After a year in which the company suffered a high-profile hack, ethereum startup Parity is now moving forward on key project development.
CoinDesk
Russian Tourists Lost 4 Million Baht in Bitcoin to Fake Interpol Officials
Over the years, we have seen multiple stories regarding people scamming Bitcoin holders. It is a very worrisome trend which only grows more popular, it seems. More specifically, a group of fake Interpol agents scammed Russian tourists out of their Bitcoin holdings. A total amount of 4 million Baht worth of BTC was taken from them. It is not the first nor the last time such incidents will occur. An official investigation is underway to hopefully retrieve the stolen money.
According to Thai Visa, the incident took place in Muang District. More specifically, a Russian couple found themselves face to face with two Russian men. At that time, the men identified themselves as Interpol agents. They immediately claimed the couple was involved in some irregular Bitcoin activity. No evidence of these claims was ever provided during the incident. That is not surprising, as it is clear these individuals were looking to scam the Bitcoin holders regardless.
Fake Interpol Agents Want Your Bitcoins
By taking the couple by force, the tone was set rather quickly. A third Russian man entered the room shortly afterward. His demand is simple: the password for the netbook computer. Additionally, he obtained the Bitcoin account password. It is unclear if this applies to an exchange or a desktop wallet. For now, the details regarding that particular aspect remain rather vague. Either way, the account held a total of 100,000 Euro worth of Bitcoin.
The couple was scared and eventually gave in. Facing a threat of being drugged and handed to the Thai police is not all that appealing. It took a total of five hours before the fake Interpol agents got what they wanted. Thankfully, no physical harm is done to the couple, although they are still pretty shaken up. After contacting the Thai police, we now have to await what the investigation turns up. Bitcoin transactions are rather easy to trace due to the transparent nature of its blockchain.
So far, it seems the fake Interpol agents have fled to Malaysia. This seems to confirm the Thai police knows all too well what is going on or who is behind this theft. Assuming that is the case, it should be easy to rectify the situation. Whether or not the Russian couple will get their money back, seems highly unlikely. It is evident cryptocurrencies will continue to attract criminals all over the world. This is a rather problematic development, but there’s little one can do about it. Criminals have become very bold in their attempt to steal BTC, though.
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Hypnotherapy may Help you Recover Lost Bitcoins
As a Bitcoin owner, one of the worst feelings is losing access to your wallet or private key. After all, storing your Bitcoin is done in such a way they can’t be recovered without key information. This is only normal for most people, but it is confusing for others. Thankfully, there may be a solution in sight to recover lost passphrases and passwords. Although hypnotherapy is not necessarily the best way to go, it seems to work quite well for some.
Not everyone would go to great lengths to recover a Bitcoin wallet password or recovery seed. Noting this information down is of the utmost importance. However, people can still lose access to this information for many different reasons. The file containing this information is lost, stolen, or destroyed. Thankfully, a Bitcoin wallet can often be imported into a new solution if you have the necessary information. Hypnotherapy can be of great help to remember passwords and recovery seeds in this regard.
Hypnotherapy to Recover Lost Bitcoins
More specifically, there is a hypnotist in South Carolina specializing in this type of activity. This person helps people recall forgotten passwords or find misplaced storage devices. It can be well worth checking out if you have a Bitcoin wallet on a USB device you can no longer find. Jason Miller, the hypnotherapist, does charge a fee of one Bitcoin plus 5% of the money recovered. This means he has to be very certain about his skills. It is an interesting business model, though, and some people seemingly want to explore in a time of need.
Especially people who bought BTC years ago will benefit from this solution. We often hear stories about people losing access to a wallet. In most cases, they misplaced the device or can’t remember the password. Using hypnotherapy to recover this information makes a lot of sense. At the same time, hypnotherapy is still “frowned upon” in social circles these days. That’s a bit unusual, considering this method has scientific roots. It’s not just smoke and mirrors, nor does it require any “belief” in the system either.
Whether or not people will use such a method to recover their bitcoins, remains to be seen. It is certainly true a lot of coins have been lost forever. Or that is what we think, at least, unless the wallets have recovered over time. Jason Miller may certainly be onto something in this regard. He claims the collection of techniques used should yield satisfactory results. Only time will tell if that is the case, though. There are other ways to recover lost bitcoins, but hypnotherapy may be the least “intensive” way to go about things.
