The title is a bit misleading as we don't know if the coins have changed hands. They probably just transferred them to a new address that they also control.
When I opened my wallet for the first time in a few years, I found the only way to get the coins out of the old version of multibit was to send it to all to a new wallet with new keys running new software.
Given the age of this wallet, something like that could be involved.
Arguably (by me) Bitcoin Cash is MUCH closer to "Bitcoin" than the current "BTC" chain. Bitcoin Cash coins were moved too though. It will be VERY interesting to see if they try and use Cash Fusion to effectively mix the coins on the BCH chain though.
but why would you need to rotate a cold wallet (presumably) key? Key rotating makes sense for your password or tls keys, because they're used on a regular basis on networked computers that can possibly be compromised. But if the private key is stored on an airgapped computer (or paper wallet) there would be no advantage. If anything pulling the computer out to do the signing presents more danger because there's opportunity for your house to be raided (by police or rival criminals) while you're doing the signing.
many people have the encrypted key pair and have been trying to brute force access for years.
so either someone succeeded, or it got rotated by simply moving the coins to literally any other address. of course, both of these outcomes are indistinguishable which is part of the beauty of the system, especially if someone was actually trying to ride out statute of limitations or something else.
they can still obfuscate their destination either way. if the source is illicit its money laundering, if the source is not illicit its just obfuscation, if done right the illicit source is never discovered having been replaced with a licit source.
I don't think the statute of limitations applies once you've been found guilty. That applies to the time limit for prosecution, not the time limit for executing asset seizure that was declared forfeit. It is always forfeit, you don't get to protect your ill-gotten gains if you manage (or someone receiving them manages) to hide them long enough. They still have a seizure order on them if, presumably the FBI, can figure out how to get them.
How would you obfuscate anything? The blockchain tracks every transaction. Not only can that money be traced forever the feds can claw it back from anyone who received it if they wanted to do that. Or follow it to the exit points if the owner tries to launder it via other means and apply pressure there.
There are services called tumblers which take bitcoins from multiple people (often multiple sources per person); mixes them up with bitcoins from lots of other people, transfers them about a lot randomly etc, then at the end spits out a series of transactions which add up to not quite the amount you submitted (different by a random amount).
Each of these transactions can be traced, but it can be difficult to track which output bitcoins relate to which input bitcoins.
> A file that some claimed was an encrypted bitcoin wallet containing the keys to the funds has been circulated in cryptocurrency communities for the past year, and – if it is what it was claimed to be – then a combination of brute computing power and good luck could have successfully decrypted the wallet.
It likely didn’t really leak. It’s a trick/scam they play on the naive. One can replace the cleartext section in the wallet with a unrelated tx reference that doesn’t match the actual encrypted private key. The wallet will act like the real one (it will show the referenced tx in the UI) but even if you could decrypt the encrypted private key, it would be for the wrong pubkey.
Someone might want to take more precautions generating keys for $1 billion vs $1 million. I'm betting this person (or persons) generated keys in a more secure manner (potentially a sharded key, or using hardware wallets) than the original keys, which may have been generated on a non-airgapped device.
That sounds like such a pain to access, though. Better to just have it in 10 wallets of $100m, plus one wallet with a few mil that you use for actual transactions.
> Key rotating makes sense for your password or tls keys, because they're used on a regular basis on networked computers that can possibly be compromised.
Surely key rotation only makes sense if the time between each rotation is much much less than the expected time between compromise and theft.
In high value situations, an attacker is highly motivated to ensure they steal Bitcoin very quickly after compromise. Especially becaus the clock is ticking until the compromise is discovered and mitigated.
Might just be a change of key infrastructure. If this was generated a long time ago, perhaps the owner wants something a bit more modern, like a HD wallet on hardware, something like that. More ergonomic and elegant than possibly holding on to a load of different keys.
But with the HD wallets you can switch a field in the derivation path for each coin. Then one seed can give you different looking addresses for each chain, from the same device.
Very briefly, secrets should have maximum lifetimes. This is for multiple reasons - someone could be brute-forcing it; algorithms are regularly found to be less secure than initially thought; keys leak over time.
Any secret protecting anything you care about should be rotated. The schedule is dictated by specifics.
Given that these were worth $350k at the time 8+ years ago, my guess is on a vendor that got out of prison and was carefully planning for a day to move it around.
Let's not infantalize him. Twenty six years old is not a "kid." He was a grown ass man who attempted to have someone killed. That being said, a double life sentence is extreme, considering many actual murderers get out after less than twenty years. Our draconian drug punishment escalations are not good.
