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

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

#151
post #89

"Why yes, the wallet we found was empty. Totally empty."

Back in 2015 two rogue U.S. Secret Service agents, Shaun Bridges and Carl Mark Force, were caught and sentenced to prison for stealing funds while investigating the first high profile darknet market the Silk Road. Shaun Bridges plead guilty for moving 1,600 bitcoins of seized bitcoins confiscated by federal authorities.

You can't steal in the course of an investigation what was already stolen as part of the crime.

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

#152
post #113

I don't get why people even try to store their cryptos in a cloud-based wallet. Just store it in a USB and put it in a safety deposit box.

Some have mentioned they were transacting when their deposits withdrawals stopped working. It wasn’t a matter of storage.

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

#153
Okay so I grew up with my Colombian step brother...who lets say was an active participant back in the day (see Narcos), he apparently thinks important people from that trade lost their money (like in Narcos),

Let me guess one of two things:

1) If he surfaces, it won't be the law that catches him.

2) He got a deal he couldn't refuse

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with 100% of hashpower you can't steal anyone's money

You can stop them from ever spending it. You can't take it from someone, but you can stop them from using it - I doubt most people would consider that much of a difference (they still suffer the loss).

This is true if you consistently have control at every relevant point in the future, but if a malicious entity gets control for a month and then loses it to the crowd again you can spend your old funds. That's one difference. Another is that the transaction log can theoretically be moved to a new chain if some part of the crowd desires (and has been), so if a proprietary ASIC manufacturer takes control the community, or some part of it, could move to a different hashing algorithm that isn't yet targeted by ASICs, and you could spend the funds on that chain. In either scenario you've probably lost value, but not all value as originally suggested.

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

#155
post #82

According to the dates and other information in the article, it is also possible he was hacked and someone else has the money.

In that case he could just come out with it. My guess is he lost the money either by trading or through pure technical incompetence that resulted in hardware loss or did something to erase it all on accident. Coming out with this would not excuse him from legal consequences as much as it would he be claimed he was hacked.

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

#157
post #137
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before/after the 850k/650k hack there were numerous other hacks, the total number of stolen BTC is still not clear, new proof of other hacks is still being discovered. Apparently Karpeles also found a 'forgotten' wallet of 200k BTC, which he still seems to own. It's a mess.

No, the found wallet is under the control of the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of MtGox. We know this for certain because he sold 35,000BTC when BTC was around 10,000USD, ensuring the creditors will get their full investment back. Doesn't make us whole of course, but it is nice.

I lost some 2010 BTC (trading at ~$30) in the MtGox failure, and then missed the window to make a claim. Harsh.

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

#158

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 way that it works is that a certain number of coins are created when a block is mined. That number is recorded on the ledger associated with an address. Let's say it's 25 BTC, but it can be any number -- it doesn't matter. If you don't spend any of that BTC, then it exists only as that number -- a chunk if you wish. It is indivisible. It sits as 25 BTC in the account. If you decide to spend 5 BTC of the 25, then the ledger records that 5 BTC goes to wherever you are sending it and 20 BTC goes to your wallet. The previous 25 BTC chunk is removed. The 5 BTC exists as a "chunk" in the other wallet and the 20 BTC exists as a "chunk" in your wallet. The 25 BTC "chunk" no longer exists. Each wallet has a list of these "chunks" of BTC. Let's say that I have a 7 BTC "chunk" as well as the 20 BTC chunk. I want to send 22 BTC to someone else. It will take remove both my 20 BTC "chunk" and my 7 BTC "chunk" and give me a 5 BTC "chunk". I can't remember if the recipient gets a 22 BTC "chunk" or a 20 BTC "chunk" and a 5 BTC "chunk" (it's been a long time since I looked at the source code). I think the former, but it is traceable where the original came from and how they "chunks" where split up.

Hopefully that makes it a bit more clear. The word "chunk" is my own -- if you start using it in other discussions, nobody will know what you are talking about ;-) However, the main thing is that the wallets do not contain balances, but lists of transactions that ended up giving them coins. While there is no such thing as a "coin", it's discrete amounts rather than flowing in and out like water.

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

#159
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because my first argument still applies in full to satoshi. There are balances of satoshi, but no individual satoshi.

every satoshi can be traced from birth until unspent. There are most certainly individual satoshi. they live in UTXO's.

This is not true. Say I have a wallet with two Satoshi, and I transfer one each to two different wallets. Then I transfer two Satoshi from those wallets to a new wallet. Which way did each Satoshi take? You can't say!
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