

The Bitcoin Richest: Accumulating Large Balances - SlipperySlope
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/22/the-bitcoin-richest-accumulating-large-balances/

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hippich
To get better idea - I had my webserver hacked solely for a purpose to get on
VPN and hack my desktop and laptop one night and all wallet files copied.

Person(s), who did it 1) were definitely very good at it, since they got root
permissions on all machines (all 3 running different versions of Ubuntu) and
2) believe in it to the point where they think withdrawing it at this point in
time not required - coins still did not move after hack event.

For me it sounds like very professional people interested in it and they
believe bitcoin will be stable enough to keep coins where they are right now
for a long time.

~~~
lsc
really? tell us more about what happened. how did they get from the webserver
to your laptop? (e.g. what was listening on your laptop?)

I find these sorts of attacks very interesting (and very frightening) because
if a sysadmin's desktop is compromised, without the sysadmin noticing, the
attacker has access, essentially, to everything the sysadmin accesses with
that desktop. The best you can do, as far as I can tell, is to use some sort
of 'the private key never leaves the smart card' system, and to run some sort
of tripwire-esque intrusion detection system; the latter is key, because even
with a theoretically perfect smartcard, if the attacker owns my ssh client
binary when I authenticate to the server... it's over.

~~~
hippich
i do not know details. I am pretty good with security stuff, but this time i
had no clue.

basically somebody was able to get root permissions on the webserver, 'cos
(s)he removed all system log files.

Then (s)he was able somehow to hack into my laptop and desktop connected to
this webserver via VPN. My local machines were running regular dev stuff:
apache, nginx, mysql, etc, but nothing with obvious vulnerabilities. And on
top of it - (s)he removed log files, which could be done only by having root
access to both machines. Nothing in authlog (i restored it), nothing in wtmp..
I made byte copy for later research, but at this point in time - no clue how
this could happened.

While I can suspect hosting staff doing this on server - it really boggles my
mind how it could be done on two home remote machines, both running different
Ubuntu versions.

ps: bizarre part was - once i realized it happened, I started doing research
on webserver and (s)he started kicking me out and banning IP address in
firewall! the only way to finally get to the machine was to reboot it in
single mode (my hosting provider allows to reboot it in single mode and start
ssh for root account with random password)

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rmc
_What can we learn from this list? First, it demonstrates that a broad group
of people are comfortable enough with the bitcoin crypto to exit the
traditional banking system and leave significant value on the blockchain for
extended periods._

Erm no. Someone could have mined those BitCoins at the very start for very
little effort. For example in 2010, someone offered 10,000 bitcoins if you
bought them a pizza ( <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137> ).
Bitcoins were worth very little then.

In the early days it was very easy to clock up huge amounts of bitcoins.

~~~
Retric
That and there is only one balance over 100k USD. But there are a lot of
people that would consider 100k an almost meaninglessly small amount of money.

~~~
reitzensteinm
The balances are in BTC, so 100k BTC = $650k USD or so.

But I agree with your sentiment; a top 10 list on Forbes culminating in ~$2m
isn't terribly impressive.

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vladd
People keep confusing the software and the currency.

An open source distributed software system is available for free and is able
to offer privacy, cross-border protection and prevention of asset seizure. But
these characteristics are properties of the code and its forks, not of a
specific coin or Bitcoin in particular.

What offers Bitcoin value is the level of marketing that makes people pour
money and graphic cards in this specific implementation of the code. It
doesn't have any scarcity - the code is forkable, there aren't any laws making
it mandatory to use it for commerce/taxes, nor any laws that prohibit
alternative coins from appearing. In fact, many other coin systems do exist,
with the same advantages:

\- <http://solidcoin.info/>

\- <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Namecoin>

\- <http://litecoin.org/>

\- [http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1895/what-
bitcoin...](http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1895/what-bitcoin-
esque-alternatives-are-there)

~~~
alister
I think the whole world will benefit from there being a _single_ ,
standardized and widely recognized Bitcoin rather than a bunch of balkanized
forks.

Bitcoin is what everyone knows and it's what has a shot at success. If the
choices get muddied, I don't think anyone benefits.

~~~
user49598
Wow, the whole point of bitcoin is freedom. You're essentially arguing that
this freedom is cool and all, but we'd all be better off if with less of it.

~~~
hollerith
A certain ideal or principle of freedom is what interests _you_ about Bitcoin.
Author of grandparent might have different reasons for his interest in
Bitcoin. So, the contradiction or double standard you see is not really there.

~~~
user49598
Did you down-vote my comment because you don't agree with me?

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kylebrown
There is some speculation that the richest address on the list, with 438k BTC,
belongs to The Silk Road.[1]

1: <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=82952.0>

~~~
gwern
Given the tumbler behavior, that seems pretty plausible.

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K2h
i like the plots that show the wallet balences change in time. may not know
who these are, but we can see the change.

[http://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1DkyBEKt5S2GDt...](http://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM)

