Craig <[email protected]> wrote:
> There is no bank. There are over 100,000 nodes maintaining a shared public > ledger as to who owns what. Every time a transaction is made, it goes into > the public ledger. Whatever there is or is not, someone walked off with 700,000 units of it, if this report is accurate. That's worth $70 million, or maybe it is worth $7 million, or maybe it is worth nothing. People do not rob banks electronically nowadays. They used to, back in the 1960s and 70s, when computers were new. I have some amusing old books describing the techniques. They would never work nowadays. A typical one was the salami technique, combined with the Zzubrinski deposit. You take small amounts or rounding errors out of accounts and stuff them into the last account listed alphabetically, which is a dummy account that you opened with a fake name. Account holders who spot errors of a few cents are not going to complain. They figure someone had difficulty reading the check. In a large bank that piles up pretty quickly. As Krugman says, "To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value." BitCoins fail #2 because the value fluctuates and also, apparently, because they are not secure against theft. - Jed
