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Bitcoin Plunges Into Bear Market
UPDATE: BTC has rallied 26% off its lows in the last 55 minutes - with extreme volumes

From it's gold-matching highs at $1242 on Thursday night, the price of Bitcoin has collapsed over $400 (32%) to $840 on heavy volume. Of course, this is only a one-week low for the exuberant digital currency but still a significant plunge (as its smaller brethren Litecoin has collapsed 51% from its highs). Interestingly, this drops the price of Bitcoin in USD below the 'arb'-based price of Bitcoin in China ($965). It seems, all coincidence aside, that the BIS infamous plunge-protection-team has been re-trained...
and as BTC collapsed, Gold rallied...
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At least unlike the gold/silver COMEX systme, each trade is fully allocated.
Mon Dieu!
It is all over! My hopes... my dreams.... shattered!
Nope. No bubble here.
I agree. No bubble, just real trading and real profit taking in the wild virtual west.
Oh that's some training, peddle to metal with the stage coach over the cliff.
>>>>> More Brown : fonestar's undies right now
>>>>> More Brown : Obama's undies when teleprompter crashes
As the saying goes, if you can't take the heat use a better thermal cpu compound.
I'm a bitcoiner and even I saw this bubble from ten blocks away. It's not done popping yet, and when it is it won't recover for a while. Then: cheap coins :D
I miss cheap coins!
Good Call: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R07g__bsYL8
Again: What matters is NOT the price.
What matters is that it bypasses the cartel.
Hello???
you mean the Cuban bankers??
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2513261/Tel-Avivs-luxurious-Meie...
imagine a street named after the fuckin Rothschilds
"hey Joe, its at the corner of Cartel and Rothschilds''
One day people will wake up and recognise the difference between physical reality and virtual make-believe.
Until then, those who are capable of resisting the mass flow of stupidity should treat money in the same manner as what people [with a lot more common sense] did prior to WWII, and that of course includes physical Gold and Silver.
People living back then would laugh at the Bitcoin Flim-Flam, but in the same breath warn you to hold physical and wait and be patient.
TSP
"If I had a Bitcoin it'd bounce back just like Trayvon..."
-Obie, addressing the Annual Mayberry Barber's Convention
I’m not so sure about those things..
I poured a little acid on my computer and I detected base metal under a veneer of genuine paint.
I hear it's more fun to drop a little acid than it is to pour it on your computer.
Amazing. My little toy account is down about 5% today, while BTC is down about 15%. Meanwhile, I now have more BTC.
Damn, I missed my chance to invest my life savings and BTFATH BTC.
Failed binary argument #1253.
Decided to throw $100 down this week and pick a horse, bought into some Quark Coin and it's up 700%. Bitcoin and Litecoin are way to bubbly media hyped right now but Quarkcoin has the potential to hit $1-$5 and stay there not to mention it's encryption and transaction times puts bit coin to shame. It is also dispersed much more evenly and no one party has a major stake in it, it was mined by geeks and fanatics (no mining guilds, not mined by the developers) then dumped on the open market months ago.
It truly is a second generation crypto currency that is well dispersed, if you have some bitcoin head over to www.cryptsy.com and pick some up. If you want to support and become a part of the Quark community head over here:
http://quark.freeforums.net/
Have you attempted to withdraw as of yet?
I am a little uneasy of your suggestion due to several comments made here: https://cryptsy.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/43596
Had the same, but you can withdraw if you persevere...
I think cryptsy just had a hissy fit with every btc/LTC owner wanting to get on there and diversifgy....
I recently loaded up with a broad spread of the top 10 crypto-currencies by marketcap (as seen here on coinmarketcap.com) ranging from megacoin (best wallet, easy to mine), quarkcoin (being pumped by keiser), freicoin, worldcoin, primecoin etc.
Most are up a few 100% this last week.
Which I enjoyed.
Cheers!
"Damn, I missed my chance to invest my life savings and BTFATH BTC."
You will have another chance. BTW I thought Bitcoin had "collapsed" again? But MtGox is telling me $1019 USD?
Please stop scaring me. I have a tendency to dump everything I own when I get scared.
You're a weasely little prick and nobody here likes your attitude, tone and childish behavior.... Fuck off.
This is not true. Fonestar is a paragon of competing currencies and a preview of all we have to look forwards to in our brave new technocracy.
Actually, it IS true- your vote-downs on this forum are piling up faster than Million Dollar Bonus's lately, easily putting you into the "Douche" level......
Is THAT the key? Is the value of BitCoin tied to your vote-downs on this forum????
Might as well be- it's as good reason as anything else.
I've cracked the code!!!!
Actually, my upvotes are pretty much on par with downvotes. If you think ZH is an anti-bitcoin forum you are dead wrong. I will not permit FUD against Satoshi's brilliant creation to be disseminated here or on any other internet forums.
Perhaps you should find another forum, one with thick, dumb trolls who like to touch things? After working in this field for years I can tell you it's always those that bitch the most about technology that bitch even louder when it gets taken away or breaks.
LOL- "working in the field for years...."- listen, scanning items as a cashier at Walmart hardly qualifies you as an expert in technology, dude.
Despite your posturiing, one thing your posts have consistently lacked is a demonstration of technical knowlege about anything. I see you ranting about Libertarians a bit, but that's about it, really. The rest of your drival has been cut-and-paste stuff, mixed with some Wikopedia.
If you need help counting, you might get your Mom to buy you a calculator- on this post alone, you're quite a bit in the red, dude.
But hey- facts never bothered you before, why let them start now?
I have commented many times on the technical aspects of Bitcoin. Perhaps you cannot read properly? Most of the posts deal with idiocy though who are only trying to attack Bitcoin.
will there be futures tradeable on Bit$hit? hedging virtual garbage with some fiat derivative must be a really smart move, methinks
Dats BitRayzisss!
Not a bit raciss, a byte rayciss.
Get your ByteCoin Here, get your bytecoin while they're hot.
lol...ya gotta love it.
Kiddies with their on-line trading accounts are soon taxed ;-)
Come on.. As if we're not already getting enough and don't, by definition, have more to come.
Taxman is coming for every one of us. :)
lol...just trying to guide some of the pups malikai.
Anyone with a TD AmeriTrade or Squabie or ScottScan account dabbling in this WILL have their SSI number given to IRS for any profits garnered.
And the IRS doesn't accept BitCoin as payment ;-)
Somehow I don't doubt that the majority of ZH readers still bank with Citi, Chase, BOA, etc...
I would repeat that the "metals only" crew is their own worst enemy but I don't think it would register.
reality
STRANGE MOVES IN BITCOIN TOP 100 HOLDERS
can someone please explain me what these changes mean and why could they happen when all of them were not trading for months?
http://www.offgridminds.com/misinformation-blog/2013/12/1/strange-moves-...
I wouldn't worry too much about the top 100 holders. They were the guys who knew what they had and aren't going to surrender that advantage to you at any price.
It's still amazing that you can buy this technology for only $1,000 USD per coin!
Buy now while supplies last!!!
'coin'?
WTF...
"Again: What matters is NOT the price.
What matters is that it bypasses the cartel."
What a fucking stupid ape you are CH1. You Bit-tards have created YOUR OWN CARTEL !!! LOL !!!
You're now CENTRAL BANKER SCUM !!!!
And don't believe for ONE SECOND.....or 4 calculations per cycle in an AVX routine in an Intel Haswell CPU or several hundred threads dispatched to over 2,250 shaders in an Nvidia Geforce GPU.....that the Chinese and the Russian mafia haven't infiltrated this shit.....or the NSA and everyone else.
LOL !!!! You silly fucking geek-tards. I remember when the internet was DARPANET. So all that fancy tech and shit that you and I use (and I've been using before you were a horny thought in your father's mind......code in assembler and get back with me script-kiddie).....first came from the military-industrial complex.
The apple does not fall far from the tree. You think you're getting away with something. You're not. You're not even doing something particularly special. Calculating a number that some fuckwad convinced a bunch of other geek fucktards had some sort of magically delicious worth. LOL !!!!! You're more stupid than that fucking silverback that's you're avatar.
Don't flower it up man, just say it as it is...
Have a F'n clue !
It's manipulated just like EVERYTHING else.
The "value" of Bitcoin exists ONLY in your mind.
Financial cyber utopia.......it's NOT.
I'm afraid the value of Bitcoin and everything else only exists in people's minds.
Sorry, no objectivist magic for you.
Rule #1: "If you don't hold it, you don't own it."
Corollary #1: "If you don't hold it, you'll lose it."
Corollary #2: "If you don't hold it, someone will take it."
If you hold it you can seize it.
If it's virtual you can't prove it exists.
"If it's virtual you can't prove it exists."
True. YOU can't.
lol...whoopsie.
I think he just let the virtual cat out of the virtual bag.
(No animals were harmed in the creation of this ponzi, just peoples savings)
I thought it was pretty clear I was referring to hiding your wallet.dat? I will try and keep things simple in simpleland.
And I thought I was showing a complete disinterest in accumulating virtual wealth in dat files or the devices they're stored on.
...and you still like the BitCoin and you still own it.
Shit storm a comin!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEYGjFzPuXM
Trailer Park Boys are awesome.
Anyway, I got a new 10/22 I'm gonna go and play with. Have fun guffawing over the definitely-this-time, for-sure-real, once-and-for-all, it's-a-slam-dunk "end of bitcoin".
Ruger?
Virtual.
And he keeps it in a top-of-the-line cloud safe, with a AES-256-CBC encryption dial. You should see him shoot with it, always dead on and never needs cleaning ;-)
Yes, with a synthetic stock and built in laser (I'm a crypto fag)
And not even very crypto.
Nice, have fun. I have the stainless takedown, Love it.
They're not coins. They're 1s and 0s.
All coins are made up of 1s and 0s.
WTF????
Gold sovereigns, where's the 1's?
I've already said it, the gov has tons of bit coins they have already obtained through using their huge amount of computing power to mine them or just buying them. They will hit the market at times of low liquidity to scare people out. This drop happened while the three biggest markets are doing other things, Americans are watching football or other Sunday non-financial stuff, and the Japanese and Chinese are sleeping. Read the signs and diversify out of bitcoins, not all but some, because if you miss cheap ones you will get them soon enough. Bitcoin has been a gift to the US government and has taken 12 billion out of the gold and silver markets which they manipulate but will eventually fail. Bitcoin is a market that is a piece of cake for the US gov to manipulate.
Word. What he said.
"I miss cheap coins!"
When your favorite crypto-currency is getting too expensive, why not pick up a few Cheapcoins™!
Not to be outdone by its larger bretheren, Cheapcoins™ are a sure-fire way to play the cyber-game without hurting your wallet. Since Cheapcoins™ are "splitting" -- or halving the price with twice the number of coinz™ -- almost on a daily basis, rest assured that buying your Cheapcoins™ will never break the bank!
Take a look at Cheapcoins™ today!
Maybe, since BitCoins are becoming so popular the Treasury can get in on the act and start selling BitBonds.
it's not exactly a stable "currency" he?
why do you think more idiots will flock in after all those crashes everytime somebody tries to sell bitcoins?
Somthing doesn't need to be stable to get into and out of. Broaden you horizons, not everyone wants to hold something for thirty years waiting for a profit.
The problem with bitcoins is that the exchanges have no depth.
BTC is illiquid.
There are far far too many marketable orders and far too few limit orders, this means that the price impact of trying to shift any significant volume is just horrendous.
This is by design.
BTC is the most centrally held "currency" in the world. What did we see the other day? 100 wallets own 1/5th of BTC?
The trick here is to drive the price sky high using illiquid exchanges. And exit your long position not on the exchange but by swapping your BTC for hard assets in the real world.
The prices on the exchanges are pure bullshit as the exchanges are so illiquid. The trick for BTC is to get the exchange prices pumped through the MSM until people start to accept the exchange prices as real.
