Bitcoin Jesus Offers Bounties to Hunt Down Hackers and Thieves

Roger Ver is so well known for his role in the rise of the worlds most popular digital currency that some people call him The Bitcoin Jesus. That makes him a prime target for hackers. Theyve stolen his money, and theyve broken into his email account. But the Bitcoin Jesus is becoming the Bitcoin Vigilante.

I am tired of seeing real criminals, with lots of victims being ignored, while traditional law enforcement is busy going after perpetrators of victimless crimes such as those involved in the Silk Road Marketplace, Ver says.

In 2012, someone hacked the online currency exchange Bitcoinica, stealing tens of thousands of bitcoins Ver had stored there. And in May, someone broke into his old Hotmail account, using it to steal sensitive information. Then things came to a head last week, when someone infiltrated an email account belonging to another big bitcoin name: Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious founder of the digital currency. Ver thinks it was the same hacker who busted into his Hotmail account.

After all this, hes fed up with hackersand a little mystified too. The part that annoys me the most is that all of them are plenty smart enough to find honest work, he says. Last spring, he placed a bitcoin bounty on his Hotmail hacker. And now, hes crowdsourcing the idea, so others can offer similar bounties when theyre victimized. He just launched a website called Bitcoin Bounty Hunter that pays for information leading to the conviction of the perps behind several prominent bitcoin hacks.

The project is yet another example of the technology behind bitcoin remaking far more than currency and online payments.

The site takes advantage of bitcoins ability to move money around the internet privately, and Ver says it could be used to let anyone anonymously create, contribute to, or collect a bounty. Naturally, bounties are paid in bitcoin.

Hes currently the guy who controls the money and decides when a bounty will be paid, but he says the project is a work in progress. Eventually, he wants to use an advanced digital currency programming technique called a smart contract to allow bounties to be paid out automatically. The project is yet another example of the technology behind bitcoin remaking far more than currency and online payments. Its also reinventing everything from smart contracts to secure chat clients.

The site lets anyone post an anonymous bounty anytime theres a crime with a victim, Ver says. To collect your bounty, you must assemble a dossier of evidence, get it digitally notarized using a nifty bitcoin blockchain hack called Proof of Existence, and forward it to law enforcement. Then you waitpossibly a very long time. Vers website pays bounties only upon conviction. Its like a digital Crimestoppers that way.

Right now, the site offers 37.6 bitcoinsmore than $17,000for information leading to the conviction of whomever took over his and Satoshis email accounts (if thats indeed what happened). Separately, Ver is setting up separate bounties for information leading to the conviction of the criminals who stole hundreds of thousands of bitcoins from the Japanese bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox and for the hackers who stole money from Bitcoinica. Ver lost 25,000 bitcoins in that hack. Ver will seed the Mt. Gox and Bitcoinica bounties with 2 BTC each, but he expects that to grow as word of his effort gets out.

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Bitcoin Jesus Offers Bounties to Hunt Down Hackers and Thieves