Free bitcoin lucky number hack
That hack bore all the same hallmarks as this one except the SIM hijacking. In the ensuing melee the hacker asked me to send 10 Bitcoin and that he would send me 11 back in the morning.
Confused, I told them that I had some Bitcoin but not that much. This interaction led to my hacking. Once it was clear that I had some bitcoin somewhere the hackers decided I was their next target. Ultimately I got away lucky. Nothing major was stolen as of today and I took control of all of my accounts fairly quickly. I had some two-factor set up but because my phone was compromised first I lost access to most of it.
The biggest question is how the hackers took control of my SIM card. This is the most troubling and T-Mobile is looking into what happened. My trouble is not new Bitcoin exchange Kraken warns of this and suggests a few tricks to keep yourself safe.
They also recommend changing your telco email to something wildly inappropriate and using a burner phone or Google Voice number that is completely disconnected from your regular accounts as a sort of blind for your two factor texts and alerts. This is my first major hack in the Facebook age and the feeling of panic I felt is still palpable. How can you make every bitcoin exchange completely transparent while keeping all bitcoin users completely anonymous? The second is security. If the ledger is totally public, how do you prevent people from fudging it for their own gain?
The ledger only keeps track of bitcoin transfers, not account balances. In a very real sense, there is no such thing as a bitcoin account. And that keeps users anonymous. Say Alice wants to transfer one bitcoin to Bob. That transaction record is sent to every bitcoin miner—i. Now, say Bob wants to pay Carol one bitcoin. Carol of course sets up an address and a key.
And then Bob essentially takes the bitcoin Alice gave him and uses his address and key from that transfer to sign the bitcoin over to Carol:. After validating the transfer, each miner will then send a message to all of the other miners, giving her blessing.
The ledger tracks the coins, but it does not track people, at least not explicitly. The first thing that bitcoin does to secure the ledger is decentralize it. There is no huge spreadsheet being stored on a server somewhere. There is no master document at all. Instead, the ledger is broken up into blocks: Every block includes a reference to the block that came before it, and you can follow the links backward from the most recent block to the very first block, when bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto conjured the first bitcoins into existence.
Every 10 minutes miners add a new block, growing the chain like an expanding pearl necklace. Generally speaking, every bitcoin miner has a copy of the entire block chain on her computer.
If she shuts her computer down and stops mining for a while, when she starts back up, her machine will send a message to other miners requesting the blocks that were created in her absence. No one person or computer has responsibility for these block chain updates; no miner has special status. The updates, like the authentication of new blocks, are provided by the network of bitcoin miners at large.
Bitcoin also relies on cryptography. The computational problem is different for every block in the chain, and it involves a particular kind of algorithm called a hash function. Like any function, a cryptographic hash function takes an input—a string of numbers and letters—and produces an output. But there are three things that set cryptographic hash functions apart:. The hash function that bitcoin relies on—called SHA, and developed by the US National Security Agency—always produces a string that is 64 characters long.
You could run your name through that hash function, or the entire King James Bible. Think of it like mixing paint. If you substitute light pink paint for regular pink paint in the example above, the result is still going to be pretty much the same purple , just a little lighter.
But with hashes, a slight variation in the input results in a completely different output:. The proof-of-work problem that miners have to solve involves taking a hash of the contents of the block that they are working on—all of the transactions, some meta-data like a timestamp , and the reference to the previous block—plus a random number called a nonce.
Their goal is to find a hash that has at least a certain number of leading zeroes. That constraint is what makes the problem more or less difficult.
More leading zeroes means fewer possible solutions, and more time required to solve the problem. Every 2, blocks roughly two weeks , that difficulty is reset. If it took miners less than 10 minutes on average to solve those 2, blocks, then the difficulty is automatically increased. If it took longer, then the difficulty is decreased. Miners search for an acceptable hash by choosing a nonce, running the hash function, and checking. When a miner is finally lucky enough to find a nonce that works, and wins the block, that nonce gets appended to the end of the block, along with the resulting hash.
Her first step would be to go in and change the record for that transaction. Then, because she had modified the block, she would have to solve a new proof-of-work problem—find a new nonce—and do all of that computational work, all over again. Again, due to the unpredictable nature of hash functions, making the slightest change to the original block means starting the proof of work from scratch.