It's a complex scam. But if you have experience of trading big volumes on illiquid markets you can see right through BTC.
The exchanges are a thin facade. A veneer of substance and worth covering what is effectively just empty data.
The exchanges are manipulated to convince people to accept a few BTC for significant real world assets.
Many financial exchanges around the world are manipulated to facilitate a very large off exchange transaction. For example corporate equity placements will often see the daily markets squeezed lower to influence the placement price ahead of the deal.
This is what's happening. I you try to sell 1000 BTC maybe the first 10 are sold at 1000 USD, the next 10 at 950 USD, the next 10 at 700 USD, etc. There is just not enough people willing to purchase BTC at the current price so as soon as somebody tries the price plummets.
It's really easy to manipulate a consolidated limit order book.
There are half a dozen methods which you can use which encourage people to place their limit orders higher or lower than they would otherwise.
It's also very easy to work the yellow strip in such a way that you can move the market and the spread fairly cheaply.
Many of these methods such as spoofing are well known, but some of the slightly more sophisticated methods I have never seen mentioned in the financial press. Some methods are so complicated that there isn't a jury in the land that could understand it and convict someone employing such abuses.
Sounds like good old fashioned front running either short or long.
hmmm, sounds just like how gold is traded
Not front running.
If you can intercept MBO's and SBO's in the quote routing system you can achieve a very sophisticated level of front running which doesn't actually look like front running in any of the recorded data sets.
Most houses set up dark pools not to hide their limit orders but specifically so that they can gain information on marketable order demand for liquidity prior to a trading platform querying the main exchange.
This allows the dark pools to front run their clients on the main exchange.
But this isn't what I see on BTC.
BTC is not manipulated in a very sophisticated corrupting the system way, such as how the NASDAQ is. It is manipulated within the consolidated limit order books.
The shape of the book across the exchanges is very particular there is a lot of bid side spoofing. There is a lot of buying with max price impact and a lot of selling with min price impact. And the resilliance (technical term) of the bid is very mechanical in its nature, the resilliance of the ask is disorganised and chaotic, as it should be.
It's kinda funny. But the book is being run. The market is cornered. And someone is attempting to fix a price for a large transaction away from the exchange. The exchanges cannot handle any significant polarised volume as is evident by the extreme beta. When a large seller shows up, the manipulators disappear and the seller is allowed to sell through what is a very weak book. As soon as the distribution ends the book is run up again before the ask has time to deepen.
It's an obviously cornered market. It is extreme beta driven not by news but by the mechanics and microstructure of the consolidated limit order book.
EXACTLY how it's being run. If you run large trades away from the exchange of a relatively limited good, by nature you can disrupt market pricing in exactly the manner in which you suggest- it's why the price has swung hard both ways.
Funny, this scheme is thousands of years old, yet dupes still get taken in on the "this time it's different" mantra.
Whomever is doing it- my bet is on a Chinese faction- kudos to them for recognizing there are still plenty of suckers in the room.
Thanks Occident Mortal
for clarfying that in semi-layman's terms. I've always had a "weird feeling" around bitcoin, and now that I find myself regretting not getting into it 3 years ago, I am somewhat consoled by your rational analysis of the manipulations that BTC is undergoing. I still wish I had 1000 btc to try and sell one a day at 1k each, but that's not the case.
Unfortunately, looks like the link was taken down on bitcointalk, but here is google cache you can try looking up some of the exchange scams/thefts/frauds that are listed:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9c8tQ5HnjWUJ:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php%3Ftopic%3D83794.0+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca
I was looking for a simple one in particular where the exchange operator was just inflating bid/asks to drive prices higher.
Where can I get a redemption catalog?
BTC does remind me of Green Shield Stamps.
Those were the days.
I knew them as "S&H Greenstamps". I think my mom got our toaster that way in the early '70's. . .
"Somthing doesn't need to be stable to get into and out of. Broaden you horizons, not everyone wants to hold something for thirty years waiting for a profit."
