There’s a £60m Bitcoin Heist Going Down Right Now – Watch It In Real Time

Via The New Statesman:

One of the largest heists in bitcoin history is happening right now. 96,000 bitcoins – that’s roughly £60m as of the time of writing – was taken from the accounts of customers, vendors and administrators of the Sheep Marketplace over the weekend.
Sheep was one of the main sites that came to replace the Silk Road when it closed in October, but it too has now closed as a result of this theft. It’s a little hard to work out exactly what’s happened, but Sheep customers have been piecing it together on reddit’s r/sheepmarketplace.
Here’s what happened: someone (or some group) managed to fake the balances in peoples’ accounts on the site, showing that they had their bitcoins in their wallets when they’d actually been transferred out. Over the course of a week the whole site was drained, until the weekend when the site’s administrators realised what was happening and shut everything down.
Originally it was thought that only 5,200BTC – or £3m – was taken, with a message posted on Sheep’s homepage blaming a vendor called “EBOOK101″ for finding and exploiting a bug. However, over the weekend it became clear that the amount stolen was much, much larger.

In a normal robbery that money would be gone by now, but it isn’t. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and bitcoins can’t just disappear. It works because each and every transaction is public and visible to each and every other person using the Bitcoin network, and a person is only as anonymous as their link to their wallet.

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Distributed by RINF Alternative News