownership of the means of production with government agencies wasting money doing useless tasks (to say nothing of the risks associated with it).
Perhaps the inability to differentiate these two is actually something that's common these days, though, which would explain a lot about modern discourse on the topic -- likewise the conflation of "jobs" and "wealth" (the former being a means to an
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It applies to lots of things. In this instance here someone filed a fake claim of child abuse.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/met... [bostonglobe.com]
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Re:Still can't believe (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it's the dumb public who's at fault. Except... for some strange reason the police don't behave this way in, say, Nordic countries, despite them being openly and officially huge-government welfare nanny states straight from Ayn Rand's worst nightmares. So perhaps, just perhaps, the problem behind the police acting like an occupying force is not the public but the police themselves?
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Oddly enough yes. Don't believe me, check with the family court system and see the lopsided numbers and seemingly infinite stories of how bad a deal a dad gets.
But with the oppression of men being done by men, not women, shouldn't more of the anger and frustration be directed at men, not women? Because it isn't the women doing the oppression, it is just you disagreeing with your fellow men in power about how things should be. Like many other issues. So if you really want change it might be more productive to engage politically based on that premise, not on fighting "feminists".
Fireworks (Score:5, Informative)
http://dailyanarchist.com/2012... [dailyanarchist.com]
http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroo... [cpsc.gov]
He was charged for selling agricultural fireworks (to scare away pests) on ebay. Turns out that the manufacturer was making them too powerful and/or not following regulations that limit their sale to farmers, ranchers, and growers.
He was also the only person prosecuted over the incident, despite the same fireworks being sold all over, including Cabelas. (Ken Shearer is mentioned in the CPSC press release, but his case is unrelated.)
No "Bounty On His Head": Timmy Fails Again (Score:1, Insightful)
Ver refused, and the hacker apparently backed off after Ver put a 37 bitcoin bounty on his head.
From TFA: "Then Ver responded with a link to a Facebook post offering that 37-bitcoin bounty for information leading to Nitrous’s arrest, and Nitrous immediately backed down. To be clear, Ver didn’t put a bounty on Nitrous’s head. He merely said he’ll pay out the money when Nitrous is arrested for hacking his accounts."
Re:"Bounty On His Head": I Fail Again (Score:1)
Whoops! I fail this time.
From TFA: "Ver refused, and the hacker apparently backed off after Ver put a 37 bitcoin bounty on his head."
However, that statement links to this article [wired.com] which states that: "Then Ver responded with a link to a Facebook post offering that 37-bitcoin bounty for information leading to Nitrous’s arrest, and Nitrous immediately backed down. To be clear, Ver didn’t put a bounty on Nitrous’s head. He merely said he’ll pay out the money when Nitrous is arrested for
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Its a perfectly reasonable modern use of the term.
Ten months? (Score:1)
Take a pack of Black Cats camping (Score:5, Insightful)
If you go camping and take a pack of Black Cats with you, you may have just illegally transported explosives. Details matter.
Take a pack of Black Cats camping (Score:1)
I had a cousin convicted and spent time in jail under a "manufacturing explosives" charge for putting drain cleaner & tin foil in a pop bottle. Our "justice" system is certifiably insane these days.
An hour or a month? (Score:2)
How much time? If he spent a day in jail and that nipped it in the bud, so he didn't make acetone peroxide without a license, I'm okay with that. If he spent a month, probably meaning nobody bailed him out, that sucks.
damn. Nobody read the law (Score:2)
That sucks. It sounds like nobody on his side read the law he was charged under, probably, because with zero property damage it would be a class C misdemeanor (ticket) in most states. You didn't mention which state, but it sounds like the prosecutor, the defendant, and perhaps failed to read the law.
Federal charges for manufacturing explosives involved in interstate commerce are serious, but I don't think that type of device would qualify as an explosive under federal law, since there is no explosive comp
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The "explosives" in question were firecrackers designed to scare birds sold on ebay...
Cojones (Score:3)
anonymous! (Score:3, Interesting)
If random hackers find you and shake you down, your imagined immunity from FBI is just imaginary, isn't it? Shows without a legal government backing it up and providing for a non-violent conflict resolution options and contract enforcement options, all these "digital anonymous currencies" are just jokes, created by folks unconnected with reality creating castles in the air.
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"Aren't bitcoins supposed to be anonymous?"
No, they aren't. This has been covered many times already.
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They can be, however people keeping their mouths shut is another thing all together.
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He might not have tried to be anonymous, though. No amount of obfuscation or anonymity can stop you from proclaiming who you are.
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BitCoins are not anonymous. Wallets are.
It isn't tough to guard your BitCoin stash from the bad guys:
1: Keep it offline. Buy a cheapie netbook, slap Linux on it, create and do your wallet stuff on that. Make sure to back the wallet up. This can be done in a number of ways.
2: If you have a real stash of BTC, go with a paper wallet. If you want a proper "currency" feeling, go to bitcoinpaperwallet.com, and buy some pieces of paper, seals, bags, and even a Ubuntu live CD with the wallet software on it f
Hmm (Score:1)
but also the person who gained access to Satoshi Nakamoto's email account earlier this year."
Wait... now we know who Satoshi Nakamoto is? Or rather he has an email account.
Bitcoin (Score:1)
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The first rule of bitcoin. Don't talk about bitcoin.
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Anonymous
The creators of bitcoin never claimed that.
and secure. LOL.
That's more or less equivalent to saying "lol RSA 4096 isn't secure because someone can beat you up and force you to reveal the password lol". Bitcoin is secure.
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Bitcoin is precisely as secure as the computer on which the wallet is stored. No more, no less.