Was reading last night about the owners of these market sites (silk road, sheep etc), transferring everyones money in their acc and randomly shutting down their sites.
The users are just left there like
THE FUCK?
was reading bout the one guy with $3m usd completely manipulating the market today and keeping the prices low.
he is only doing that for one reason 
I dont know much about this shit, but i can bet the clever people already bought their shit and sold their shit already.
You man are on THIN ice.
unless you have bitcoins.I dont know much about this sh*t, but i can bet the clever people already bought their sh*t and sold their sh*t already.
You man are on THIN ice.
no one in here has bitcoins so this thread should slowly die
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6
Some fan-made physical bitcoins. (Photo: antanacoins/Flickr)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.
A couple of reddit users realised that the sheer size of the heist makes “tumbling” the coins - the normal method of laundering bitcoins - impossible, as long as they kept on their toes. Someone with bitcoin can send some to a tumbler like bitcoinfog, where it will be split into smaller subdivisions and mixed with other bitcoins from other places, recombining and splitting again several times over until the whole amount eventually comes out the other end, theoretically in such a way that it’s impossible to track. Silk Road’s in-built tumbler successfully foiled the FBI, allegedly.
However, reddit user TheNodManOut managed to track where the first bunch of transfers out of Sheep went, and from there andsilkroadreloaded2 worked out which tumbler that the thief was using. Here’s how silkroadreloaded2 describes what’s happened since (“Tomas” is the alleged owner of Sheep, and one of the suspects for many users):
All day, we've been chasing the scoundrel with our stolen bitcoins through the blockchain. Around lunchtime (UK), I was chasing him across the roof of a moving train, (metaphorically). I was less than 20 minutes, or 2 blockchain confirmations, behind "Tomas".He was desperately creating new wallet addresses and moving his 49 retirement wallets through them, but having to wait for 3 or 4 confirmations each time before moving them again. Each time I caught up, I "666"ed him - sent 0.00666 bitcoins to mess up his lovely round numbers like 4,000. Then,all of a sudden, decimal places started appearing, and fractions of bitcoins were jumping from wallet to wallet like grasshoppers on a hotplate without stopping for confirmations.Shit!He was tumbling our stolen bitcoins a second time, and a tumbler is unbeatable....Unless you guess which one it is, nearly all the coins belong to the person you're tracking, jump in with him, and get jumbled up through the same wallets using the same algorithm. I was hopping from foot to foot shouting "come on!" at my laptop, waiting an age for 6 blockchain confirmations to get 0.5 btc into "bitcoin fog". My half a bitcoin got sliced and diced through loads of wallets and I followed the biggest chunk with blockchain.info - along with 96,000 stolen ones!
Or, in other words:
>He gathered 96,000 in one pot, then split it into about 50 smaller ones. then he saw me 666ing them all. Imagine a sports stadium with 96,000 people in it, each with $1000.He sent them all via different routes all over the world, but the same 96,000 people then arrived at a different stadium and he went to bed.Now there are 96,001, and I just phoned you on my mobile to tell you where the stadium is.A major problem with tumblers is that they only work with lots of bitcoins coming and going from a lot of different sources - if a tumbler is taking in 96,000 bitcoins, those will massively outnumber all other bitcoins being tumbled and it’ll be easy to spot them coming out the other end. Mix in a little of your own with all those other ones and you'll find out the wallet addresses that the tumbler uses, and it should be easy to spot large transactions splitting off from there.
The fascinating consequence of this is that you can see the stolen bitcoins on the public blockchain, and as long as there are people keeping tabs on it there’s going to be no way for the thief to cash in on their haul. Considering how people rely on tumblers to maintain anonymity when buying illegal stuff online, this unusual loophole is something of a revelation.
Right now, as you’re reading this, you can watch as the the thief starts trying to move their bitcoins on again - it’s currently down to 92,000 bitcoins and dropping as smaller chunks begin going out. Selling those bitcoins and turning them into cash is going to be extremely difficult, as the major Bitcoin exchanges all demand proof of identity (specifically to avoid charges that they're involved in money laundering), and if they're broken down into smaller quantities to sell via a site like localbitcoins.com a paper trail will still be generated. As soon as it's possible to link one real-life bank account or identity to any bitcoins from that stash, it will be possible to work out their real-life identity.
This counts as one of the largest robberies in history at Bitcoin's current market value, ranking in the same company as real-life thefts like the $108m diamond theft at the Harry Winston store in Paris in 2008. 96,000 bitcoins also places the thief as one of the wealthiest Bitcoin millionaires on the current rich list (but bear in mind that few serious Bitcoin players keep their currency in just one wallet) - and all without having to go to the trouble of wearing balaclavas or threatening someone with a gun.