...you mean like a Ponzi scheme? Oh, wait it's not a pyramid scheme, it's a buy the bitcoin scheme. Yeah, I'm feelin' it...
Wow, you really changed your tune rom last week when you said Bitcoin was the future..
Indeed, it was his future --- for the following few days, anyway.
The mental timeframe labeled "the future" is not a long one for the historically ignorant and the ADD-afflicted.
Oh my God! Listen to your fucking self! Where were you in the 2001, huh? Same deluded bullshit back then, too. Fucking pets.com, it's going to rally back any fucking minute! Yeah! You know what one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life was? Sitting in a restaurant, listening to a former Nortel employee tell me how he kept his stocks even after the company cratered because he knew, he KNEW, damnit, that they would come roaring back in another ten years. That bullshit fucking company only put company stock in their employees' 401k plans. Think about that. Think about how bad that smelled at the time but nobody gave a shit because it was the new digital age and the old rules don't matter anymore. That stock cratered and broke the backs of the company's own employees, except for the pros at the top who golden parachuted right the hell out of there! They ripped their own employees off, man! It was a a brilliant fucking con, and nobody saw it coming because they were so fucking smart.
Yeah, right, fucking Bitcoin. Sell me a fucking bridge over the Hudson. At least Pets.com was a real company and not just made up fucking numbers!
As someone who won't tolerate BS, sophistry or hypocrisy from anyone, I have to raise the Bullshit flag on this article:
Valuation fluctuations may be a sign of (a) Volatility, (b) Correction, (c) Profit taking after a pump & dump, but a "Bear Market" it ain't. Not if you have the slightest clue of what constitutes a "bear market".
Clearly the writer is extremely biased (has an agenda), is sloppy, "writing under influence", or... worse. 1/2 star rating.
Do you know what thermal compound is made of? Silver!!!!
Yes, it turns out that you can live without bitcoin, but you can't live without silver. That is called intrinsic value, silver has value on its own. That's the difference between BTC and AG.
Some silicon dielectric compounds have silver in them.
Most do not.
Dielectric and thermal compounds are different things.
Silver is the best heat conductant element. There is no substitute, so far.
I just generated a really big fucking integer. I will sell it to you for $1000. This is a tremendous deal because that integer is totally unique! Nobody else can own it except you. This shit sounds remarkably like "I'll just put the tip inside, I swear!"
You don't NEED silver thermal compound. You can use toothpaste, denture paste, etc. They won't be as effective, but the same is true about gold plated contacts versus just copper.
And you are really grabbing your ankles and begging forgiveness?
No, just getting ready for the rocket to $1500 - $2000 levels after the correction.
You are riding the rocket, this much is certain.
I would not miss this for the life of me!
In that case, I have several unredeemed cartons of Blue Chip Stamps you can take off my hands. I'm sure they have value - they can be redeemed for all sorts of goods and services.
SURE BRO!!!! DON'T SELL ANYTHING! WHOEHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
KEEP ONTO YOUR AIR!!! EVERYBODY NEEDS AIR!
right,.
So hardware is "real" and software is "fake"? I see.
Any other daily wisdom from the book of simple minds?
Naw dawg, hardware is 'real' and software is 'virtual.' How would you like it if I said I was bringing the beer and I showed up with virtual beer?
Lol bring virtual beer and ill let you in through the virtual door.
Unless im mistaken, and unless someone debunks the periodic table tomorrow, they wont be finding out that PM's are totally worthless any time soon, therein lies the difference. With Bitcoin, all it takes is an idea...and that thing is fucking toast, in an instant.
Software is malleable, let's just put it that way. Also, software doesn't give a crap whether you are rich or die next to a sewer drain by the side of the road. And here's the really important thing, are you ready? No cryptography is reliable. Even a one-time pad--they get a hold of you, they can beat the secret out of you. Crypto is bullshit. It is meant to protect secrets for very short periods of time. See the problme here?
Let these fools eat bitcoins.
bitcoin is a barbarous relic
The information is being repeatedly deleted from the bitcoin reddit, because they don't understand you cannot stop the news, but someone figured out how to loot bitcoin wallets by searching every possible private key, sequentially, and made a site that generates the public key for the wallet.
