Cryptocurrencies (most of them) are decentralized, censor-proof, distributed network. The "attacker" allegedly performed a double-spend attack by sending the 40K ETC and then rewrote the block(s) so the transfer never happened and the 40K coins still belong to the original wallet. But what if the attacker is someone else? What if he's a person or group that transferred 6,000 coins for double-spending that was on the same block(s)? The 40K would be a by-product, who knows how many transactions were in the block(s) affected and which ones of those belong to the attackers (most likely more than 1 transaction). Finding out who owns the wallet is possible if there was history associated with a person or group, and even then, it could be someone outside of the country of jurisdiction (i.e. China). What then? There's a whole discussion of tainted coins which can be applied here if the developers of etc choose to do so. For example, if you deposit bitcoin that originated from the darknet wallets in the past several transaction history to Coinbase or some of these centralized exchanges, they will freeze your account. Tumble the coin by exchanging for Monero and back to bitcoin before depositing to Coinbase is good practice.
Just finally read a little more, gate.io exchange says that the network was under attack for 4 hours, so I take it back that I doubt it happened. I kinda read another snippet about it that Coinbase was suspending all transactions regarding etc as the network was under attack (at that time). ETC is a shitcoin, so anyone transacting on the etc blockchain is putting value at risk. jmho.
schweiz, I have you on ignore but I see your post when I'm not logged in. Any currency or payment network that is currently in-use is very complex. Let's take the $, does everyone understand how it's created and accounted for and distributed? I don't. There are things like monetary policy, and fractional reserve banking I read about, and so on and so forth. And yet, everyone uses it. Does everyone understand how the PayPal network work? or the Visa Credit Card network? or the ACH system? and on and on. Bitcoin was created and published by Satoshi (anonymous person or group). Satoshi did not force anyone to use it. In fact, it did not have any value and in the beginning was given away to anyone who wanted them. I'm sure everyone's familiar with the 10,000 bitcoins for pizzas. And yet, here we are, a bitcoin is worth over $3,500 each. It's quite incredible it has this much value if you saw where it came from.
Like I said:As almost all prices for goods are expressed in traditional currencies this causes a problem for crypto's that are worth $ XXX and 1 year later only 20% of that amount. 1 year ago they could buy 5 times more for their crypto's then today. That can never be compensated with a "cheap transaction fee". Today you need 5 times more Bitcoins to buy the house you could buy end 2017. That's reality with Bitcoins. A Bitcoin that was hyped in 2017 and bursted like a bubble. Most people don't know how a PC, a car an airplane... works either, yet they use it. You can see it from two sides: it went up from zero to $3,500 (for the happy few) it went down from +$5,000, over $19,000 to $3,500 (for the mass majority) Isn't the crash of 80% incredible too? A "success story" does not have so many and so deep crashes as the bitcoin. Marketcapital dropped by 80% in less then 1 year. So all crypto owners together lost hundreds of billions. That sounds incredible too, but not in the way you see it. The incredible Bitcoin can even not recover slightly in the past 12 months. You only see these crashes in currencies like: Iranian Rial Vietnamese Dong Indonesian Rupiah Guinean Franc Laotian Kip Sierra Leone Leone Uzbek Sum Paraguayan Guarani ...
schweiz, I'm on the camp that views bitcoin as a store of value like digital gold and the currency functionality is a very nice bonus. it makes for a high-risk/high-reward speculative investment vehicle. Speaking from experience, bought bitcoin as an investment, and spent when it was appropriate, whether the price was 7K, 10K or 15K per bitcoin. You were the one arguing no one's going to use bitcoin/cryptos as they are too complex, and now you're turning it around. Anyway, let's move on. You always say the majority of "investors" bought at the top (or near the top). Let's do a mental exercise on that. How many people in the world have $20K lying around and of those people, how many would be willing to invest that amount on 1 bitcoin? You sound so confident of this, so you must know a lot of people around you that did this. Do you know of one person? How about $15K when the price of one bitcoin was around that much? How about when it was $10K? Think hard. Imagine what you're saying and don't be swayed by words that sound good to you so you just say it. Most of the people in the world are not rich af, and they will not be investing that kind of money carelessly. Sure, there are some who invested at the top, but it's not the majority, far from it. I posted about this before... I started buying bitcoin in 2013 at around $100/bitcoin and told as many people as I could, friends, family, coworkers, and most of the time all I got was uninterested look. They must have been thinking why would I buy an unheard of investment at a hundred $ (to $300+ as it went up throughout the year) a piece. Not a single person I know bought bitcoin. It shot up to $1200 and it crashed all the way back to less than $200. In 2017, especially 2nd half, everyone was thinking I was a genius, but no one bought any. It was way too expensive. So, when you say the majority bought at the top, I strongly disagree with you. Traders pushed the price up during the bull market. Now, bitcoin is in a bear market and traders are pushing the price down.
Safe to say that this is not a positive development for cryptocurrency confidence. As was pointed out in an earlier post, these exchange thefts have become a rather routine occurrence. And markets are built up and torn asunder based upon confidence. You can write an elaborate thesis on the soundness of blockchain and the robust nature of cryptocurrency composition - you can even berate others for not having the technical chops to understand it. Fine. "Distributed, Decentralized, Public Ledger". Well, apparently stealing it is not terribly difficult - over $1Billion of Cryptocurrencies were stolen in 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/07/1-p...s-stolen-this-year-and-it-was-easy-to-do.html On December 6, someone stole $11 million in gold from a Brinks truck. Rare occurrence and Brinks made the parties whole. We now know as established fact that cryptocurrency transactions, storage and supply chain technologies are indeed vulnerable to attack and theft. Cryptocurrency trading exchanges are in fact less safe for users than other regulated securities exchanges. Maybe that will change.
That is one way to look at it. The other way is that these programs are still in beta, and we are just weeding out the bugs. As long as it is not my money, of course. And yes, banks would give your money back if they are robbed. IIRC bitcoin was never released as a full featured, done product, so technically it is still in beta version. Yeap... https://bitcoin.org/en/version-history
The Cryptocurrency Exchanges are typically not insured by third parties. From what I can tell - once they've been robbed they declare bankruptcy. Crypto thefts tripled from 2017 to 2018. I just read an article by Aon that they are going to start offering Crypto insurance for banks and exchanges - but I would imagine that the haircut will be fairly steep.
Not sure if it's good for bitcoin, probably negative effect (negative impression to cryptocurrencies in general). But yea, only worry about events related to the coins you're invested in and always what events affect bitcoin. A good analogy is if you're invested in NVDA, you don't care if Wells Fargo had an accounting scandal and is down 20% for the day, but if Apple is down due to slow down demand on graphics presentation (i.e. YouTubers growth stagnating), then it affects your business as well and NVDA will be down in sympathy.