I think you should presume innocent until proven guilty, if you’re a fan of our court system. And he was not convicted of attempting to have anyone killed.
I do not acknowledge the authority of the legal system of the United States of America over my own beliefs and statements. However, if I did, I'd just call to your attention the fact he was sentenced partly based on this the transgression I named, even if he was not charged with it. That would be enough for me to drop the "alleged" verbiage, were I inclined to put it there in the first place.
I believe the GP was attempting to draw attention to the fact that the majority of Ross's sentence was based on mere allegation of a crime. (Granted, with good evidence, but without due process.) The probable reason charges were dropped on the conspiracy to commit murder charge was it probably would have fallen to an entrapment defence. Hiring a hitman was suggested and pushed by someone acting on behalf of the government at the time.
Ross is no hero, but also, let's not pretend the court system acted reasonably here. If they had even a 50/50 chance of getting him on conspiracy to commit murder, they would have brought the charge to trial. The prosecutor didn't drop the charge to be nice. The evidence of entrapment probably would have hurt the case as a whole, so they dropped the conspiracy to commit murder charge. Yet, it appears this strong suggestion that he committed a serious crime played the majority role in his sentencing.
This should scare anyone around the world, given the long reach of US law enforcement. The prosecutor kept embarrassing entrapment details out of the trial and still got a heavy sentence for just the allegation of a crime. The prosecutor got to have their cake and eat it too.
The fact that he was sentenced based on a crime he was not convicted for is a travesty and in my opinion unconstitutional (violates the rights to a public jury trial and to due process).
Apparently there has been a long standing practice of judges finding facts to justify a longer second, but it's questionable whether the practice is Constitutional.
That's appropriate because a) it's important to be very careful when assigning criminal penalties, and b) they spend a lot of time and money getting at the truth.
But when discussing things casually, as here, neither is true. I'd say HN runs somewhere between "reasonable to believe" and "balance of probabilities". And that's about right. If I'm wrong about Ulbricht, no particular harm comes to him; if more information comes to light and I change my mind, there's no damage to undo.
The whole thread is about a harsh court sentence, so yes - it is very appropriate here.
> And that's about right. If I'm wrong about Ulbricht, no particular harm comes to him; if more information comes to light and I change my mind, there's no damage to undo.
Would you not agree that what you said is equally true for one who judges people at roughly the same high standard as courts?
If you want to use a court-like standard, sure, go wild. Although I think it's a mistake in that you don't have a court's powers. You're guaranteed to err on the side of the guilty even more than a court, even though you have much less reason to bias your judgment that way.
We know Kings of England have committed murders. We know dictators have committed atrocities. We know Germany attempted to get Mexico to attack the US. Should we not talk about those things just because they haven’t been tried in court? No, that would be crazy. We should talk about those things because they did happen and there is evidence.
And there is evidence in this scenario too, is there not?
> And there is evidence in this scenario too, is there not?
Not all evidence is created equal and the situation here where there was a functioning fair court system is quite different from situations where there isn't one. There was definitely some irregularities in the investigation, and a possibility of entrapment.
Regardless, i don't take issue with talking about it, i just take issue with saying he deserves to be punished for it when the allegations were never proven in court. He should be punished for the things its proven he did, not the things he might have done.
Yes. This should scare us all. Hiring a hitman was both suggested and pushed by someone acting on behalf of the government, and an entrapment defence had better than a 50/50 chance of working, or they wouldn't have dropped charges.
Ross is no moral hero, but let's not pretend he was treated fairly or reasonably by law enforcement or the court.
In truth, that really depends on where you fit into the legal/court system. Spurious allegations can be libelous, so make sure you have the right kind of clout, position, and justification before alleging anything serious, especially if you fall into the "private citizen" camp when making the aforementioned claims.
That's the first and hopefully last time I've seen "grown ass man" on HN. This isn't Reddit (although a tiny bit of Reddit humor and wordplay is nice from time to time).
But good news! The US draconian drug punishment laws are changing as we speak... for users, that is. Sellers are probably still at significant risk.
I do cringe at the sight of reading "grown ass man" considering that it does not really add much to what "grown man" could have accomplished. Thanks, I am glad to know I am not the only one who feels this.
may be the transfer of that $1B is exactly the way out of jail. Giving that the fed agents in the case so easily succumbed to the sub-$1M temptation, one can only imagine what $1B can buy you there.
The operator didn’t stash every Bitcoin that came in. A few vendors here or there may have withdrawn their funds. These were withdrawn from the main account, but who knows who owns it.
The point is that the media gets up in arms about criminal activity and money laundering with cryptocurrency but rarely ever reports crimes of a much greater magnitude made by “legitimate” institutions like banks.
