FBI’s seizure of Bitcoin starts government protest
Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 10:41 pmWIRED
The Magic of Bitcoin Turns FBI’s Seized Booty Into Government Protest
Bitcoin Talk, the popular Bitcoin discussion forum, has been hacked and as it stands the site is currently unreachable.
Bitcointalk has been down for several hours. The forums have been allegedly hacked and Defaced by “The Hole Seekers” and selling 150,000 emails and hashed passwords stolen from Bitcointalk.org for 25 Bitcoins, where the passwords are hashed with sha256crypt.
Hacker embedded the “1812 Overture” song in the background with a dazzling animated picture show.
According to Bitcointalk admin Theymos, it’s possible that the hackers gained access to the database. He says the website will not be restored until he figures out precisely what vulnerability the hackers leveraged. He’s offering 50 Bitcoin to the first individual who can pinpoint the security hole.
It now appears that the FBI are behind the attack:
The FBI seized over $3.3 million in digital currency after busting up the online drug marker known as The Silk Road, and on Friday morning, someone spotted what is likely the online address where the feds are keeping all that money. The seized funds are in the form of bitcoins, the world’s most popular digital currency, and bitcoin addresses are public things. You can’t take the money, but you can see it.
That someone then started broadcasting the address on the popular discussion website Reddit. And pretty soon, the address turned into something else.
You see, anyone can transfer money into a public bitcoin address, and when you transfer, you can post a message that’s as public as the transaction. Within hours of the address being discovered, anonymous protesters started peppering the address with messages accusing the feds of blatant hypocrisy in taking down the Silk Road. Call it a protest by payment.
It’s yet another example of the way Bitcoin changes the role of money in the world. With Bicoins, money isn’t just money. It’s something that can serve so many other purposes.
The first protest message came in at 11:05 today, and it was a bit oblique. “This is a loan for standard interest.” It contained a link to a story about $20 billion in cash abandoned at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, and a second link to a documentary about life after death. It cost 0.001 bitcoins, about a tenth of a cent.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... in-addres/
The Magic of Bitcoin Turns FBI’s Seized Booty Into Government Protest
Bitcoin Talk, the popular Bitcoin discussion forum, has been hacked and as it stands the site is currently unreachable.
Bitcointalk has been down for several hours. The forums have been allegedly hacked and Defaced by “The Hole Seekers” and selling 150,000 emails and hashed passwords stolen from Bitcointalk.org for 25 Bitcoins, where the passwords are hashed with sha256crypt.
Hacker embedded the “1812 Overture” song in the background with a dazzling animated picture show.
According to Bitcointalk admin Theymos, it’s possible that the hackers gained access to the database. He says the website will not be restored until he figures out precisely what vulnerability the hackers leveraged. He’s offering 50 Bitcoin to the first individual who can pinpoint the security hole.
It now appears that the FBI are behind the attack:
The FBI seized over $3.3 million in digital currency after busting up the online drug marker known as The Silk Road, and on Friday morning, someone spotted what is likely the online address where the feds are keeping all that money. The seized funds are in the form of bitcoins, the world’s most popular digital currency, and bitcoin addresses are public things. You can’t take the money, but you can see it.
That someone then started broadcasting the address on the popular discussion website Reddit. And pretty soon, the address turned into something else.
You see, anyone can transfer money into a public bitcoin address, and when you transfer, you can post a message that’s as public as the transaction. Within hours of the address being discovered, anonymous protesters started peppering the address with messages accusing the feds of blatant hypocrisy in taking down the Silk Road. Call it a protest by payment.
It’s yet another example of the way Bitcoin changes the role of money in the world. With Bicoins, money isn’t just money. It’s something that can serve so many other purposes.
The first protest message came in at 11:05 today, and it was a bit oblique. “This is a loan for standard interest.” It contained a link to a story about $20 billion in cash abandoned at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, and a second link to a documentary about life after death. It cost 0.001 bitcoins, about a tenth of a cent.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... in-addres/
