On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 7:37 PM, Razer <g2s@riseup.net> wrote:

Whoah! Bankers and investment vultures HEART mythical currency! Who knew?

Depends on *which* currency you mean. Bitcoin - Yes they can make all the usual services money off it from the stupid. But control is the other huge half of their traditional equation, and they'll have about as much control over p2p wallets and transactions as they have over crypto... so far none, except for fud, threats, contempt. TheirCoin - They'll have a hard time getting all themselves banksters, feds, big business / retail / employers / compute / etc to all sit down at the same table to hash it out... globally. Too many of them will want it for themselves for that to work. Which will make them like all the rest... bunch of failed coins that nobody really uses or cares about. Then there's the huge lead bitcoin and its worldwide ethos has that they'd have to compete with. ie: Most of these are fundamentally the same thing, tweaked param / algo / marketing / private forks of bitcoin that failed or have no real purpose that bitcoin doesn't or won't ever meet... http://coinmarketcap.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies Though some are interesting for what they may solve, are integrated with, or new purpose (again, that bitcoin doesn't cover) ... blockchain privacy - dash, monero, zcash / zclassic outcomes - augur programmable - ethereum storage / etc - maidsafe / etc and so on if you can link to or assemble such a useful list? https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5kq767/if_your_government_thinks_i... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-27/bitcoin-surges-20-week-chinese-volu... https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5krljj/it_looks_like_kim_dotcom_is...

On Dec 29, 2016, at 4:18 AM, Georgi Guninski <guninski@guninski.com> wrote:

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On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 06:00:13PM -0500, grarpamp wrote: # Banking On Bitcoin - Gravitas Ventures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmxqlSevtkQ ...snip...

Are there stats about bitcoin fraud vs traditional financial fraud? Decentralization complicates things. Especially about fraud done by malware.

I don't have stats but i know that fucking worm PhotoMiner (a monero miner propagated through FTP amongst other methods) is endemic... There are a lot of dumb shits mining monero without knowing it. I still see it banging on the door of FTP server trying to upload itself (and failing and getting blocked) from at least a few hosts every day.

On Dec 29, 2016, at 4:45 AM, Georgi Guninski <guninski@guninski.com> wrote:

On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 04:32:58AM -0500, John Newman wrote:

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Are there stats about bitcoin fraud vs traditional financial fraud? Decentralization complicates things. Especially about fraud done by malware.

I don't have stats but i know that fucking worm PhotoMiner (a monero miner propagated through FTP amongst other methods) is endemic... There are a lot of dumb shits mining monero without knowing it.

I still see it banging on the door of FTP server trying to upload itself (and failing and getting blocked) from at least a few hosts every day.

Mining bitcoins without knowing it is essentially non-issue compared to stealing the bitcoin wallet or abusing some subtle ``feature" of Bitcoin.

Sure, wallet theft is more akin to a heist and could net massive gains if you pick your target well. Is there any malware that actively looks for and steals wallets? I don't know, probably. Still, with a big enough bot net doing your mining and paying for the wattage i imagine it adds up. I wouldn't mind owning one :) It seems bitcoin is pretty resilient to other attacks on subtle features... although i'm not that well versed in the subject.

On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 04:52:45PM +0200, Georgi Guninski wrote:

On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 06:41:14AM -0500, John Newman wrote:

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Sure, wallet theft is more akin to a heist and could net massive gains if you pick your target well. Is there any malware that actively looks for and steals wallets? I don't know, probably.

searching the web for

bitcoin stealing malware

returns a lot of results, some are from 2014.

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Still, with a big enough bot net doing your mining and paying for the wattage i imagine it adds up. I wouldn't mind owning one :)

i am not sure mining on a botnet is the best way to profit from it. AFAIK, conventional CPUs are not efficient for mining, far worse from ASIC/FPGA?? or good video cards. probably the Internet Of Things will change this, allowing to install few ASIC miners to the rooted box.

Yeah it seems there is lots of both kinds, and other kinds too. An interesting summary: http://bravenewcoin.com/news/bitcoin-stealing-malware-evolves-again/ "A fourth type of bitcoin-thieving malware was recently created. This new variety hijacks the infected device's Windows clipboard, and replaces bitcoin addresses as they're copy and pasted. Trojan.Coinbitclip is the first instance of this new type of attack, discovered by Symantec on Feb 2nd. It was designed to watch for a bitcoin address copied using the clipboard, and replaces it with one of it's own, bypassing any protection from multi-signature and hardware wallets. While clipboard hijacking is not a new concept, this is the first time it has been found replacing bitcoin addresses." But yes of course you're right general purpose CPUs do not mine nearly as well as machines with dedicated mining ASICs. Stuff like the people in Venezuela use (where power is free, but everything else is unobtainable...).

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It seems bitcoin is pretty resilient to other attacks on subtle features... although i'm not that well versed in the subject.

i am not familiar with bitcoin, but AFAIK it is something like "advanced socialism" by design. "consensus" of something like 50+% allows fucking up with coins and transactions and there already was a controversy about a "corporation of miners" abusing this unless i am mistaken.

-- John