Someone money launders with crypto and it’s on the front page. A bank launders hundreds of times more and it’s just another day. Perhaps you could say it’s because of the novelty of crypto, but I suspect the motives run deeper - crypto is a threat to modern financial institutions and turning public interest against crypto is in the best interests of the establishment.
Money laundering in traditional finance is a problem of scale: there's far too much of it and we don't police it well enough. The problem is tractable given enough enforcement tools and resources. Bitcoin's different - it has little AML control so it's super easy to write money laundering tools. Monero is even worse. Money laundering is built into the protocol, to the point where being able to determine the chain-of-custody over some funds is computationally infeasible. Cryptocurrency is designed to increase the scope of money laundering rather than just the scale, because it makes money laundering the default.
Think about how difficult it was to enforce copyright law in 1970 versus 2010. In the former, copyright enforcement was a matter of having enough lawyers to sue enough enterprises. In 2010, everyone has a commercial-scale copyright infringement device in their pocket. You practically can't enforce the law to the same level purely because the targets are too small and numerous and going after them is a PR nightmare. This is why the music industry fought against consumer-grade recording technology for so long (and lost). Regulating large businesses is a fundamentally more tractable form of law enforcement than individuals.
> Monero is even worse. Money laundering is built into the protocol, to the point where being able to determine the chain-of-custody over some funds is computationally infeasible. Cryptocurrency is designed to increase the scope of money laundering rather than just the scale, because it makes money laundering the default.
I would replace 'money laundering' with privacy and anonymity.
These properties are desirable. These properties give the individual undertaking the transaction a semblance of control. These properties prevent authorities from taking that control away except by using the law, which i think is a fairly good way to enforce control.
So if the individual feel that the law is unfair, they have the option to _not_ obey. If enough people choose to _not_ obey, it forces the court's hand and legislator's hand - this serves society.
Under centralized control, the individual does not have the option to not obey, because their transactions require approval from authorities. This approval becomes a chilling effect for change, and it makes it easy to target them before the general society is able to transition or understand. Civil disobedience is thus impossible under centralized control.
Right I had to explain this to someone last time this subject came up. Illegal != immoral, take for example the Jews in Nazi Germany because it's required by the internet to invoke Nazis :) . Anyways, had cryptocurrencies existed when the some Jews were trying to escape Germany, and had those Jews moved their assets into crypto it would have certainly been illegal but that does not mean it would have been immoral. There are quite a few people in which anonymous funds not trackable by the government lends to their moral cause, though that cause may very well be illegal in their country.
What behavior of mine do you think I should change? I didn't see any suggestion of something I actually did wrong. It felt like you were trying to criticize, but that your criticism had no actual content.
Indeed, the criticism is not of the facts but of the logic. My critique is primarily of your rhetoric. You requested a citation without offering a rebuttal. Yet, you you made a claim that appears to be equally well-founded, or as you're implying, un-founded.
Saying "citation needed" is a somewhat bland, passive-aggressive statement that itself lacks content. I'd have (and still would) appreciate reading the rationale for your skepticism.
I'm not interested in arguing with you for its own sake. I'm just saying the following because I don't like to see the kind of behavior in this community that I think is going on here (and I don't think it's intentional, fwiw).
Your criticism of me amounts to the fact that I asked for a citation of a statement I was skeptical about. I think that's pretty plainly not a legitimate criticism.
I think that you are the one who is being passive aggressive here.
If you thought my comment was passive aggressive, you could have just said so. (It generally is not passive aggressive to ask for a citation, but I can see how someone could think that.)
If you wanted me to explain the rationale for my statement, you could have just directly asked, instead of criticizing me in the way you did, which seems indirect and unfair.
I'm not interested in arguing for it's own sake either. I spoke up to fight a frustrating trend in internet argumentation.
> ... pretty plainly not a legitimate criticism
What's plain to you isn't plain to me, and vice versa. I think you missed the main thrust of my argument, which is getting at the hypocrisy of asking for a citation and then making an uncited claim. Perhaps more importantly, it's asking for logical argument to accompany requests for a source.
There's a related issue in the current scientific paradigm, fetishizing statistical p-values. People are so distracted by the veneer of a p-value (or a citation) that they forget to look for a plausible causal mechanism.
By the way, you still haven't explained your skepticism of the original statement you replied to.
> getting at the hypocrisy of asking for a citation and then making an uncited claim
A person asking for a citation is not disallowed from making a claim. Someone else is free to ask for a citation from me, in return.
