This Is What Happens When You Hack and Extort the ‘Bitcoin Jesus’

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/dfwtbj/



This Is What Happens When You Hack and Extort the ‘Bitcoin Jesus’
By Robert McMillan
05.28.14 | 6:30 am

When the man known as “The Bitcoin Jesus” got hacked, he didn’t go straight to the police. He just tapped the power of bitcoin.

Last week, Roger Ver–an American-born ex-pat living in Japan who’s long been at the heart of the worldwide bitcoin community–was contacted by a hacker who had seized control of his old Hotmail account and used it to nab his Social Security number, passport number, and other personal information. The hacker threatened to exploit this information unless Ver forked over about 37 bitcoins, the equivalent of $20,000. But then Ver used the same number of bitcoins to put out a bounty on the hacker, and this instantly transformed the brazen cyber criminal into a penitent stooge.

“Sir, I am sincerely sorry. I am just a middleman. I was being told what to tell you,” the hacker told Ver soon after the bounty was posted, before later asking: “Are you going to order a hitman to kill me now?”

Libertarians have long hailed bitcoin as a way to free the world from the control big government and big banks. But with his 37-bitcoin bounty, Ver has given the world’s most popular digital currency a new kind of libertarian cred. For Ver, the digital currency is not just a way of storing and moving money without help from the authorities. It’s also a way of seeking justice, something that’s laid out in the Skype chat logs that Ver provided of his conversation with the hacker. Sure, you can wield this type of bounty using other currencies–and many have–but there’s something particularly appropriate about doing it with bitcoin.