Let's watch and see what happens next.
shit is mad
i was just thinking why dont hackers steal everyone's bitcoins
they're attacking places with the most coins
would be jokes to see a headline "Winklevoss Twins lose millions again"
Hackers >>>
Its mad there is a whole other dimension to the internet. We are just the normal civilians working 9-5.
The hackers are the gangbangers and shotters etc.
I always found the shit intruiging but never bothered looking into it properly.
that reddit thread is fucked, how can someone think they can steal 100 million from a drug market place without pissing a lot of potentially very serious people off.
Did One of the Silk Road's Successors Just Commit the Perfect Bitcoin Scam?
By DJ Pangburn
Yesterday, Sheep Marketplace, an anonymous digital narcotics bazaar that grew popular after the shutdown of the Silk Road, announced that it had been robbed of 5,400 bitcoins—the equivalent of $6 million at current exchange rates—and then promptly shut itself down. This came just days after Black Market Reloaded announced it would be shutting down due to an inability to absorb a massive influx of new users leaving Sheep Marketplace.
Writing on the marketplace's homepage, the administrators claimed that one of its vendors, EBOOK101, had exploited a bug in the system that allowed them to pilfer the bitcoins.
“This vendor found [a] bug in the system and stole 5,400 BTC—your money, our provisions, all was stolen,” the Sheep Marketplace's message read. “We were trying to resolve this problem, but we were not successful.”
The announcement did nothing to quell rumors that the site was in fact an elaborate scam. If these rumors are to be believed, then it’s a short step toward wondering if the 5,400 BTC theft was an act of misdirection, and not a separate incident by unknown assailants.
Making money in digital back alleys isn't hard, if you know what you're doing. Among the many revelations to emerge from the Silk Road's implosion was that Ulbricht made a great deal of money on bitcoin transaction fees—millions, in fact. This model of direct user fees helps to eliminate users' fear that any particular marketplace is running a scam.
The mysterious shutdown of Sheep Marketplace, which relies on vendor fees for funds, follows a tumultuous few weeks for the site and its vendors. Beginning November 20, or in the days following, large volume Sheep vendors found that they were unable to withdraw their bitcoins. These vendors and other Sheep users took their complaints to the site’s forum and Reddit. Sheep admins addressed these complaints by assuring users that the site was experiencing technical problems related to the update of an automatic tumbler used to disguise transactions. (The site’s timeline of erratic behavior was arranged semi-coherently by the person or people behindSheepMarketScam.com, a site that is compiling the updates of multiple Reddit and Sheep forum threads.)
By November 27, Sheep Marketplace claimed 90 percent of users were now able to withdraw bitcoins. This turned out not to be the case. Two days later, admins announced that users would be able to withdraw 1 BTC, but only after a 22-hour countdown clock had expired. According to updates on SheepMarketScam, the clock appeared to be operating according to some wacky kind of Einsteinian relativity. Adding insult to injury, many vendors were unable to withdraw bitcoins after the 22 hours had elapsed. With bitcoin’s valuation skyrocketing following a positive reception in Congress two weeks ago, this behavior looked suspicious to Sheep users and observers.
Admins of the Sheep Marketplace then claimed (the chronology here is fuzzy) that they didn’t want to flood the bitcoin network with small transactions, another curious move given bitcoin’s booming business. The vendors who were able to withdraw, according to SheepMarketScam, had less than 1 BTC in their accounts to begin with. The implication here being that many vendors with larger vaults of bitcoins were unable to withdraw, leaving the alleged scammers free to cherry pick the most fruitful accounts.
The same day, in a bit of circumstantial Monday morning quarterbacking, Reddit userthrowme1121 posted a new thread on the Sheep Marketplace subreddit, acknowledging that he/she was now convinced the Sheep was a scam. The new theory: a couple of vendors had slashed drug prices like infomercial salesmen right around the time the site started experiencing technical difficulties.
“We all know that Sheep is Czech owned,” wrote throwme1121 in his original subreddit post, claiming Czech vendors were also involved in the site's administration; namely, ctrlaltweed and PREMIUMGOODS, who are apparently friends. “These 2 vendors have dropped their prices like CRAZY on ALL products,” added throwme1121. “In addition, they have added new products like Cocaine and MDMA that they have NEVER stocked before, and they are using stock images not their own. And you guessed it—FE ['finalize your transactions early'] on everything because of Sheep withdrawal issues.”
