Yeah bitcoin
Where do they live? It is totally anonymous, and when you buy bitcoin, all they do is put you on the list. I am going to need that computer. Should I- Should I like- send it off to get the hard drive done? Um, I have a- I have a history of tech support. I will bring you my laptop. Alright here it is. Oh my god it feels so big. It was not water damage. I opened up the computer and it turns out that the battery had exploded inside the computer.
But, I managed to get the hard drive out, I connected it to my computer, and I went down into the studio with Producer Damiano Marchetti. Okay, it is, uh, Tuesday, January 2nd, Welcome to the new year, Damiano.
Are you ready for this odyssey of discovery? I had it in backwards. The hard drive is spinning. The hard drive is spinning, which means that… oh.
Wait a second — this looks like a wallet address. It has no transactions, it has not received any bitcoin, it has not sent any bitcoin.
So do you remember when I said Jia bought her bitcoin from a bitcoin exchange, which is— PJ: Basically, instead of her managing her own bitcoin keys and worrying about potentially losing them and never getting her bitcoin back, she could leave it on this site. And the good news is Jia remembers where she bought her bitcoin. She bought it at a website called Mt. So, in the early days of bitcoin, Mt. Gox was like the Bank of America of bitcoin. And what happened was, one day in early , Mt.
And then, a document leaked from Mt. Gox that said over the course of several years hackers had stolen about , bitcoin from Mt. One of the biggest bitcoin exchanges houses called Mt. Gox has gone offline.
It seems to have vanished. Transactions have been halted, and the CEO is unaccounted for after resigning from the bitcoin foundation. People were freaking out about this. There was talk that this could be the end of bitcoin entirely, because there was half a billion dollars worth of bitcoin that was just gone. Which, today, would be worth ten billion dollars. People start filing lawsuits left and right.
The only bright point in this dark tale, I mean, at least for us, is that Mt. Gox puts a portal on their website that lets you check to see if you had bitcoin there when the site shut down. Like if your name was Jia Tolentino. So I call Jia…. I walk her through the site. It will take you to the Mt.
Gox bankruptcy filing system. Uh, she tries to login. Like, what password was I using in She has like my level of memory. The temporary authentication code will be sent to the contact email address that you entered on the bankruptcy claim form.
I could have made us rich. I will never give up. As long as you have hundreds- potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars locked on the internet somewhere— JIA: Gox to speak to. Like the right bank teller. Hello, thank you for calling. How can I help you today? Uh, I would like to check on the, um, account balance of an account on Mt. And basically I learn that this operator has a ton of polite ways of saying no. But I could, I could give you the information, and maybe they would get back to me?
Is there a way to contact the trustee directly? Unfortunately we cannot promise anything like that ALEX: Thank you so much sir, have a nice day then. So, at this point I decided that my last option was to escalate this whole thing, to go to one person who I was positive would know whether Jia has any bitcoin on Mt Gox: The owner of Mt.
His name is Mark Karpeles. Crypto Drama in the past 2 hours: The Binance statement, however, was very insistent that there was "no evidence of the Binance platform being compromised. All funds are safe. There were irregularities in trading activity, automatic alarms triggered. Some accounts may have been compromised by phishing from before. We are still investigating. We're using cookies to improve your experience.
July 17, Coindash heist Ether Bitcoin. The smoke and mirrors that exhaust most attempts to understand if something is real or not, a large current running just beneath the surface of the IoT universe we are creating for ourselves, is tricky in spades for cryptocurrencies. Because technology is so lucrative , and because for most people, trying to understand if it actually adds value or another positive derivative to the collective conscience of the money markets in these days of swiftly shifting sands, making a decision to invest or not is extra hard.
But…there is now a fair amount of substantiation if not a conclusive, to support that the secure underpinning of bitcoin, blockchain technology, may well be developed sufficiently in the next 5 years or so to actually provide a level of security that will enable cryptocurrencies to become safe enough to trust - if not implicitly, at least to the degree that will make them a part of our collective existence in a way that has not been achieved yet.
Because virtual currency is capable, not just possibly but with a documented frequency of probability, of suddenly, unpredictably, disappearing into thin air. This cool new wampum built on a not-so-new technology that is being amalgamated, mashed up, and repurposed as a new technology - a different possibly better solution for something else, is still a work in progress.