There are already dozens of bots crawling it already, looting everything they can find, starting in random locations. It will take a long time to get through all the possibilities at first, but it will accelerate as more computers are put to the task.
The Novice explanation of what will happen: This allows the bots run by bad people with basic understanding of computer science to randomly loot wallets. There are 19 quintillion wallets, and most of them are empty, but now it's just a measure of time and computing power.
Someone with a large botnet could easily put hundreds of thousands of computers to work on the problem.
The smart people got out yesterday when the news first broke.
I am pretty sure "the smart people" can afford to wait 100 years or so before the first successful crack is done.
The seed isn't (can't be) entirely random, therefore once the pattern emerges, a large portion of the 18Qt can be tossed out. It won't take 100 years since the cracking is already being done. Your wallet could be one of the unlucky ones already being looted today as computers are being put to the task.
Every minute, every second, every thousandth of a second, is a roll of the dice.
Sometimes, bitcoiners put up the first part of their private key as verification for this or that. Knowing their public key and even just the first few digits of their private one narrows the range of pages by a significant margin, making it much easier to loot the wallet. If you have made any portion of your private key public, I would suggest removing it, and cashing out immediately.
It's a scam to steal private keys by getting people to divide their private key by 0 x 7F and type it into the URL. Then of course all that needs to be done to steal the private key is multiply the page by 0 x 7F.
The point is that they're already generating the private keys, without you having to put anything anywhere. I wasn't even going to paste the link but a skeptic asked for proof. I wouldn't recommend you do anything with your bitcoin wallet other than to get out while the getting is good.
I know all this technology stuff is complicated, but at least try to read my post before you fly off the handle.
I take it you are a buyer.
Never bitcoin. Not even once.
A link to source ? I wana read more on that.
If its true, thats pretty much the death of bitcoin.
Think about this.
ALL those people using websites to generate bitcoin wallets... whats to stop those websites you are using to generate keys from printing a duplicate wallet set of your wallet for themselves?
It wouldn't surprise me if every bitcoin wallet generated online has already been robbed.
The only safe key you have is from the bitcoin wallet applications themselves, and even those, theres nothing stopping those from sharing the information.
Like I said "bitcoin may be encrypted"
but
The wallet sites are open to exploitation
The exchanges are open to exploitation
The computers and means of storage are open to exploitation
The online wallets are open to exploitation
And its all anonymous, if you get robbed the only identifier you have is
16UGJoVsFbRLkdn8LsDGKp5apKm6eBisX8 took your coins.
Good luck tracking that down to a real name/person.
:P
http://directory.io/
Take your private key and divide it by 0x7F
That is the page that has your key
You can go to your wallet on the site with your public and private key exposed.
After you do that, you may want to change your pants.
Bitcoin is done like my thanksgiving turkey.
Any chance its a spoof?
I mean,
904625697166532776746648320380374280103671755200316906558262375061821325312 pages of keys?lol
sounds a little funny, probably a joke.
Sure the odds are your key is somewhere in there with random luck, someone COULD find it.
But all you need is a fast enough computer to sit there and test each key.
If they could make ASIC hardware to do that, someone out there (probably in china) could create a processor to go through all these keys and loot each one.
It sounds funny, and is pretty funny so long as you don't have any money invested (lol) in the bitcoin scam.
Bitcoin won't die instantly, but as the true believers start to wake up to empty wallets, word will get out. The sub reddit mods can keep deleting this but the horse has left the barn.
On the bright side, perhaps some of those ASIC computers that are less and less profitable as miners can be repurposed to looting wallets. Recycling!
If it were possible to do this, I wouldn't create a dumb ass website and publicize the fact...
Love the Donate BTC Address at the bottom of the page, nice touch.
You can generate a trillion keyparis a day for 10 years, it's still a trillion times more likely you'd win the next Powerball than find an address with coins on it
More profitable to use that computer power mining BTC.
XenoWrong = Laughable
As somebody pointed out: It's a scam.
