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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

#271

Post by Arnavion »

Angostura wrote: post #269
Arnavion wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say there are three BTC addresses in the world, #1 to #3. Let's say address #1 has 1 BTC that you're interested in. On Monday, all three addresses send all their BTC to address #4. The next day, address #4 sends the coins back to addresses #5 through #7. Which address out of #5, #6 or #7 has the original BTC you were interested in?

So - and thank you for bearing with me on this - individual BTC don't have a unique identifier that allow one to trace its transaction history? I must admit, I always assumed that they were uniquely identifiable.

Yes. In the first place, BTC are divisible to eight decimal places, so there would be a lot of these IDs if they were to exist. And there's no reason the divisibility can't change in the future, so these IDs would have to be quite complicated.

A (non-coinbase) transaction is valid if its inputs equal its outputs, and if its inputs come from the outputs of other transactions, which in turn are valid if their inputs come from other transactions, all the way to one or more coinbase transactions. This is sufficient to demonstrate that the transaction is valid - ie it's using coins that exist instead of creating them from thin air. That is all that the protocol cares about.

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

#273

Post by DeonPenny »

HenryBemis wrote: post #125
LeonM wrote: post #48

My take on this is that they probably were insolvent for a long time already due to previous hacks/theft. The CEO just decided to lie about the supposedly 137M in funds 'safely' stored on his laptop. This is also what happened at MtGox, except that at MtGox they 'lost' wel over a million BTC. Edit: relevant listening: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/9/

And this is the problem. These guys are not regulated. There is no transparency. There are no external auditors. There is no control. When we find out, it is always too late. Every "cryptocurrency bank" is a potential Enron. I fear both the involvement of Central Banks and at the same time the lack of it. If EY (or anyone else serious about this) 'follows the money' then that would be a very interesting report to rea…

Yes the features of a fiat currency

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

#274

Post by StavrosK »

justinclift wrote: post #241
uberman wrote: post #3

For some reason this sounds like the plot of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. CEO of Crypto Company... 1) Takes time off to build orphanage in region noted for fake deaths. 2) Subsequently dies unexpectedly. 3) Is immediately cremated. 4) Wife waits a month before saying "oh by the way he is dead" 5) Wife claims all keys on encrypted laptop 6) World watches as wallets mysteriously empty 7) Experts crack laptop 8)…

Plot twist: 10) The CEO was really an actor... hired by the "wife", who masterminded the whole thing Alternative plot twist: 10b) Both the CEO and wife are hired actors. The head of the orphanage was the mastermind

And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for us meddling kids...

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

#275

Post by Firadeoclus »

dnautics wrote: post #242
worik wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. The GFC was a financial/banking crisis There is nothing in "growth at any cost" style "capitalism" that means banks must all collapse together in a coordinated swan dive, like in 2008. That sort of system will collapse, but not necessarily the banks. There is no law of nature that says we have to use free to fuck anybody capitalism run rampant over all. It is a choice. I think it is time we made a differe…

The current brand of capitalism is not "free to fuck anybody", it's actually worse, it's "target the poor". Neoliberal economists specifically call for stealing from workers: https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi... > even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of…

The point is that relative wages need to be adjusted as the value of jobs changes over time. Some work that was very valuable in the past might have low demand now. If wages are sticky then jobs where value drops faster than inflation will simply go away. That's not necessarily the best outcome if the employee could have coped with a pay cut.

High inflation does not imply that real wages shrink on average.

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

#276

Post by simonh »

Solar19 wrote: post #190
HenryBemis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the problem. These guys are not regulated. There is no transparency. There are no external auditors. There is no control. When we find out, it is always too late. Every "cryptocurrency bank" is a potential Enron. I fear both the involvement of Central Banks and at the same time the lack of it. If EY (or anyone else serious about this) 'follows the money' then that would be a very interesting report to rea…

This would seem to be a private problem. If people choose to park their money with a non-transparent, unaudited random crypto startup, that's their decision and their problem. I'm not interested in paying for "regulators" in such cases.

>I'm not interested in paying for "regulators" in such cases.

You shouldn't have to pay a penny, the industry should be taxed so that the regulation is self-funded.

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

#277

Post by ru999gol »

chelmzy wrote: post #42
omouse wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are bitcoin tumblers , essentially the idea is to split up the transaction into multiple transactions of varying sizes to various addresses and to keep doing that in such a way that it doesn't look weird... Basically they try to hide the transaction among the huge volume of transactions going on, kinda like a VPN or Tor?

The FBI/private companies have specialized tools for tracking Bitcoins throughout their lifespan. All the data is out in the open so there is no hiding unless he converted to Monero anonymously.

considering Monero could you or someone elaborate on this a bit more? Maybe clarify if I'm misunderstanding something:

1) My understanding is, every transaction in bitcoin is public knowledge forever as part of the forever growing block chain. That is, there is no way to ever remove a transfer.

2) The only anonymity built in bitcoin is to hide your identity with pseudonymity, nobody necessarily knows your bitcoin address you are using. However if you are buying coins with credit card for example from person A and spend those at person B, person A will know that you have just spend that money at person B, and person B will know that you bought the coins from person A.

3) The only way(?) to hide, make the transactions anonymous is via tumbling, that is you send your coins into a huge account outside your control that aggregates maybe millions of $ from thousands of people and then sends them out again into random addresses. Nobody except the provider of the tumble service knows where your money went, making you anonymous, your money untraceable. I assume you want to repeat this process a few times with different tumble services.

Is that correct? I'm no expert. Also with 3) how feasible is that with $130 million? I mean to successfully tumble wouldn't I need at least double the amount probably much much more? How large are the tumbles in services such as bestmixer.io? Also it seems to me that with enough heuristics even tumble services could potentially be traced back, this doesn't seem impossible to me?

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

#278

Post by pysxul »

uberman wrote: post #3

For some reason this sounds like the plot of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. CEO of Crypto Company... 1) Takes time off to build orphanage in region noted for fake deaths. 2) Subsequently dies unexpectedly. 3) Is immediately cremated. 4) Wife waits a month before saying "oh by the way he is dead" 5) Wife claims all keys on encrypted laptop 6) World watches as wallets mysteriously empty 7) Experts crack laptop 8)…

It's the wife with the chandelier in the library

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

#279

Post by jamisteven »

Cant believe the article makes no mention of the other major piece of this conspiracy which is that Michael Patryn, the co-founder of Quadriga, is actually Omar Dhanani, who was charged with one count of conspiracy to transfer identification documents as part of Shadowcrew.com and did 18 months in jail. IMO he is the real mastermind here, as his criminal record shows he was fully capable of hacking Cotten's accounts and was in close enough proximity to his networks to not raise suspicion.
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