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94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

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Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#311
This was probably an internal transfer, but if it was payment to someone, something interesting then occurs.

It then becomes valuable for the original owner to secretly mine a chain, attempting a 51% attack. They could run the attack secretly for up to 40 days and still make a profit.

So you'd really need to wait 40 days before you can be sure this transfer is safe.

But it gets scarier, if at the end of the 40 days a longer chain is submitted, all transaction since this one would be reverted too.

So when giant transfers happen, all transactions are vulnerable to long term 51% attacks. So all transactions sent now on Bitcoin aren't secure until this 40 day window has passed.

Of course, I don't think that's the case here, it was probably someone moving his own coins around, not a payment to anyone.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#312
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct, sorry. AIUI there's a higher limit for corps/govs too. Banks often have lower limits than these but I've no doubt they'll lift them if there's need. For those not familiar, FPS offers 2h (normally instant) transaction speed.

Having bank transfers in 2019 so slow is outrageous. It's the time when trading bots produce millions in a split second. But bank transactions require hours and days. And they dare to call them fast!

Eh, when does it really matter? The only time I care about speed is when buying something, and the more expensive that something is, the less fast it needs to be.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#313

As far as the fees being so cheap, and every one else guessing about how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation, F. Scott Fitzgerald is relevant: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is…

This post appears to me like two paragraphs of correct and important information, cut in two by a seemingly unrelated quote that summarizes to nothing more than "rich people are evil". People with greater wealth having access to certain services and procedures that normal people don't is unrelated to all rich people supposedly looking down on everyone else.

Do you know old money? I do, and I also know people with hundreds of millions who grew up in rags. There's nothing incorrect about what the parent poster said.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich people would consider being soft and cynical as virtuous? There's no way to read the quote in a positive manner.

An important detail is that the quote is not "they are soft and cynical", but rather: "soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful" In other words, how they are different from others. Not that they are fundamentally soft, cynicalm or bad.

How does adding an opposite as “fast where we are slow” specify anything?

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bacs limit is £20 million per item but is 3 day clearing. The £250k limit is FPS (instant clearing) I believe, or your bank.

You're correct, sorry. AIUI there's a higher limit for corps/govs too. Banks often have lower limits than these but I've no doubt they'll lift them if there's need. For those not familiar, FPS offers 2h (normally instant) transaction speed.

2h is quick. In EU sometimes it can take days.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#316
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Are you implying that it would technically break some sort of system or something like that? If I legally own a billion dollars in a Swiss bank, and I want to move it to a Cayman Islands bank, there is certainly a room full of well-paid men in fancy suits that will gladly accommodate that. Or, perhaps more similar to the topic, if I wanted to move a billion dollars from one UBS account to a new UBS account,…

Not technical obstacles, more like regulatory or legal obstacles. I imagine there is a lot of paperwork and legwork involved in moving 1B fiat

I've seen a EUR 1B+ transfer (a transfer from the central gov't tax office to a major municipality with "their share" of income tax constituting a major part of their budget) being executed in the backend, it was really nothing special execution-wise. After all it's all just numbers in a ledger about who owes whom what - just this number was slightly longer than usual.

It would require an extra pair of eyes compared to a 1M payment (which are very common), but that's not a significant difference in process, just one more employee would have it in their queue for approval and it wouldn't even increase the time as it'd jump to the front of the queue of payments that need some oversight. It could involve some extra notification as $1B leaving or arriving is meaningful enough to impact your liquidity and reserve requirements and thus your trading desk might need to borrow/lend some cash.

I'd assume that a major bank might have $1B+ payments quite often - I mean, the T-bond market alone is $500B daily and probably some of the individual trades are larger than $1B; then every delivery of a $1B+ industrial project is probably accompanied by a similar bulk payment and the projects across all the industries add up.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#318

Imagine making a typo in the receiving address

I've done this for~$500 in ETH, but I received that as payment for code written months ago that never passed review, so I wasn't expecting it anyway. Still a bit of an emotional roller-coaster to receive free money, then inadvertently throw it away within a few minutes.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#319

As far as the fees being so cheap, and every one else guessing about how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation, F. Scott Fitzgerald is relevant: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is…

Well that asks for Hemingways (fictional) counterquote:

"Fitzgerald: The rich are different from you and me.

Hemingway: Yes, they have more money."

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a myth. Most people are rich because their parents were. Most of the rest is rich because they were/are lawyers or medical doctors. (For the super-rich, business and finance becomes more important. But for your average "middle-class rich", lawyers and doctors just dwarf their numbers. Business also has highly unequal outcomes). As to why this myth persists, I guess it goes well with American puritanical roots.…

Fidelity found that only 12 percent of millionaires inherited at least 10 percent of their net worth-- 88% are self-made. https://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/on-retirement/articles/...

“Being rich because your parents are rich” can happen by a lot more ways than inheritance. In addition to gifts at death, there are gifts throughout the parents’ lives, equity gifts (you can buy one of the family houses for cheap or live in it for free), fully paid Ivy League education, prep schools, the parents can finance a startup, provide low interest loans, etc. I wouldn’t consider any of these as “self made” but they are not inheritance.
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