Under this theory, if ctrlaltweed and PREMIUMGOODS could convince buyers to purchase both existing and new drugs at deep discount, they could flood their accounts with bitcoins. That would leave the site's creators or hackers—either of which theoretically could have created the above vendors as dummy accounts—free to potentially run with the money. (It’s worth noting that ctrlaltweed was a well-known and respected Silk Road vendor before jumping ship to the Sheep.)
One day later, Sheep users, working off of numbers from the bitcoin monitoring site Blockchain, posted on Reddit that 39,918 BTC ($40 million) simply disappeared into the digital ether—making EBOOK101’s alleged 5,400 ($6 million) heist look like chump change. This mysterious exodus of 39,918 BTC seems to have occurred only after administrators blocked users from withdrawing their bitcoins from the site. This move, according to a Y-combinator blog post, is the hallmark of a virtual drug market scam. While all of this might smell like a smoking gun, determining if EBOOK101 was a rogue vendor or a dummy account behind a larger Sheep Marketplace scam could prove difficult given the anonymity of virtual black markets.
By November 30, Sheep Marketplace, feeling the heat of scam accusations, took their forum offline and posted the following message: "We are enabling a spam filter for the forums, as the number of posts had got out of control. We will be enabling the forum once this is in place. Please try to stay calm. This is a temporary measure, and we will keep everybody updated when we have further information".
Reddit user RilkSoad thought the movement of bitcoins could, as the site claimed, have something to do with the administrators performing a “tumbler integration.” This, in layman terms, is a means of obscuring transactions on virtual black markets. “Maybe they've completed tumbler integration for incoming transfers and have moved the existing money out so that they can tumble it back in and increase all of our security?” RilkSoad wondered. “I'm just playing devil's advocate here really, while I'd obviously prefer this not to be a scam I have to keep the possibility in mind.”
So, was the Sheep Marketplace a scam, or was the site, as its admins claim, the victim of theft? The consensus on Reddit, SheepMarketScam, and the site's forum is that the black market's creators were the thieves. Sheep Marketplace, for its part, isn’t doing much to help its cause or assuage its users.
Assuming the Sheep was behind the scam, it would seem that deep web and bitcoin anonymity might have guaranteed a perfect digital heist. But, the site's founders may have left virtual cookie crumbs leading back to their identity. As Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts so perfectly illustrated in his downfall, even the most powerful anonymity tools will not cover up carelessness. Could the same hold true for the Sheep Marketplace founder?
On November 2, writer and researcher Gwern Branwen appeared in the Silk Road subreddit to post about a then-unnamed marketplace. “I have been given some interesting information,” wrote Branwen. “I would like to establish priority and timing for it ... if you have a moment, please do me a favor by quoting the hash"—a "cryptographic hash precommitment proof of knowledge," which he appended to establish that he possessed certain information without revealing it—"in a comment; if a few accounts do it, it will make it easier to confirm that I did in fact post this hash on 3 November 2013 and have the information I will claim to have had.”
Sunday, around 7:00pm EST, Branwen uploaded a Pastebin page divulging the information gleaned from the anonymous hacker. It turns out the unnamed marketplace was Sheep Marketplace.
The leaker claims you can see the Tor icon if you zoom in on Jiřikovský's computer screen.
“On 2 November 2013, I was contacted on IRC by a pseudonymous chatter, 'an anonymous security hobbyist,'” wrote Branwen. “He said he had some information for me if I would swear to keep it secret. I agreed as long as it didn't involve violence like hitmen.” The security hobbyist had recently read Branwen's bet that BMR and SMP would die in a year, but thought he could do Branwen one better: He would provide evidence that Sheep Marketplace was created by Tomáš Jiřikovský, an accused bitcoin scammer.
The hacker also let Branwen know that he'd passed this information on to the FBI (more on that below). According to Branwen, the mysterious figure also took credit for leaks related to Black Market Reloaded and Project Black Flag (itself a victim of bitcoin theft). Branwen read the results, checked the links, and agreed that Jiřikovský was the likely creator of Sheep Marketplace. Then, as noted in his Pastebin post, Branwen organized his notes, made copies of all linked webpages, and prepared it all in a single compilation available for download via Dropbox.
