It looks like people are saying ~4000 BTC got stolen.
That's ... an incredible amount of coin to be stored on the service. I would never have thought NiceHash had that much usage. Not that I thought NiceHash's usage was low, but ... well let's put this into perspective.
Only 1,800 BTC are mined on Bitcoin per day. Now, NiceHash is _not_ a Bitcoin mining pool; they just pay out in Bitcoin. But that should give some perspective as to the magnitude of funds NiceHash was playing with.
I've seen some people mention cold storage, etc. NiceHash isn't a service for storing coin. The intended usage is to only keep your (the user) profits on there long enough that it exceeds their minimum withdrawal limits. I'm sure some people leave coins on there for a bit longer, to reduce the % of their profits consumed by TX fees. But, for most intents and purposes, the funds on NiceHash are 100% hot funds.
So we're talking about 4,000 BTC of _hot_ funds. It's hard to fathom what their user base must be. It'd be like walking into a department store and finding out they have $56 million in their cash registers; not for any other reason than that they have enough business to justify it.
From Reddit: The owner of the company with a share capital of half a million euros is Bitorious (45%) based in Dornberk, its director is Marko Kobal, and 55% of the company is owned by H-Bit. The owner of H-Bit is Martin Škorjanc. An interesting fact is that Martin Škorjanc is the father of Matjaž Škorjanc, who was arrested by Slovenian police a year ago for online cyber crime with the help of the US FBI in Maribor.
It seems they are using the service of bitgo to store bitcoin though the following post is old. A reddit user seems to say that it talk to them via the support 2 months ago and they were saying they are using bitgo.
NiceHash only makes payouts once a day - they could easily keep their wallet offline, generate the payment transaction with the public key of their wallet and sign it on the offline machine. As far as the buyers who deposit funds to purchase hashing power, I'm sure they couldn't get to miffed about any withdrawals being delayed to ensure attacks like this just don't happen.
I had about $60 BTC in Nicehash. I'm aware to not store BTC in places like this, but given transaction fees, it's also not something where if you're working with a small amount of mining (just a single GPU) that you can transfer out daily without getting destroyed for transfer fees.
I'm not very familiar with how crypto currencies work but when such an incident happens, how hopeful can the company be that they will get their BTC's back?
I ask because they're saying on their reddit thread that they are working towards "solving this issue". What does that mean here?
almost zero, unless they have verifiable evidence that the funds were seized by someone internal, and can somehow exact the wallet's private keys from said individual.
weren't they pretty transparent by definition? if you are listing X offers of Y hashrates, all this data is public... or was public anyway until they put up that placeholder.
That's ... an incredible amount of coin to be stored on the service. I would never have thought NiceHash had that much usage. Not that I thought NiceHash's usage was low, but ... well let's put this into perspective.
Only 1,800 BTC are mined on Bitcoin per day. Now, NiceHash is _not_ a Bitcoin mining pool; they just pay out in Bitcoin. But that should give some perspective as to the magnitude of funds NiceHash was playing with.
I've seen some people mention cold storage, etc. NiceHash isn't a service for storing coin. The intended usage is to only keep your (the user) profits on there long enough that it exceeds their minimum withdrawal limits. I'm sure some people leave coins on there for a bit longer, to reduce the % of their profits consumed by TX fees. But, for most intents and purposes, the funds on NiceHash are 100% hot funds.
So we're talking about 4,000 BTC of _hot_ funds. It's hard to fathom what their user base must be. It'd be like walking into a department store and finding out they have $56 million in their cash registers; not for any other reason than that they have enough business to justify it.