You are not only incorrect, which is fine, but you're unjustly calling me a hypocrite, which, personally, I consider to be a rather non-nice thing to say.
Furthermore, my request for a "citation" was supposed to be equivalent to asking for "any sort of rationale." You are interpreting that overly legalistically. I'm was just trying to have a conversation, OK? And I did it in a polite way. I would have been happy to hear a rationale that was not a citation per se. It would even have been OK for the person I was responding to to say, "I don't know, I just suspect it," or "I heard it anecdotally," or whatever.
> There's a related issue in the current scientific paradigm, fetishizing statistical p-values. People are so distracted by the veneer of a p-value (or a citation) that they forget to look for a plausible causal mechanism.
I agree, although that's not related to my behavior here.
I'm annoyed by the same thing you are, which is when people use "citation?" as though it's a counter-argument. But I wasn't doing that. I wish I had just said, "What's your rationale for saying that." But you know what? I can't predict when someone is going to misinterpret a perfectly reasonable and polite thing I've said.
I think the thing I was responding to is exactly the (rare) kind of thing where an actual citation probably is the kind of answer someone with a rationale would want to give, as opposed to a causal explanation or some other sort of evidence. So you're preaching to the choir, here. I get what you're saying, i.e., that many people ask for citations in a context where a citation doesn't really make sense (for example, a controversial medical claim where there are probably numerous studies that seem to disagree with one another). This just isn't that sort of context. I could see myself making the same point you are making in a different context. It annoys me to be lumped in with those people that you and I are both justifiably annoyed by.
> By the way, you still haven't explained your skepticism of the original statement you replied to.
I just don't think it's true. I know that cryptocurrency is being treated as a financial asset. I haven't seen evidence that extortion or fraud are a major fraction of what's going on with cryptocurrency. I have enough familiarity and experience with the field to think that my sense of this is probably correct.
Bitcoin is 66% of the market cap of cryptocurrency. It's clear that bitcoin is being used widely as a financial asset (it's available in multiple funds you can get in brokerage accounts, there are many high-volume OTC desks, there are derivatives, there is now lending). There is a lot of journalism showing that large sums of money are flowing into bitcoin as a financial asset; for example, the company MicroStrategy purchasing $425M of bitcoin, or Robinhood facilitating bitcoin trading, or GBTC accepting inflows of hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase bitcoin.
In contrast, I'm aware of ransomware, but I suspect it's probably a very small fraction of the bitcoin/cryptocurrency economy (but, as I said originally, I would be interested to see evidence contrary to that). My sense is that it's pretty hard to effectively launder money with cryptocurrency, unless you stay out of the US and Europe and parts of Asia, i.e., unless you stay in the places where it's already probably easier to launder money. But again, that's just my sense, so if someone has an explanation contrary to that, I'd be interested to see it, which is why I asked.
I view many of the smaller crypto coins as scams, so there is actually an interpretation of OP's statement that I agree with - I guess it depends on how you define "fraud" and "a huge fraction." Again, bitcoin is 66% and is clearly not a scam (though it would be fair to ask why that's clear if someone doesn't already know - but my answer right now would be, go research it yourself, I can't take the time to explain all that). Bitcoiners may be misguided or wrong, but it's not a scam.
You've confused a critique of your rhetoric for a critique of yourself. There's no need to defend a turn of phrase so vigorously. If you'd just led off with, "No, I didn't mean it like that," as you've done here, then I'd have shut up. I mean, come on, surely you recognize how "Do you have a citation?" falls into the camp that both of us apparently dislike.
Anyway, back to the topic of Bitcoin. I think your assessment is right in that the bulk of Bitcoin transactions are speculative investments. However, given that the value of Bitcoin as an asset lies in its assumed eventual use as a currency, the original comment might also be correct in that non-speculative transactions are predominantly related to illicit activities. I'm unaware of any common legitimate purpose beyond financial speculation.
When one thinks of world trade, there's (these numbers are from a faded memory of an international trade class about 2 decades ago, so they're horribly wrong) something like $50 billion in goods exported daily. That's the world economy. Then there's $500 billion in currency derivatives traded daily to ostensibly enable exports across currencies, but it's really just speculation. It's not real trade. So when someone talks about the Bitcoin economy, it's hard to know whether we should be talking about just the actual economic activity conducted using Bitcoin as a currency, or whether we should include the speculative trades as well.
> You've confused a critique of your rhetoric for a critique of yourself.
If you call my comment hypocritical, I think you're calling me hypocritical. Apparently you don't think so. That's fine. It could be a cultural difference. Let's not litigate it.
> There's no need to defend a turn of phrase so vigorously. If you'd just led off with, "No, I didn't mean it like that," as you've done here, then I'd have shut up.
I don't think this is a charitable thing to say. If there was no need for me to defend it, there was no need for you to "attack" (criticize) my comment in the first place. If you don't agree, that's fine. Again, let's not litigate it.
> I mean, come on, surely you recognize how "Do you have a citation?" falls into the camp that both of us apparently dislike.
I don't agree. As I already explained, I think it's OK to ask for a citation, in a certain context. I don't think I was doing the thing you're complaining about and which annoys me. If you disagree, that's fine. Let's not litigate it.
I would have liked for you to find a way to continue communicating without continuing to criticize, but it didn't happen. Oh well. Let's call this conversation finished. Take care. On the bitcoin stuff you are bringing up, that looks fine to me. I don't have anything more to say about that.
If you'd like me to explain why I hate Bitcoin, look no further than the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index[0], which currently has Bitcoin using the same energy consumption as the nation of Chile. It provides less utility than a credit card, all while using 779092 times the energy needed per transaction.
I don't think it's inexplicable that we hate an ongoing environmental disaster.
You're not wrong. HN seems heavily biased against anything crypto. With Paypal, Square, MicroStrategy, and even JPMorgan adpoting/investing in Bitcoin, I think it's becoming legitimate.
Has anyone not been called GPT-3 yet? If you post anything remotely controversial then it's inevitable sooner or later. It's the current go-to for discrediting opinions you don't share.
Real estate is designed for people to live in. Money laundering through real estate is ancillary -- a bug -- and attempts are made to stop it. Regularly. Up to and including Vancouver instituting a 15% tax on foreign buyers and New Zealand banning non-residents from buying real estate.
Cryptocurrency is designed specifically, by virtue of its decentralized and trustless nature, to facilitate money laundering. It was a design goal. This is what it's for. That and of course, collecting the proceeds of ransomware. Another way of describing 'money laundering' is transferring value, without the permission of a centralized government authority, with the intent to conceal the source of funds (hey it's your money right?).
That it has yet to achieve the same scale is not relevant.
All sorts of illegal activities aren't done at scale, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be policed. Otherwise you'll be pointing to the small scale right up until the moment it's not small anymore, and then it's too late.
> Cryptocurrency is designed specifically, by virtue of its decentralized and trustless nature, to facilitate money laundering. It was a design goal.
If it was its designed goal, it would've also included provisions to provide proofs anonymously, and reduce physical traceability.
I very much see some cryptocurrencies tried, and some are moderately successful with it, but none have progressed much on the former other than by using crypto signing by some centralised, or semi-decentralised entity which processes the ledger, or does proof of work. So, none of the popular cryptocurrencies have achieved a true "non-chain" way of working, which does not rely on a continuous record of the global state of the ledger.
The cryptographic trust in such mechanism would be much less than in a non-anonymous ledger, where the state of all wallets is recorded for everybody to see, and check for signs of something weird.
Despite you being incorrect, its not even worth debating because the common denominator is that it looks like the state should just quit using public resources on trying to whitelist transactions since that seems to be the real waste, and find a new tool to curb whatever activity they were actually trying to stop.
> [Money Laundering] is what [cryptocurrency's] for. That and of course, collecting the proceeds of ransomware.
That's the wrong part, even if it was just hyperbole for literary effect then you are conflating legal terms you don't really understand then. Money laundering is a legal term that requires an illicit origin, not merely circumventing the permission of a centralized authority. You were correct that it is designed to ignore the concept of centralized authorities, the rest was either a completely incorrect extrapolation of that, or hyperbole that did not give the effect you thought it did as it just undermines your point and the strength of your argument.
Depends, I maintain that Paul Le Roux is the most likely Satoshi, and of course -- if true -- that would be why Paul Le Roux created it. [1]
> Money laundering is a legal term that requires an illicit origin.
I'm not 100% sure if it requires both an illicit source and intent to conceal or not. It might, but it sounds like we both have half the definition.
For instance, structuring -- breaking apart large transactions into smaller ones to avoid a currency transaction report -- is illegal regardless of whether the source of funds is criminal or not.
> Depends, I maintain that Paul Le Roux is the most likely Satoshi, and of course -- if true -- that would be why Paul Le Roux created it. [1]
Okay. And that's partially why I'm open to the idea of the government ceasing to use public resources on whitelisting all transactions, instead of debating you over whether something is or isn't money laundering.
Structuring is a different crime than money laundering, which is actually another exhibit on why I want the government to cease using bothering using public money and resources on whitelisting all transactions. I read enough court cases on Google Scholar about paranoid people doing legal things convicted for only structuring on Google Scholar to make this opinion, and this was before HSBC got a slap on the wrist for literally accepting cash deposits from the literal cartel and getting caught, undermining the whole point of whitelisting transactions to begin with.
>"For instance, structuring -- breaking apart large transactions into smaller ones to avoid a currency transaction report -- is illegal regardless of whether the source of funds is criminal or not."//
I assume you mean according to USC (ie USA law), could you cite which section please?
and pretty much trying to avoid any monetary reporting threshold is a criminal charge whether you intended to or not.
so this one is funny because almost every fairly poor person I know, the kind of people that would rarely have over $10,000 at once ever, are the exact people that would harbor some belief about doing X, Y and Z to "avoid transferring over $10,000"
Thinking about workarounds, of course carrying money over the border is limited to $10k too, but this was amusing (in a 'I can't believe they were that petty' sort of way):
>"There was also a case in Canada in 2013 where fluctuating exchange rates caused a man to have his funds seized. In this situation, the man carefully calculated and was carrying just under $10,000 CAD. However, by the time he reached the airport two days later, the exchange rate tipped his combination of USD and CAD dollars to over $10,000 CAD. Sniffer dogs detected the undeclared cash and the CBSA seized the total amount from him." (from https://clearitusa.com/u-s-customs-cash-limit/)
and carrying a cheque that's signed counts as carrying >$10k. So, I wonder about carrying a Bitcoin wallet?
1. Houses are not "the real estate market". People need dwellings to live in, and the real estate market is there to regulate people's ability to build and occupy them.
In a similar fashion to you, I could very well argue that real estate was designed to perpetuate class by way of a multi-generational ponzi scheme, because that's the de-facto situation.
In reality, like with cryptocurrency, trying to attribute intention where you only see an effect is just manipulative.
Cash does work pretty well for money laundering, except that it’s bulky. The $1 billion mentioned in this article would weigh 10,000 kilos and would require a semitrailer to move. And the big problem is that now you have to do something with it. You can’t buy anything worth more than $10k with it, without the government getting paperwork on it, so you’re kind of stuck with it.
(3) is a sufficient component in the US to be money laundering, so it's a sufficient working definition. cash is tracked fairly extensively, as anyone who's transferred large sums can attest to.
> Cryptocurrency is designed specifically, by virtue of its decentralized and trustless nature, to facilitate money laundering. It was a design goal. ... with the intent to conceal the source of funds
That is simply false. Virtually every cryptocurrency is 100% traceable.
Pseudonymity is almost never sufficient, as Ross Ulbricht proves.
Yes, there are a few cryptocurrencies for whom untraceability is a design goal. Obviously this does not include Bitcoin (which is the subject of this thread), and in general it doesn't include the vast majority of cryptocurrencies.
One single counter-example of someone who failed to take necessary precautions when committing a crime doesn't mean the tens of thousands of people you never heard of haven't been very successful.
Is that the same as a mixer? If so: sure, they work just fine, except that you've introduced a SPOF who can tell everyone who you are/where it came from/where it went, etc. It's also tough to call something that arose long after BTC itself a "design goal" of BTC.
Maintaining proper opsec for any significant length of time is extremely difficult, nigh impossible. Almost everyone will fail at some point. With pseudonymity, a single failure ever means everything is lost. With anonymity, only that single failure is lost.
Not taking any position on the rest, but you can mix/tumble cryptocurrency without SPOF: given a specific denomination of bitcoin (eg 1BTC,0.5BTC,0.2BTC,0.1BTC,etc; call it a DIME), set up one or more TOR hidden services with the following interface:
.init: generate a new wallet and return its public key, the public key of another wallet (probably one per service for obvious reasons) with at least a DIME to mix and a opaque token identifying (only to you) the pair.
.fini: given a token from .init and a transaction that adds up multiple source UTXOs and sends 1 DIME to each of a (sorted) list of wallets that includes the .init-generated wallet, sign that transaction with your source wallet.
.link: given a DIME size in BTC and a (.onion) URL implementing this interface at that size, add it to a internal list.
.list: given a DIME size, return (possibly a random subset of) the list from .link for that size.
For best results you'd need to formalize this interface a bit more and popularize it for better entropy and better plausibility of "well, I guess someone else thought this was a good idea to imitate". Speccing a client to interact with such services (feeding data from .list back into .link and collecting keys from .init to build transactions for .fini) is left as a excersize for the reader.
The key point is that you have disposable pseudonyms that will mix their coins with anyone who offers a valid mixing transaction. Assuming there is demand for mixing from anyone other than you (if there's not, you can't really do anything anyway), this captures that demand in order to satisfy your own mixing needs, while also allowing others to bootstrap the exact same trick by adding their own backends via .link.
