The Haoles at Coinbase announced earlier today that they will be suspending operations in the state of Hawaii indefinitely. An email sent to customers in the Aloha state informed them that "The Hawaii Division of Financial Institutions has recently communicated regulatory policies which will render continued Coinbase operations in Hawaii impractical. " Customers are being given the usual 30 day period to either transfer "their" Bitcoin to another address, or sell for fiat using the company's exchange. No word was available if or when services would resume there in the future. Sorry for your laws
Author Archives: shinohai
Dream Market (Yet another Darknet Market) Accounts Compromised
A reddit user named Skillzythehacker has claimed to have compromised thousands of accounts on Dream Market, though market administrators said no Bitcoin were at risk. The attacker said of all the compromised accounts, none were using 2FA, a supposed panacea for login security issues.
Dream market admin wombat2combat released the following message:
- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The user /u/Skillzythehacker sent the mods of /r/Darknetmarkets a list of over 50 login credentials [names and passwords] for dream market accounts. After looking at them more closely we can verifiy that they are working and the accounts are pretty old because their user IDs are between about 100k and 500k while the latest ones [when registering a new account] are higher than 700k. It is therefore very likely that these login credentials were obtained through a database breach/hack. There were already made some changes to the current dream market warnings and this issue will be added to them too. - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJYqiTvAAoJEMPzj/CHV15DtLUP/jQ9hpsuqUg/QMcoTN35rWgI QVIbU2rK1APMnf3QL1WAGnqcyv3u3ymh3gV2CC9HkQDOBIbgkPOk77bjMMoV3G1/ rvDdSTsNHE4pv878k/IOT6mgBuQN3h2YEPsTbuT2XVzZoI2/PX3l+Zs/TEUTNnku KIQSkZNWPQpIr8DKPXDmGW3Zulpfgv8+1b1m2NrThZe4hTQ9LObmE9gboeI6keRs AVkrfG2ijB40ADjYWtIyj4AvxdvsGotL2p/QnrRfaDX8dfJWbpEeK/KEg0zwdVqe VnTWsRoHCCb65IJ3It8YFIKhmDZRH27ulT4nCtyPu8grRRhQn+pZYP8wj0VBsOsa raHNko4cJBo4y/BQjEfYHWjKO485w+RF1NRNfDuH8sj86zV2NpERtGCD9HZJ3hdk 07EN4/tuJbRlhImIJCx6I+Q7YCDtc2eKhRqy5IX2qwEspZvhUiDELVSvwquW2Hoz OYmvkrMgao0Tdk4kaefk6VOXi+ClxK6VNYAvHWN//mylwOk4Av7Z4Kg5I33N1tfS QY4bh3e7JwkQ/LHJghhRSeeTM5AAzFOPluLeXxx6zQf74f7fQYDfRJd/LRq2yp7H MDV91mS/ID5814UIC0aNXTBfUzn7+bxJus0yJKTjGNiZBpE2SuoKsWARX03En9sn pMtjAJ+DD5BZBcC+oiu5 =b1Lf - -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
The attacker is said to have provided proof he could log into various accounts, leading users to speculate that user info was stored with weak or no encryption. (archived)
McDonald's Exposes Nuts After Hiatus
Exposed nuts are again to be seen around McDonald's restaurants worldwide, as the company reverses an order that required peanuts and nuts to be served in individually wrapped containers. The move is a blow to sufferers of persons with nut allergies who had long benefited from the policy. A statement from the company said "All products available at our restaurants may contain or come into contact with peanuts, tree nuts or other allergens".
McDonald's employees worldwide are now free to liberally sprinkle nuts on any dessert, although a local franchise assured me they plan to keep their nuts wrapped for the time being.
ZCash Sinks After Bug Induced Chain Fork
Zooko's ZCash suffered a severe setback today, initial reports calling it "chain fork" that occurred due to using an old version of the "anonymous" software. Zooko advised users to update to the latest release in order to avoid any potential problems, but "further analysis" of the bug would be released, likely to assure users the scam isn't collapsing prematurely as they try to figure out what happened. Prices on the bologna exchange Poloniex slid to $33 USD per coin, listed at #18 in the coinmarketcap.com ranking of scamcoins, dipping below even other obvious scams such as Steemit and Dogecoin. (archived)
Police One Forum Hacked In 2015, Users Notified Now
Police One, a forum frequented by members of US Federal and State "Law Enforcement" agencies, confirmed today that 715,000 of member accounts have gone up for sale on the deep web after a breach that occurred in 2015. The database contains usernames, password hashed with every hacker's favorite md5, email addresses, dates of birth, and other miscellaneous data for the bargain sum of 0.4 BTC. Forum officials said they were notifying members of the hack so they could reset passwords, although this will do little to prevent dedicated attackers from future attacks.
