$70 million worth of bitcoin were stolen from NiceHash by a hacker. Why was NiceHash holding on to so much Bitcoin?
Minimum withdraw limits?
As of post time, theres been no data on how much of this 70 million was due to miners. NiceHash like other mining pools have a minimum payout. Understandable that these services hold on to your shares until they are confirmed but to set minimum payouts on certain cryptocurrency is asking for trouble.
Minergate has different minimums based on the coin. For instance you must have .01 bitcoin to withdraw to a wallet.
Imagine how many users attempted to mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrency only to have less than the minimum withdraw amount?
By holding on to a miner's share until a minimum amount is mined is putting these services at risk. These mining services should lower limits to get as much earnings as possible to miners ASAP in order to lessen the risk of losing millions.
By lowering withdraw limits, miners can collect and move their pool shares to their own wallets and thus reduce the risk of a mining pool being hacked for millions of held payments.
Who knows how much of that 70 million worth of bitcoin was held pending a minimum payout?
Mining pools, beware... because of this breach you can be assured a competitor will pop up with lower withdraw limits and better security.
There was no reason for NiceHash to have that much in bitcoins on hold for payouts.