On 06/20/11 17:59, Jon Cox wrote:

Yes, the value of Bitcoins crashed from $17.50 down to $ 0.01 in the span of about 5 minutes yesterday, and though people were allowed to buy at $0.01, they probably won't be able to cash out, because Bitcoin just announced a rollback.

A rather timely illustration, wouldn't you say? ;)

That wasn't Bitcoin itself, just mtgox, the biggest exchange. Somebody hacked an account and sold a heap of bitcoins at a negligble price, so the exchange froze itself before the USD were actually cashed out and is resetting to the state before the exploit... There's been a few bitcoin heists, down to the usual computer security issues; bitcoin itself has, interestingly, remained unbroken, which bodes well for its underlying security. The mtgox heist could have happened just as well with any online banking system; it's just that the bitcoin economy rather new, so there's lots of little bit players suddenly finding themselves transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars without having the expertise or capital to build the kinds of security that banks do... ABS -- Alaric Snell-Pym http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE