Re: [ANN] MANDATORY UPDATE ██ ZEITCOIN MOVEMENT [FULLY POS] ██

Quote from: a_cat_named_joe on February 15, 2015, 04:50:43 PM

Just saw the news about BTER. Seems I took a hit. I hope not too many others were affected. We were warned. Here's the latest on what BTER have to say on their website :-

7170 BTC got stolen from our cold wallet in this transaction:

https://blockchain.info/tx/f5b0363f03e1ed8bb812c135361ea93590c831ce9f13a3750be1b93575baccc6

720 BTC bounty for chasing it back.

All wallets have been shut down and withdrawals of the unaffected coins will be arranged later.

BTER.com
Email:support@mail.bter.com
Phone:400-0070-955
QQ: 4000070955

Question 1: If it's a cold wallet, how can the coins be stolen?

Question 2: Are we fated in that just as we get to the top of a coin vote poll, the exchange closes down!? We were at least 8th out of 256 and rising faster than all the other coins on BTER.

Q1: Inside job. If you have the private key everything is possible. Cold storage isn't a solution. Thief can import the key --> the wallet is hot.
Different scenario: Bruteforcing with vanitygen, high calculation power and a lot of luck. (watch my signature - It took ~10 Minutes with an old AMD card.)

There are some webpages with thousands of random-generated keypairs - If a key matches with an existing key (let's say the thief is monitoring all accounts >1000 BTC against his database) he would be the winner. And the next question could be: Is "thief" the right term then? (I don't know how key generation in Bitcoin core works, but if it works with a system time randomizer, you could try to generate addresses with a manipulated system time. But that's only a thought.)

A "good" key generation could be: Mouse moving + personal message + systime + actual CPU temperature + ID of the third process in your taskmanager + hash of the current block.

Had too much beer today.

Cheers,
Ray