I have no idea WTH this article about an alleged BitCoin scam is saying, but it sounds important:

Dell SecureWorks security researchers have described a series of attacks earlier this year in which someone cleverly got miners of bitcoins and other “cryptocurrencies” like dogecoin to contribute their efforts to his mining pools, sending the proceeds to him instead of them.

Bitcoin mining involves solving complex computational problems faster than rivals, in order to add blocks of bitcoin transactions to the “blockchain,” the shared bitcoin ledger. Not only does this keep the blockchain going, but it also generates new bitcoins as rewards for the miners. Obviously, getting there first requires a lot of raw computational power, so most miners pool their resources.

According to SecureWorks, the attacker netted around $83,000 between February and May of this year. To accomplish this scam, it seems he had access to a router at a Canadian ISP, either by hacking into it or by somehow knowing the password.

I suspect that anyone who sees cryptocurrency as the great hope for some form of vaguely-defined “liberty,” but who doesn’t have an extensive knowledge of network and software engineering, or whatever the computer people* are calling it, is deluding themselves. Fiat currency, as it’s called, may be proclaimed from on high, but I’m not at all convinced that it’s in any way worse than something that has the root of the word “cryptic” right there in its name.

* To whom I mean no disrespect, as it’s not they who are misusing the technological wonders they’ve created.