Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 345 posts

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#91

Post by drewmol »

samfisher83 wrote: post #61
blancheneige wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blockchain != exchanges holding your private keys

My point is even if someone has your password there are legal routes where you can go recover your money. The bank will then do that. The blockchain is distributed. Who do you go complain to?

The bank/exchange/etc that was entrusted to protect your dollars/bitcoin/etc. FDIC insurance is indexed to dollars but insures the value of your deposits. If someone robs a bank there is no way to reverse the robbery by invalidating the physical assets they stole be it cash, gold, bitcoin keys etc. This is not a problem most cryprocurrenties propose to solve.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#92

Post by eyezick »

This article is innaccurate.

Here is the tracking by Ernst & Young (court-appointed) providing all the public information about these developments. The latest report on 1 March 2019 mentions nothing about a cracked laptop.

https://documentcentre.eycan.com/Pages/Main.aspx?SID=1445

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#93

Post by Scoundreller »

roywiggins wrote: post #76
Animats wrote: post #65

One real problem with cryptocurrencies: the information you need to determine that someone has the key to a blockchain address gives you the power to withdraw funds from that address. You can't just demand that a third party auditor have copies of all the keys. (Yeah, dual-sig, split keys, etc. Theoretically possible, not done in practice much.)

There are actually whole cryptographic schemes people have written to prove you have control over the money you say you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277865

But how do you prove how much you owe?

If an exchange can prove it controls 10 BTC, great. But what if it owes 20 people 1 BTC each?

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#94

Post by blotter_paper »

deepsun wrote: post #78
ceejayoz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the keys are lost, the money is for all intents and purposes gone.

But you can still track history of any coin existed. If somebody know wallet ids of money before they were stolen, you can trace transactions to see what wallet ids they are in now. If they say "stolen", it means that they found transactions when money were transferred from victim's wallet. And if they know transactions, then they know source and destination wallet ids.

This is close enough to true for the purposes of this discussion, but in the general case you can only reliably track the flow of funds in aggregate, not the flow of any individual "coin." If addresses A and B send equal amounts of coins to C, C sends all of those coins to D, and D sends half of them to E, you can't really track the coins from A to E or from B to E. The transaction from C to D results in a single output that doesn't distinguish between funds from A and funds from B.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#95

Post by DanBC »

xutopia wrote: post #68

This is BS... the money cannot be "gone"... what do they mean by that? There is a public ledger. We would know and can trace where this money went to. Do they mean the wallet was not on the laptop instead?

The cold wallet was empty.

Some other accounts on that exchange were set up "outside process", and it's not sure who owns those accounts.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47454528

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#96

Post by gph »

solarkraft wrote: post #50
bootloop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applying a zero-day exploit without making it public doesn't burn anything. After all, no one knows how they did it.

But would they even risk raising suspicion?

I'm confused why anyone in this thread chain would think a firm like Ernst and Young would have access to zero-days?

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#97

Post by ttoinou »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #83
stingraycharles wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s important to note that it’s not just splitting up your own transactions, it’s that it’s actually other people’s coins that end up in your destination wallets. As such, it becomes very difficult to trace: techniques for doing this are similar to large scale deanonimization of Tor traffic, and involve large scale pattern analysis.

> It’s important to note that it’s not just splitting up your own transactions, it’s that it’s actually other people’s coins that end up in your destination wallets. As such, it becomes very difficult to trace It was my basically uninformed impression that the bitcoin blockchain consists of a series of transaction records that look like this: - Address xxxxx1x sends 10 bitcoins to address xxxxx2x; address xxxxx7x min…

   (The fact that you can divide one bitcoin into 100,000,000 satoshi
    also suggests that there's no such thing as an individual bitcoin...)
Wouldn't it rather say "there is such a thing as a satoshi" ?

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#98

Post by CosmicShadow »

stuntkite wrote: post #47
rchaud wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DiCaprio? This whole affair has been at best a Weekend at Bernie's-level plot. The accounts were emptied 8 months before the death, and yet QCX pretended they were solvent the whole time so they could keep the party going.

In the sequel his ghost solves blocks when you play a latin rhythm and two young/broke computer enthusiasts who moved to Puerto Rico to make it big are the only ones who can see him because they smoked weed that grew in soil mixed with his ashes.

This is one of the best comments I've ever seen on HN, oh my god this movie would be awesome!

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#99

Post by jtr_47 »

dtx1 wrote: post #5

How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?

Maybe there's an exploit with the hardware or operating system that is not known to the standard population, but is known by the government, hardware/OS manufacturer and black hat/white hat crackers.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#100

Post by ceejayoz »

whttheuuu wrote: post #85
ceejayoz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the keys are lost, the money is for all intents and purposes gone.

it's a feature of the blockchain that you can track each and every transaction.

You can't track the off-chain stuff, though.

Plenty of coin movements in an exchange aren't going to make it onto the chain. If I sell on Coinbase and someone else on Coinbase buys it, there's no reason for Coinbase to incur fees to publish that to everyone; they can just shuffle money around on paper.

Post reply on HN