Shinohai's Saturday Shitcoin Roundup: "100 Million US dollars" And More!
Certain factions within the Chinese mining cartels threaten to spend $100 million USD1 to kill off any competition to Bitcoin Unlimited. The announcement was made by a previously unknown pool known as "BTC.TOP" which alleges to have 6.8% of global hashrate at time of this article.
Buttfinex users were elated that their "Hacker credit" token rose to a roughly 76 cent high, leaving some with hopes they might not get totally scammed after all. A twitter user by the name of "Bitcoin Nemesis" released an open letter on pastebin in which he claims to be the only person able to recover the missing funds, in addition promising the prosecution of the scammers running the show. The shadowy user further threatens to dump a list of "Bitcoin people" on the 15th "to law enforcement, intelligence agencies, to tax authorities."
Users of the scammer paradise btcjam reported withdraw errors on the platform earlier this week, leading redditards to speculate Mt. Gox 2.0 is imminent.
Venezuelan Fiat/Bitcoin interface SurBitcoin advised users to withdraw their balances after the company had it's account with Banesco shuttered for unknown reasons. No reason for the sudden halt in operations was given, though officials said they hoped to resume operations in roughly 2 weeks. Users were encouraged to use localbitcoins in the interim, which has been a popular platform in the South American communist haven to facilitate p2p trades.
The SEC published a notice “to solicit comments on the proposed rule change from interested persons” regarding Barry Shillbert's "Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT)" fund, which he hopes to trade on the NYSE.
A figure notably denominated in the wrong kind of unit ↩
Tor Based Hosting Service Hacked
Freedom hosting II, the webhost that offered website hosting for tor and "Deep Web" users, has reportedly been breached by unknown "Anonymous" hackers. All webpages hosted by the company were displaying the following message Friday morning:
Hello Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked
We are disappointed… This is an excerpt from your front page ‘We have a zero tolerance policy to child pornography.’ — but what we found while searching through your server is more than 50% child porn…
Moreover you host many scam sites, some of which are evidently run by yourself to cover hosting expenses.
All your files have been copied and your database has been dumped. (74GB of files and 2.3GB of database)
We are selling all data (excluding cp) for 0.1 BTC. Send 0.1 BTC to 14iCDyeCSp12AmhVfJGxtrzXDabFop4QtU and send your transaction id to fhosting@tt3j2x4k5ycaa5zt.onion or fhosting@danwin1210.me and We’ll get back to you with a full dump.
Up to January 31st you were hosting 10613 sites. Private keys are included in the dump. Show full list
We are Anonymous. We do not forgive. We do not forget. You should have expected us.
No Bitcoin payments had been reported on the address associated with the above message at the time of this article. Freedom Hosting is notorious for hosting fraud, scam, and child porn sites in both iterations of it's services.
US Postal Service Posts Curious Job Ad
The United States Postal Service is stepping up efforts to combat "darknet" market sales by hiring cybercrime investigators. The official title will be “Intelligence Gathering Specialist" and would be expected to trawl onion sites as well as popular clearnet gathering sites seeking to obtain information to help stem the flow of so called contraband through USPS channels.
An excerpt from the listing stated:
“Candidates shall be capable of performing a prioritized assessment of the data to identify the most critical and reliable data in order to identify , bitcoins, locations, accounts, services, travels, email addresses, IP addresses and other pattern of life data in an effort to determine physical attribution of an Internet identity. Candidates shall be capable of creating intelligence and investigative reports which represent the steps taken, the data sources reviewed and the conclusions drawn from the evaluation of the Internet information.”
US Pork Belly Inventory Falls To 50 Year Low
Bacon reserves in the United States fell to a record low in December,according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Frozen pork belly inventory totalled 17.8 million pounds, the lowest in 50 years. The result is a 20% increase in bacon prices, with demand outside the U.S. accounting for 26% of total volume. The Ohio Pork Council assured consumers that while prices of the crispy ambrosia may increase, supplies are in no danger of running out.1(archived)
Which is different from would be consumers being priced out. ↩
Roger Ver Presents Bitcoin.com Presents "Bitcoin" Unlimited Mining Pool Goes Over On Blocksize, Gets Orphaned
Roger Ver's bitcoin.com mining pool once again demonstrated its incompetence and total lack of knowledge regarding actual Bitcoin Monday by mining a block greater than 1 MB, valued at a total of 13.2 BTC in the process.1 The rest of the network quickly rejected the attempt to fork the network away from actual Bitcoin and ignored the buggy big block. Bitcoin Unlimited just released version 1.0.0 of their software, which was by and large untested, unlike the rigorous testing schedule and research that goes into therealbitcoin reference client. Disgraced former Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen shrugged off the news on twitter, the butthurt of his continual stream of poor decisions apparently still stinging. Sorry for your loss.
A healthy ~0.72 BTC in fees were attached to the block. ↩