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Cruchbase Feels Bitcoin Lost Sight of Being a Medium of Exchange
The opinions on the current state of Bitcoin are rather divided, to say the least. Some people think it’s doing well, whereas others grow increasingly worried. According to Crunchbase, Bitcoin is no longer a means of exchange. Instead, it has become slow, expensive, and anything but convenient. This is anything but a popular opinion, mind you, but there is some truth to this statement as well.
For a cryptocurrency with such a high market cap, Bitcoin lacks some basic functionality. Sending transactions is a bit of a gamble if it has to happen quickly. Including high fees is always an option but it shouldn’t even be necessary. Unfortunately, Bitcoin is no longer a means of exchange, according to Crunchbase. The value of the world’s leading cryptocurrency certainly doesn’t represent the state of the ecosystem. At the same time, these issues are nothing new under the sun either.
Crunchbase Doesn’t Like the Current State of Bitcoin
In its current form, Bitcoin is slow and expensive to use as a means of exchange. It makes for a worthwhile store of value, though. In fact, it may outperform any other financial asset in existence today in that regard. Crunchbase confirms Bitcoin shouldn’t be looked at a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash whatsoever. That situation may reverse again in the future, though. For now, it seems unlikely anything will change in the near future.
The first-mover advantage Bitcoin has is slowly eroding, to say the least. It is evident this cryptocurrency still has plenty of potential if something changes. Pushing down the fees will be very difficult until SegWit adoption increases or the Lightning Network comes around. Either of those outcomes is still months away, at best. The amount of money one pays for the speed of confirmations imply doesn’t add up. Crunchbase also touches upon the growing transaction backlog. It has been another problem for Bitcoin due to the lack of scaling.
Granted, one could easily adorable this to growing pains. It is evident Bitcoin is still maturing in front of our eyes. However, the currency has been around for many years. These issues have been known for many years as well. A lot of time was wasted due to political bickering over how scaling should work. The community eventually settled on a solution which has an adoption rate of under 15% months later. An uneasy situation, to say the very least
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James Howells Considers Digging Up a Landfill to Find Lost Bitcoin
Remember that dude from 2013 who accidentally threw away his hard drive full of Bitcoin? Well, he’s back hitting headlines again as the recent surge in BTC price has encouraged him to restart his treasure hunt. He’s prepared to get his hands pretty dirty too… by digging up a landfill site.
James Howells from Newport, Wales was an early cryptocurrency miner. He started back in 2009 and had amassed some 7,500BTC by solving the complex equations used to secure the Bitcoin network. During a big cleanup of his home in 2013, the hard drive upon which he’d stored his private keys got mistakenly thrown out. The value of the cryptocurrency stored on it at the time was then several hundred thousand dollars. That was when Bitcoin was trading at around 0 a coin.
Today, with the price of Bitcoin being almost hundred times the 2013 figure, the hard drive is worth million. It’s therefore hardly surprising that the Newport-based IT worker is keen to be reunited with his stash. He’s now considering having the landfill excavated. This, of course, is no small job. Howells explained to The Independent:
A modern landfill is a complex engineering project and digging one up brings up all sorts of environmental issues such as dangerous gasses and potential landfill fires… It’s a big, expensive and risky project.
Howells had stopped mining long before Bitcoin started to grab headlines in quite the way it did during late 2013. He’d sold most of the components of the computer he’d used on eBay but was savvy enough to make sure he kept the hard drive containing his private keys. Unfortunately, during a clear-out, he believes that this ended up being put in a general waste bin at a local landfill site. This will then have been emptied onto the tip and will since have been buried by many tons of junk. Howells blames “family life and moving house” for the mishap.
Whilst it’s certainly the largest case of lost Bitcoins known about today, Howells’ tale isn’t the only example of such a colossal mistake. A similar story comes from the editor of Gizmodo Australia, Campbell Simpson, who threw around 1,400 BTC away back in 2012. When he’d originally bought the Bitcoin, they’d only cost him AUD. Today, buying such a quantity of the cryptocurrency would set you back almost million.
However, the largest cache of lost Bitcoin might be those of their original creator themselves. Recent research from the blockchain data-crunchers at Chainalysis hints that the one million Bitcoin reserved for Satoshi Nakamoto will most likely never enter the wider market. It’s believed that these are spread out over many thousands of wallets and their owner has either lost the private keys, or has since been killed. If the person or people behind Bitcoin are still alive, they’re either the dictionary definition of the perfect “hodler”, or kicking themselves much harder than either Campbell Simpson or James Howells.