There's QOS and anti-DOS issues to be solved, but it's definitely something that in principle can work.
IIRC it was an old domain registration in his real name that did him in. He realized it and change it, but the history was still there. Been a while since I read about it, but that seems to stick in my mind as how he ended up being unmasked.
There were a few failures I read about. It's kinda silly to argue about which specific one did him in when they all could've. But if he had been truly anonymous - if there was no way to link any one of his actions to any of his other actions - then obviously it could not have happened.
> Cryptocurrency is designed specifically, by virtue of its decentralized and trustless nature, to facilitate money laundering. It was a design goal. This is what it's for. That and of course, collecting the proceeds of ransomware.
You probably have some good points to make, but saying something like this is just willfully not engaging in communication with the other side of the argument. That is an egregious strawman which obscures whatever valid points you actually have.
Prepare crapload of wallets on different exchanges for monero cryptocurrency. Prepare same amount of crapload of wallets for bitcoin as well. Split this new wallet into those bitcoins wallets. Use them to exchange to monero on your most convenient exchanges - preferably outside US so coindesk/Coinbase is out of question here. Use monero mules to mix them with other cryptocurrencies - this is the point where you lose your FBI/NSA tail. Get them out on crapload of hard currency bank around the world. By the time somebody will finish tracking to a single person a century would've passed and you're dead. End of game.
One needs to track only one such conversions, and investigate each involved party.
There is a limit here, because there are not that many cryptocurrency transactions. So each transaction chain must be small, or the number of chains must be small. Anyway, the restrictions on international investigations are probably a much larger issue than any splitting and washing that one can effectively do.
Trade it for a cryptocurrency with stronger anonymity properties and then slowly launder that through a self-owned digital service that ostensibly accepts cryptocurrency payments or donations.
If the commodity in question was anything other than Bitcoin nobody would be saying something like that with a straight face. I think “Beanie Baby” is too strong a term for Bitcoin since they are much more “inherently” valuable ($5 of Bitcoin is much more useful than a $5 stuffed animal). Bitcoin will very likely never be worthless.
But a large chunk of Bitcoin’s 2020 wealth comes from it being a speculative instrument - as your comment indicates! I hope this dies down eventually but obviously Bitcoin is objectively high-risk. We are still in the first year of a serious recession, and significant political turbulence, and a pandemic. It’s not irrational to put that money into dollars / euros / etc.
Speculation about the (unknowable) future is how we allocate all resources in the present. A lot of people on HN seem to lump the "buy because price is rising" speculators in with the "buy because Bitcoin will become the foundation of the financial internet" speculators.
Investors who understand Bitcoin's potential do it an indispensable service. They inform the public (through price information) of that which most of the public is unable or unwilling to figure out on their own: that Bitcoin has tremendous potential to change the world and warrants serious attention, both currently for certain people as a hideable, unconfiscateable, transportable, no-third-party-risk store of wealth and in the future for everyone as a transactional currency (and as the cornerstone of the financial internet).
What can you buy with your Bitcoins? Can you pay your rent with them? Can you pay your electric bill, or internet? Can you buy gas? Can you buy groceries?
I don’t own any Bitcoins and I never have, but if I did, I could at least buy some goods with them. Not most of those, but I have in fact seen real life stores that accept Bitcoin as currency.
I have as well, but not many. Certainly not enough to call it a "hard currency" (of which the entire point is that it's widely, almost universally, accepted).
The "hard" part of hard currency refers to its monetary properties - i.e. how easy it is to inflate the supply. On this metric Bitcoin is harder than anything else out there. So then we are arguing about whether it's a "currency" or not.
I personally accept is as payment, and therefore consider it a currency. Why would I want to buy things with it today when I can use ever inflating dollars for that?
Look that’s just not what “hard currency” is. “Hard currency” basically means “money which is considered a reliable store of value in major international markets.” Bitcoin simply isn’t that. No functional national government or large corporation is going to sign a large contract in Bitcoin - the very act of signing it could dramatically devalue the currency! You can’t just say Bitcoin is hard currency and devise some random measure of “hardness” out of ideological convenience.
Bitcoin is a fine technology and a fine thing to put part of your wealth into, especially if you support the tech and want to use it to buy things or invest. It’s also brand new, it’s price / USD or euro is obviously unstable, and there’s a global pandemic-depression! It’s just short-sighted (and intellectually dishonest) to say Bitcoin is low-risk and “hard currency” because it’s protected against inflation.
