Hitting the news now:
Nearly US$64 million (C$82 million) in bitcoin has been stolen by hackers who broke into Slovenian-based bitcoin mining marketplace NiceHash.
The marketplace suspended operations on Thursday while it investigated the breach, saying it was working with law enforcement as “a matter of urgency” while urging users to change their passwords.
The hack was “a highly professional attack with sophisticated social engineering” that resulted in approximately 4,700 bitcoin being stolen, worth about US$63.92 million (C$82 million) at current prices, said NiceHash head of marketing Andrej P Škraba.
Bitcoin is the first, and the biggest, "cryptocurrency" – a decentralized tradable digital asset. Whether it's a bad investment is the $97 billion question (literally, since that's the current value of all bitcoins in existence). Bitcoin can only be used as a medium of exchange and in practice has been far more important for the dark economy than it has for most legitimate uses. The lack of any central authority makes bitcoin remarkably resilient to censorship, corruption – or regulation. That means it has attracted a range of backers, from libertarian monetarists who enjoy the idea of a currency with no inflation and no central bank, to drug dealers who like the fact that it's hard (but not impossible) to trace a bitcoin transaction back to a physical person.
https://www.theguardian.com/technol...en-hack-attack-marketplace-nicehash-passwords
