Fresh Bitcoin Exchange Hacked
 

Bitfinex this time, one of the largest.

Early days but it looks like around 119,000 bitcoin stolen.

crashed the price nearly $200 today

Yeah I was just looking and the price was 700GBP but watched it crash back down to 450.

holy shit.

~* Currency of the Future *~

Is it easy to buy a bitcoin? Im a complete novice.

Any good advice on the safest way to do it?

Wow 119,000 bitcoins, that's a good chunk of ones and zeros.

With a bitcoin value of $600 they stole 71 million US DOLLARS.

This is really a major problem for the bitcoin industry, these hacks are turning things over and makes the virtual currency less trusted.

Bitcoin Exchanges - buy & sell

CEX.IO
itBit
Coinbase (Some gfyers didn't like this one)

You should also have a bitcoin wallet and blockchain.info is one of the best

LocalBitcoins.com: Fastest and easiest way to buy and sell bitcoins is a bitcoin market where you can buy from various sellers.

Now is probably a good time to buy, assuming the price recovers...

Using a centralized third party wallet service totally defeats the purpose of Bitcoin. You should run your own wallet, locally.

Wonder how many people trusted Bitfinex to take care of their funds?...

i'm using BitcoinCore

It's up to 70GB in size, but at least im in control of everything.

Oh yeah, I've been using Bitcoin core for five years, so that's something I keep forgetting: downloading the blockchain from scratch takes AGES. That's a major potential deal breaker for someone new who wants to get started.

There's been a few times that the core client has complained about a database error at startup, and wanted to re-download the entire blockchain. :helpme I have backups so I can reasonably effortlessly restore a database that is at most a couple of weeks old, so syncing only takes 30 mins, but again, that's not going to be something that the majority of users will be able (or want) to do.

This is why bitcoin is a 1.0 currency. Time for 2.0. There must be some visibility so hacks aren't possible on this scale.

Windoze+email+not well regulated digital currency exchanges = recipe for disaster.

How was the exchange hacked? Most hacks like this start out with an email exploit or the notorious zip file that is attached to the email.

Don't store value in bitcoin or other digital currency use the digital currency as a transactional currency. If you want to play the Bitcoin market (as a very volatile index) play the index Bitcoin BTC Bitstamp (BITCOIN:BITSTAMPUSD) Bitcoin Chart & Quotes - INO.com

Bitcoin was designed to be decentralized, but exchanges and mining pools have re-centralized it. Rather than everyone being responsible for their own funds, much of the BTC in circulation is held by third parties. The exchanges must be constantly hammered by probes and attacks.

torrenting it is pretty fast. then you just keep it updated.

i keep is on an SSD for fast operations.

anyway, now is a good time to buy in.

How to never lose Bitcoin:
- Buy a $10 USB drive
- Store Bitcoin keys on it

How to never lose dollars:
- Pay trillions of dollars to bankers
- Pay more trillions of dollars to bankers when they lose the fist trillions
- Print more dollars
- Build a giant military, enforce fiat currency value