A few thoughts - Sunday, May 4, 2014
Posted: Sun May 04, 2014 12:00 pm
Very short comment for today:
1.
It's a Sunday, and I only have two days a week to work on my mining pool, so I need to get back to work, so I won't be saying much today. However, I thought it would be a good idea to comment on this latest "hack" at localbitcoins. This is another case where the company wasn't actually hacked; instead, someone tricked a hosting provider into providing a root password.
It amazes me how such a huge company holding so much money is using a third-party provider like that. Haven't they learned from all the 2012 hacks where rogue employees stole huge wallets?
One of the first things I did in December was to spend 0.9 bitcoins and buy a server for our pool. For only $1000 plus $199/month, we can host the pool ourselves on a FiOS business class connection that provides 300/65Mbps connectivity and no cap, on an alarmed property. There is no bad employee at the hosting company who can abuse his privileges and copy our wallets, and we control our own backups. Given how cheap this is, and how 65Mbps is more than what you get at almost all shared hosts (who oversubscribe their so-called 1Gbps connections), why haven't the security "professionals" figured this out yet?
Why are people still using shared hosts?
2.
Has anyone here noticed that the price rarely moves on Fridays and Sundays, and there is rarely any news on those days either?
3.
Yesterday's informal poll ended up with 44 votes for being around multiple bubbles, and 26 being their first bubble. That surprises me. I bet if we ran that poll in /r/bitcoin, we would end up with a 25/75 split or even a 10/90 split, however.
On the other hand, one could read the results to say "you should know better" when people start panic selling due to the repetitive Chinese news, or when people claim that bitcoins are in a worse position now than they were at this point in previous cycles.
1.
It's a Sunday, and I only have two days a week to work on my mining pool, so I need to get back to work, so I won't be saying much today. However, I thought it would be a good idea to comment on this latest "hack" at localbitcoins. This is another case where the company wasn't actually hacked; instead, someone tricked a hosting provider into providing a root password.
It amazes me how such a huge company holding so much money is using a third-party provider like that. Haven't they learned from all the 2012 hacks where rogue employees stole huge wallets?
One of the first things I did in December was to spend 0.9 bitcoins and buy a server for our pool. For only $1000 plus $199/month, we can host the pool ourselves on a FiOS business class connection that provides 300/65Mbps connectivity and no cap, on an alarmed property. There is no bad employee at the hosting company who can abuse his privileges and copy our wallets, and we control our own backups. Given how cheap this is, and how 65Mbps is more than what you get at almost all shared hosts (who oversubscribe their so-called 1Gbps connections), why haven't the security "professionals" figured this out yet?
Why are people still using shared hosts?
2.
Has anyone here noticed that the price rarely moves on Fridays and Sundays, and there is rarely any news on those days either?
3.
Yesterday's informal poll ended up with 44 votes for being around multiple bubbles, and 26 being their first bubble. That surprises me. I bet if we ran that poll in /r/bitcoin, we would end up with a 25/75 split or even a 10/90 split, however.
On the other hand, one could read the results to say "you should know better" when people start panic selling due to the repetitive Chinese news, or when people claim that bitcoins are in a worse position now than they were at this point in previous cycles.
- Days until July 24: 81