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James Howells Considers Digging Up a Landfill to Find Lost Bitcoin
Remember that dude from 2013 who accidentally threw away his hard drive full of Bitcoin? Well, he’s back hitting headlines again as the recent surge in BTC price has encouraged him to restart his treasure hunt. He’s prepared to get his hands pretty dirty too… by digging up a landfill site. James Howells from Newport, … Continue reading James Howells Considers Digging Up a Landfill to Find Lost Bitcoin
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FANG Shareholders Lost Almost 20 Times More Than Bitcoin Investors Today
While all eyes were told to focus on the cryptocurrency chaos over here… the widely-owned ‘no-brainers’ FANG stocks suffered total losses that were almost 20 times larger than the ‘losers’ in Bitcoin… At the end of the day – amid all the turmoil – Bitcoin ended the day down over billion in market cap.
BitNewz.net
Chainalysis: Up to 3.79 Million Bitcoins May Be Lost Forever
According to blockchain analysis company, Chainalysis, up to 23% of the Bitcoins currently in circulation may be lost forever. The study represents the first detailed effort to quantify the number of units of the cryptocurrency for which private keys have long since been forgotten.
Of course, it’s impossible to say exactly how many Bitcoin are being hoarded and how many will truly never be recovered. For this reason, Chainalysis have placed an upper and lower estimate on the figure. The company believe that between 17 and 23% of the Bitcoin that have been mined today have been lost. In terms of actual BTC, these figures represent between 2.78 and 3.79 million.
These “missing” Bitcoin are mostly from the very early days of the technology, when each unit was worth pence, rather than above ,000 as they are today. Presumably, folk like the man paraded through the papers in 2013 for throwing out a hard drive with 7,500 BTC would have been more vigilant with their stashes, had they been worth what they are currently.
Whilst their precise methodology is a guarded secret, Chainalysis use age and transaction metrics to work out which Bitcoin haven’t been moved in a very long time. They broke their findings down into five categories: mined Bitcoin since the start of 2017, strategic investments, buying/selling, Satoshi’s original one million coins, and those that haven’t moved in the last two to seven years.
Chainalysis used their methodology to determine that no Bitcoin mined in 2017 were lost, and of the BTC used for strategic investments and buying/selling, only around 4% were missing for good. Interestingly, the company believe that all of Satoshi’s original coins have long been lost, and that between 30 and 50% of those Bitcoins that haven’t moved in the last two years are also gone. The latter statistic is the trickiest to measure. It’s very difficult to determine which wallets are owned by someone playing a very long waiting game, and which are owned by people who have lost their private keys. However, events like the August hardfork cause many long term holders to move coins and thus they can be determined as still in circulation.
The figures represent BTC that is genuinely lost and never to return to the economy. They ignore those that have been hacked or stolen. This is because these will eventually make it back into circulation, as the thief responsible is now able to control them.
The implications of the number of coins lost are potentially huge for the Bitcoin price. Of course, the total supply is fixed and no new coins can be minted above the 21 million cap. Bitcoin might be far more scare than people currently give it credit for. This would mean a much greater price in the long term – should people continue to desire holding BTC.
A senior economist for Chainalysis, Kim Grauer, had some thoughts about the implications of increased Bitcoin scarcity and whether the market had already priced in the coins gone for good. Fortune report:
“That is a very complex question. On the one hand, direct calculations about market cap do not take lost coins into consideration. Considering how highly speculative this field is, those market cap calculations may make it into economic models of the market that impact spending activity. Yet the market has adapted to the actual demand and supply available – just look at exchange behaviour. Furthermore, it is well known monetary policy procedure to lower or increase fiat reserves to impact exchange rates.”
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What’s going on with Ethereum $280m in cryptocurrency ‘lost’ amid security scare
Approximately 0m worth of the cryptocurrency Ethereum has been frozen in time and potentially lost forever after a critical bug was accidentally triggered.
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A Platform That Solves the Problem of Lost Wallets Exists
The cryptocurrencies lost due to the forgetfulness of the user, broken technology or intentional destruction, cannot be restored ever. The total number of “dead” bitcoins can be about 4.3 million and their cost is about billion at today’s rate. As it is known, the total number of bitcoins in the world is limited: they have … Continue reading A Platform That Solves the Problem of Lost Wallets Exists
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