Feds take down BTC-e (Bitcoin's largest exchange)

[ionbasa]

2 hours ago, Name Taken said:

Maybe the FBI will hold another Bitcoin sale. 

If they do so, it's via auction/bid process. The last time they did it, they sold 'blocks' of 22BTC at a time. This of course limits what average users can buy, so it'll probably only be high profile buys with enough cash to buy.

http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-government-auction-winners-2017-5

Venture capitals love these types of auctions since they can make a quick buck off of it.

[KuJoe]

On 8/2/2017 at 6:10 AM, 2bitmarksman said:

trade their BTC for fiat currency in person

I know of people who do this, they even make house calls and will order pizza and hang out for a few confirmations to make sure the transactions go through. I forget the websites off hand, but back out in Colorado there were quite a few people who did this in relation to the legalized marijuana industry not being allowed to put their money into banks so for security they were trading cash (they weren't allowed to accept credit cards or checks so marijuana dispensaries are a 100% cash business out there) for BTC since it was the only secure way to keep millions of dollars in their houses without investing in a ton of safes.

[KuJoe]

2 hours ago, ionbasa said:

This of course limits what average users can buy, so it'll probably only be high profile buys with enough cash to buy.

And I'm willing to bet that anybody buying them automatically goes into a database somewhere...

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

and bitcoin has a backup: it's decentralized nature is that backup

for a virus to harm the btc network it would need to attack all nodes of the network at the same time. For an hacker to take down/manipulate the he would need to have at his disposal at least 51% of the total hashinìg rate just to be able to counterfeit records of the blockchain.

 

 

I believe you're confusing robustness for having a physical back up.   It might be harder to take down than a simple virus (but then so is convention currency), however if a virus/hacker was to succeed,  conventional currency has a lot more support in the existence of both gold reserves and physical cash. . 

[suicidalfranco]

41 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

I believe you're confusing robustness for having a physical back up.   It might be harder to take down than a simple virus (but then so is convention currency), however if a virus/hacker was to succeed,  conventional currency has a lot more support in the existence of both gold reserves and physical cash. . 

cold storage, here's another back up solution, basically what saved the bacon too many exchange sites who got attacked, put your stuff in a drive, disconnect the drive, done, you know have a backup

[mr moose]

51 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

cold storage, here's another back up solution, basically what saved the bacon too many exchange sites who got attacked, put your stuff in a drive, disconnect the drive, done, you know have a backup

 

That's still not the same thing.   Banks have backups too.    you are still confusing robustness with backup support (alternatives of equal value to carry the load in the even of a failure).