Agree to disagree. I would say you're the one twisting the definition of "hard currency" (Wikipedia is not the source of all truth).
"Hard money" originally reffered to gold. When paper currency took over the term "hard currency" was used to distinguish between good and bad paper currencies.
I maintain that the "hard" part (which derives from gold) refers to the inability to be inflated easily. But I'm happy to concede that Bitcoin is not a currency yet in most peoples' eyes. I'm happy to switch to calling it a hard money.
> Hard currency refers to money that is issued by a nation that is seen as politically and economically stable. Hard currencies are widely accepted around the world as a form of payment for goods and services and may be preferred over the domestic currency.
BTC is inarguably NOT "widely accepted around the world as a form of payment for goods and services". I'm very sorry to break it to you.
I would say wash it thru Monero and then mix it, from there if I were the illicit type I would try to do offline exchanges with gold bugs who are also crypto enthusiast to get it into hard assets. 1 Billion in gold is actually only about a half a semi-load full, it would take some time but assuming you fractured it into a bunch of different monero wallets, you have time on your side. If one get's compromised you take what you have and run. Because it would be safe to assume at that point that there are tools monitoring the chain by state level actors that none of us are privy to. If you are going to live that life paranoia is key.
The simplest is probably to make a deal with criminals that have an existing money laundering network. The trick would be avoiding having said criminals simply kidnapping you and forcing you to reveal the keys.
Low volume ways would be to use the bitcoin to purchase drugs or other illegal goods by the kilo and sell the drugs the usual way.
It's unlikely that the person needs to full billion immediately. Five or ten million a year could be enough for many people and at that kind of level exchanging for monero could work.
There is also the option of sending small amounts to thousands of real people's bitcoin wallets (and lots more to wallets you control) and letting those people deal with the FBI first.
Buy a Trump Tower apartment for a grossly inflated price, and offer to pay in bitcoin. If you act quickly, the deal will get done before there's risk of prosecution.
A crowd sourced cash out. I would never expect to get the full 1 billion dollars, so I'm basically going to offer the bitcoin at half price to whoever wants it, payment being in monero. I'd possibly set the price lower if demand is low, but adjust depending on how demand and monero value fluctuations go. I think people would buy the coins, especially if there's decent publicity and marketing. Frame it as free money for whoever wants it, and I would walk away happy with anything more than $100 million and my anonymity.
Ever wonder why there are so many of these scams? Even with very low conversion efficiency, it works over time with acceptable safety guarantees for the sell side. See scalped tickets, low cost bus travel & gift cards.
There can be options, the OpenDime[0] is one that’s intriguing. The owner seeds the entropy before it can be used and the only way to get the private key is to physically (and visibly) alter it.
It would be interesting and probably a big deal to test this out, I don’t think I have the chops for it but hope to read about it if you (or anyone else) gives it a shot!
You couldn't. An easy guess is that every bitcoin mixer is compromised. You could maybe withdraw $100 at a time from bitcoin ATMs, until KYC/AML forces ATM operators to maintain a coin/address blacklist.
>An easy guess is that every bitcoin mixer is compromised
there are trustless mixer networks[1]. The bigger problem is that you're going to run out of liquidity. You preferably want to exchange 1B of "dirty" bitcoin for 1B of "clean" bitcoin, not tumble the 1B of bitcoin and get back the same dirty coins.
Anyone you'd hire would be risking breaking the law in the U.S. or some other country, plus you'd have no legal protection if they decided to screw you over.
they face 40 years of verification on every transection, its a waiting game. pretty sure they want to cash out fully at first sight when time allows it.
Yeah, I also have https://privatekeys.pw/bitcoin/random. as my homepage. Every day I reload it a couple of times... it's like playing a [very shitty] lottery every day.
Maybe the private keys were behind an encryption scheme that took roughly seven years to be cracked with brute force. I can't say I envy the owner(s) of these coins. Maybe a billion dollars worth of closely watched bitcoins it is a good problem though. Who knows? I certainly don't.
It's permissionless, as in no reporting transactions over $10k to the government, no ID checks to create an account, no names and addresses in the "global transaction log" etc.
To me, privacy is an essential component of freedom, and the government and banking system knowing everything about my transactions is not as bad as everyone knowing something about my transactions.
> “Either way, the funds are now on the move, and whoever now controls the bitcoins may want to cash them out,” Robinson said. As for whether it was an insider or a hacker, his guess it’s as likely either way. “I’d say I’m 50/50 right now, perhaps leaning towards a Silk Roader. They were clearly biding their time and waiting for a busy news day in order to do this without it getting too much attention.”