The website simply looks at the last part of the URL and multiplies it by 0x7F to get the key and then it generates a page to show it to you. In the process it also keeps a copy to itself.
I could code something like that in my lunch break - In fact any script kiddy can do it in about a day or two.
Anybody that goes into that website and tries it with his/her own private key is a sucker and will loose all their BTCs.
I hope I'm pointing out the obvious, but please nobody type their private key into a URL on some random site - even after dividing it by 0x7f.
Yea, exactly, if you do that you pretty much publicized your key.
!!!
Yup, this is a phishing technique.
QuickSilver has got a point don't you think?
Back during the Internet goldrush, I used to do nslookups for domain names and the peculiar thing I found out was that just by searching for a domain someone out there would mysteriously reigster it and beat me to it. The whole domain squatting game was rigged. After that, I never did searches, I just immediately tried to register the names I wanted (ps, I was not squatting, I needed the names for actual companies). Didn't get rich. :-)
If this kind of thing can be done, wouldn't it be far easier and more profitable to steal money in the bank?
Uh, that web page is a deliberate joke and/or an attempt to stampede the heard. To say otherwise is blatant misinformation.
The site you're refering to http://directory.io/
The first tip of should be the page title:
Page 1 out of 904625697166532776746648320380374280103671755200316906558262375061821325312The protocol for key generation is well known, so generating sequential keys is not some new discovery. Doing so has no impact on bitcoin whatsoever.
The keyspace for bitcoin private keys is WAY WAY WAY bigger than 19 quintillion -- to probability of brute forcing a key is roughly 1 in 1048. Searching for one key takes multiple universe lifetimes.
There's not a single example, ever, of a bitcoin wallet being looted with a randomly generated private key due to someone "guessing" the key. There are many due to people using insecure brainwallets, but that's a completely different attack vector.
A 512-qubit quantum computer can solve 21024 possibilities in minutes and they already exist.
The D-wave machine is used mainly to solve certain problems in quantum mechanics. It doesn't have universal quantum logic gates. There are theorems about this being impossible. D-wave hasn't even tried.
It can't crack BitCoin. It can't even factor 256-bit prime numbers, which is the quantum "killer app" which will allow the NSA to break most encryption used today.
This comes from a friend who is a quantum genius and BitCoin bear.
If Sauron had a universal computer which could wield the computing power of 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 parallel universes, the death of BitCoin would be a minor worry.
18 quintillion entries, with botnets of hundreds of thousands of computers pinging random ones in batches of 1000 or so apiece, every second. If they hit a wallet with bitcoins in it, they get all of them.
It's like buying a lottery ticket with terrible odds, but you get billions of tickets and infinite attempts. It's merely a matter of time and computing power.
If you've ever made even a portion of your private key known to the general public, your chances of losing your bitcoins with no recourse goes way up because even a partial key makes it much much easier to narrow down the possibilities.
A trillion times more likely you find somebody's hidden gold stash by digging random holes in the woods. The numbers involved in the private key space are truly astronomical. These issues have been hashed and re-hashed since Bitcoin's creation 5 years ago.
Every once in a while, a bitcoiner shows up on Reddit to complain that his wallet was emptied even though he followed all the recommendations to keep them safe.
Expect these events to happen much more often now that the secret is out.
...and most if not all of these were using online wallets without 2FA because they did not follow proper security protocol or well-known recommendations.
Oh, BTC back to mid-$900 on average... Imagine that.
Security is an issue and part of the growing pains weening ourselves off of bank hand-holding.
Quintillion = 1018
Bitcoin private keyspace = 1048
There are roughly 1 billion PCs in the world. You know what? I'm going to give ALL of them to your fuckin' botnet. Every single one, 24/7. Even better, they're all quad-core processors running a 4 GHz, 16 billion operations per second (1.6 x 109 , time one billion computers 1 x 109, or 1.6 x 1018 operations per second. 24/7? x 86400 seconds per day. You know what, let's give you a hundred years on this, so 365 x 100.