The documents note, among other things, that Jiřikovský owns the Sheep Marketplace VPS hosting service, and controlled several other domains on that service, Old Cans and Font Park being two of them; that he was the earliest Sheep Marketplace promoter, advertising it on other sites earlier this year; that he is a Czech developer who runs Ubuntu, just like the Sheep Marketplace developer; and that his email address is listed on the Bitcoin Scammer List. They also prove that Branwen’s source had identified ctrlaltweed as a suspicious moderator and vendor almost a month before throwme1121 did so.
Even before the mysterious leaker’s help, Branwen smelled something fishy with the goings-on at Sheep Marketplace. “The veriest Google search [of Sheep Marketplace] would turn up that clearnet site,” wrote Branwen in his Reddit post The Bet: BMR and Sheep to die in a year. “And ithas been pointed out that the clearnet Czech site hosted by HexaGeek was uncannily similar to the actual hidden service.”
Branwen then criticized Sheep Marketplace’s official explanation for the clearnet mirror site, which was that “fans” had set up the fully-functioning mirror on cloned software many months before the Deep Web site started attracting the Silk Road exodus hordes.
Does this definitively prove Jiřikovský’s involvement in Sheep Marketplace, let alone the bitcoin theft? The information gleaned by Branwen’s source seems pretty damning. The evidence could lead to vigilante justice by scorned buyers and sellers, by hackers, and by law enforcement. If bitcoin is to be made palatable for the masses, especially in the wake of the recent effusive praise on Capitol Hill, those invested in the cryptocurrency's future will want to bring the Sheep Marketplace thieves down, and prevent similar scams from happening again.
Which raises a third interesting scenario that could explain the Sheep Marketplace mayhem. As the mysterious hacker who doxed Jiřikovský told Branwen, he passed the information to the FBI on November 2. That means the FBI had an 18-day head start on its investigation (assuming it undertook one) before the site started experiencing problems. That would be more than enough time for the FBI to reverse-engineer the Sheep creator’s identity, as they had done with Silk Road’s Ulbricht.
Considering the FBI puppeteered Anonymous informant Sabu, convincing Jeremy Hammond to dump the Stratfor data onto the bureau’s servers, would it be very surprising if the feds commandeered Sheep Marketplace? It's possible that, with information on Jiřikovský, perhaps the FBI was able to track the Sheep’s bitcoin transactions, and nab careless vendors.
In this anonymous free-market matrix, there is no legal recourse for the scammed. Every user is anonymous and making transactions in anonymous currency. That makes it harder for law enforcement to bring their digital surveillance tools to bear on the drug war, but it also makes it harder to establish human trust on the deep web. Amidst the meteoric rise of bitcoin, and the promise of the security and anonymity that comes with cryptographic currencies, the people of virtual black markets—especially ones named "Sheep"—have forgotten the age-old maxim that a fool and his money are soon parted.
madness, the internet >>>>>>>
peak for that tomas guy, one way or the other
internet is very deep. guys will get bodied because of this.
holding stable, quark, peer and a measly 24 megacoins now.
all others have been sold.
holding stable, quark, peer and a measly 24 megacoins now.
all others have been sold.
so you sold your bitcoins too?
Props though on this thread, it has been a hell of a ride. You have brought a lot of people in with an opportunity to make a bit of chain including me.
nah my bitcoins are staying with me for now
waiting it out
all the money I've made over the last few days with the other ccs I've put back into bitcoin
no worries. Someone from this forum introduced me to my first 3 bitcoins back in '11 times. so thank them i guess.
made any losses on your alt coins?
holding on to my litecoins for a while, hope btc-china and mtgox arent long with the integration....
no losses
have quite a ridiculous amount of stable and quark though so i'm still a bit vulnerable
i have put back the half coin i began this trading journey with, as well as a bitcoin on top, so if any losses come from the above gamble it won't matter too much
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1s2f6j/dont_deposit_into_btce_withdrawals_arent_working/
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everyone should defo be stashing their loot in offline/paper wallets. Bare dodgy-ness going about.
come across that the other day^
only on about bank transfers pissing about n everything was eventually sorted out with a lot of hassle
as ppl pointed out btc-e has nothin to gain from scamming people, they make stupid amounts from transaction fees everyday
have people been chuckin shit in their offline wallets with no issue?
mines all still there
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i dont even know tbh, seen so many different reason suggested online (holiday weekend, markets correcting itself, pump & dumps, large orders pending over the weekend, etc) then alot of the newbies worrying and selling straight away when stuff decreases.
Reckon it will start to climb again overnight.
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Rippy
Might buy more LTC now that they're around 20 euros again
Bitcoins on localbitcoins are back around 720 mark as well
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