My god, it's full of stars... Best read of my young week. Thanks. I like it when comp sci professors affirm my suspicions and do so in a scathingly snarky way.
Again, objectively, Bitcoin exchanges have had a crisis every six months, because they use terrible databases whose code quality matches that of a masters project. I went to the Cornell dairy barn, I drank the fizzy milk drinks that the agriculture students designed for their masters projects. The code being peddled under the first-generation NoSQL rubric is analogous in its construction and quality.
If I were to encounter my bank's CEO on IRC, I would not think "how cool and edgy, lemme get a screen cap, LOL," I'd put my money in a mattress and short the bank's stock.
Overall, Bitcoin has been an ongoing massive online course on economics and distributed systems for the libertarian masses. It's ironic that Mt. Gox turned into a chapter on fractional reserve banking.
The Bitcoin demographic is 98% male, between the ages of 20-30. I base this on official online polls, confirmed by pictures of the Bitcoin Christmas party at Bitcoin HQ in NYC, which somehow managed to look more depressing than my high-school dances. This demographic uses their laptops for viewing highly questionable content and their phones for installing flapping bird software from Jimmy Bob's Software Inc. These are the same people who have started but not yet finished reading The Fountainhead, the same people who grant permissions to make phone calls, activate cameras and send SMSs to phone apps whose sole function is to act as a flashlight. Running a wallet is the last thing they should be trusted with.
What Nigerian scams are to your grandfather, Bitcoin exchanges are to the 20-30 semi-tech-savvy libertarian demographic.
Then there is the increasingly disconcerting social side. I've always steered my own life towards doing fun and interesting things with smart people in happy and positive communities. Bitcoin, at the moment, is in a slump, with a community that has become its own parody. While the underlying cryptocurrency is quite interesting and the wallet software is fairly good, the exchanges are based on layers upon layers of bad software, run by shady characters. The Bitcoin masses, judging by their behavior on forums, have no actual interest in science, technology or even objective reality when it interferes with their market position. They believe that holding a Bitcoin somehow makes them an active participant in a bold new future, even as they passively get fleeced in the bolder current present. And as if the world does not have enough schmucks with Macbooks who call themselves entrepreneurs, we have the term "Bitcoin entrepreneurs" used unironically by mainstream media. The community has designated a Nobel leaurate as its nemesis, solely because he asked some inevitable questions every thinking person in his profession ought to ask. As far as I'm concerned, the only winning move is to not play this game. Sure, you may make money, perhaps lots of it, on the inevitable ups and down that are sure to come, but you'll be associating with the wrong kinds of people. If your life goals did not include some amount of pride and self-respect for you and your community, there were tons of other, easier ways of making money fast that you could have taken.
It would have to be although there is not a Nobel prize in economics.
I just did like three double takes trying to figure out who "she" was. I wonder why the author chose that pronoun, and why it stood out to me so much.The technical obstacle is that the attacker has to either front-run Mt Gox or wait for it to slip up. Specifically, she has to capture a legitimate transaction issued by Mt. Gox, modify it, and have her modified transaction accepted by Bitcoin miners in lieu of the original one.