Doing that math, we're now at 5.0 x 1027 operations. It takes 12,000 operations to compute one hash that's an address -- this is just computing the hash, not searching the blockchain. So 4.1 x 1023 .
So the entirety of the world' PCs in one massive botnet, working 24/7, using the fastest processors available, for one hundred years, can compute just the addresses of 10-25 of the bitcoin key space. That's 0.00000000000000000000001% of the keyspace, assuming zero cycles spent on searching the blockchain. But hey, all those are the odds of finding one key! Let's let everyone on the planet have 10 private key wallets! So we mutliply by 7 x 1010. OK, they odds are REALLY going up now, oh boy, now we're at 7 x 10-15 ...
Let's see, that's a .0000000000001% percent chance of finding just one private key, assuming everyone on the planet has 10 private bitcoin wallets, using every fucking PC in the world for 100 years, assuming infinite speed/zero time in seaching a blockchain that's 16GB in size for matches.
Yeah, you're right, Frog. It's merely a matter of time and computing power.
I believe that 'bitch-slap' would sum things up nicely.
1. You don't understand how it's being done.
2. You're bad at math.
3. Making up a bunch of numbers might make you feel better, and may convince some of the ZH bitcoin bagholders to stay in on this stupidity, but no one with a brain is buying it.
1. It's not being done.
2. I'm great at math. However, I made so many approximations in favor of the crack it's not even funny. There's not enough power generation or storage on the planet to make a bitcoin brute force work.
3. Time will tell. You said so yourself -- it's just a matter of time and computation. Care to give us a timeframe when this uber-hack of bitcoin takes it out? I have made my lower estimate -- which is not in 100 years with all resources dedicated to it. You're very confident I'm wrong, so put out a number -- when does bitcoin collapse due to this alleged hack?
Seriously, if this hack were valid, if private keys can be arbitratily breached in "just a matter of time," then bitcoin is over. It goes to zero. When? A week? A year? I'll bet you a 1 oz gold eagle bitcoin has a meaninful non-zero value in USD in a year, game?
This is a best a joke, and at worst a phishing attempt. There's zero validity to the claims here.
There are so many better ways to attack bitcoin than the technical aspect -- which is pretty well understood. It can be made non-convertible into USD overnight with a minor regulation change; security of both exchanges and clients is weaker than it should be, the list goes on and on. Challenging the technology itself, when it's extremely well studied and documents, especially when you don't have a clear understanding of it just undermines your argument.
Aw, don't spoil their doom fantasty seek.
I suspect Barry Silbert started this rumor so he could buy sub 1k bitcoins when his London crew gets to work in the morning.
BUY MORE!!!!
YOU SHOULD SELL ALL YOUR PLASMA TO BUY 1 MORE BITCOIN!!!
Well I did just sell some low purity junk silver.
AND THAT'S WHY YOU'RE THE SMARTEST GUY IN YOUR FAMILY!!!!
SELL MOMA'S GOLDEN TEETH TO!!!! TURN THEM INTO BITCOINS!!
THERE ARE MORE THAN ENOUGH WILLING TO SELL THEM TO YOU!!!
Junk silver = chump.
So you also have a problem with junk silver?
We are carressing ours right now! You SOLD yours!
No, like I said I just sold my low purity 40% and 50% shit. I like copper too, but I prefer it after my silver as a dessert.
Yeah, an Olympic size swimming pool filled with copper pennies.
Swimming in liquidity.
You definitely don't need a swimming pool. I own thousands of dollars worth of physical copper and it's not a burden to store.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ6fdJYQ8kM
You're such a lying sack of shit. Go fuck yourself, that is, after you've finished blowing your butt-boyfriend.
I have to support fonestar on principle alone. Being a stacker myself, I recognize other forms of tangible wealth whether it be Au, Ag, BTC, stawks, copper, lead, beans, etc.
I do personally believe in having my assets in physical possession, but to each his own.
Sure is entertaining tho'.
Most ZHers wouldn't know a free market if it walked up to them and kicked them in the junk... Sad really.
Well, at least I know that really big, impressive looking numbers are no different than any other numbers!