
Bitcoin Mining Service NiceHash Says Hackers Emptied Its Wallet - rayuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/bitcoin-mining-service-nicehash-says-hackers-emptied-its-wallet
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greenyoda
Earlier discussion can be found here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613)

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nikolay
When I hear about something like this, I always think: "Insider's Job." Sorry,
can't help it!

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TaylorGood
True. Founders risk tolerance may have been such that they looked at current
$BTC price and decided this was it.

Can anyone guesstimate what they were profiting? Compare that to a $62m
payday.

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micaksica
Reddit says they were making about $500K a day in mining fees.

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nikolay
What prevents them from keep mining?

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Operyl
Downtime, lack of trust from users, etc.

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j_s
Not sure anything new in this story from the one discussed four hours earlier
(70+ comments):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15865613)

The official press release was on reddit, submitted but with no comments:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/7i0s6o/official_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/7i0s6o/official_press_release_statement_by_nicehash/)

A handful (5) of comments on the earliest related submission:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863306)

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snowpanda
I don't know too much about bitcoin but am I reading this correctly that they
had $60 million in ONE wallet?

Wouldn't it be wise to have part of this money in several "offline" wallets or
something?

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earenndil
Apparently the reasoning is that this would cut fees on transferring money.
Instead of transferring it from wallet to wallet, which would incur fees, they
keep it all in one wallet, and change internal numbers.

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thisisit
I was just wondering, given the record prices - how soon will we hear about a
hack? And here we are.

Though I wonder why the announcement says:

> We are working to verify the precise number of BTC taken.

While the article says:

> A wallet address circulated by NiceHash users shows that more than $60
> million of bitcoins might be affected, according to CoinDesk, the
> cryptocurrency research and news website.

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modwilliam
There is no official announcement on the BTC taken, but reddit users have been
passing around a wallet that suddenly got $60m recently

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nerdponx
It will be interesting to see if, when, and how they try to move all that
crypto-loot. I'd be surprised if BTC/USD didn't start falling in anticipation
of increased supply (and hopefully some healthy trepidation regarding the
state of Bitcoin security), since Bitcoin is still the main source of
liquidity between crypto and fiat.

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SilverSlash
I'm not very familiar with how crypto currencies work but when such an
incident happens, how hopeful can the company be that they will get their
BTC's back?

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SAI_Peregrinus
Transactions are irreversible. That's basically the entire point. They'll only
get the coins back if the thieves are caught, haven't spent them, and give
them up.

