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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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple million dollars is a retirement nest egg. You can stop working, stretch it carefully until you die, and leave a small sum to your heirs. To be very rich requires upwards of $100 million. Then you can access high paying investments which will generate enough income to afford a couple houses, hire help, buy a boat and a plane, and have enough left over after taxes to increase your assets to offset inflation. A…

A couple million dollars is more than a nest egg. You can retire immediately and provide for your family and yourself your whole life with that kind of money.

That is wrong, if you live in a wealthy country. The safe rate of return right now is a few percentage points at best. If it stays like that, and we get inflation, then it is going to be even worse (wealth shrinking happening now depending on tax variables of the retiree.)

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

#352
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about wire transfers? In the US both banks would charge a transaction fee.

Normal ACH (Automated Clearing House) transactions in the US tend to be free. I can move money from one bank to another bank without any fees. It usually takes anywhere from 1-4 days. This is moving US dollars. Not sure what the cheapest way to move USD to EUR is and likely not free.

Depends on the bank. Wells Fargo nickels and dimes you on this kind of stuff for instance.

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

#354
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entirely dependent on location, lifestyle, family status, etc. Yes, with $2m you can retire tomorrow and get something like $100K/year in pretty much guaranteed income not pegged to inflation. (You can argue the numbers but certainly ADDED: Yes, you're "rich" but not jet-setting in business class at resort hotels, multi-million dollar coastal city condo, eat at top restaurants on a regular basis etc. rich. Which is a…

Wait, how would you guarantee 5%? I don't see "put it in an index fund" as "pretty much guaranteed".

Annuities, high grade corporate or muni bonds, mix in some high dividend yield blue chips, etc. I'd mix with some riskier investments that were higher return on average.

Nothing is guaranteed if things go totally to hell, of course. (And I did make the qualification of not being pegged to inflation.) But unless we get to a very bad place, I think that assuming 5% on these sorts of investments is a pretty safe bet.

(ADDED: But pick your own number. 3-4% probably is closer to the really very safe modulo inflation given instruments like CDs in that range. But you're reinforcing my basic point. $2M is not really the basis for a huge annual income in perpetuity or even over a multi-decade timescale if you don't have other income streams to add to that mix.)

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

#355

I worked in the trading dept of a large hedge fund and this could easily be them, or someone like them. They regularly traded several billion in bonds, currencies and short rates each day and just aren't used to those trades posting publicly (outside the exchange). I can see them seeing this Twitter thread, scratching their head and wondering, "what's the big deal?"

I think the big deal compared to those normal hedge fund trades would have to do with relative volume. Trading in bonds etc., a billion is relatively small and unlikely to move markets very much. In Bitcoin, a billion is a bigger deal, representing a larger chunk of the whole, and buying or selling that much has a much greater potential to move the market.

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

#356
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The anonymity is still not perfect, especially against state-level actors. With PirateChain it is, but true anonymity brings with it other technical challenges.

I haven't heard of PirateChain. However, the state-level threat model includes things like taxes, where (e.g.) people in the US have to report every transaction they make. If most people report their PirateChain transactions, amount in, amount out, then the problem is that unreported transactions would stick out and would probably be associable with wallets. Am I getting this wrong?

A requirement to report taxes is not normally thought of as a threat to privacy coins per se. And the whole privacy coin thing is modelled on the belief that the state has no business knowing all your financial details.

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

#357
post #335
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was working on farms ( 30 yrs ago ) most farmers were still on property they owned. During that time I saw the shift to corporate farms and I dont know that answer as I have found less labor intensive work. Most of the corporate structures I saw were family or a combination of family and friends.

I think many farmers are pretty levered. Whether its mortgage on the land or loans for operating capital, to make a decent return on equity you've got to borrow.

I would agree with that perspective. I knew a few farmers that owned it all but those have passed on.

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

#358

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…

I'm wandering what services and price structures you are referring to. Examples? While there are vast differences between what's available to low income vs., say, upper middle-class people, the differences on the other side of the distribution curve are not that dramatic.

For example, wire transfers in the US are fixed price regardless of the amount, ACH transfers are practically free, mortgage rates cannot go lower than treasury notes, etc. Or maybe I am misinterpreting who you consider as "normal people".

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

#359

There are what, about ~2,000 billionaires in the world? Of those, I don't believe any of them would hold a billion in BTC. From what I can tell, it has been ruled out that this is from any of the exchanges. Is this a possible nation-state transaction?

Fully agree that billionaires likely wouldn't hold a billion in BTC. Its very possibly CCP.

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

#360
post #12

I can count maybe 5 people in the crypto space that would have that much BTC, but none of them would be dumb enough to put it all in one wallet. Most likely some large institutional investor decided to re-key their cold storage wallet.

This is the part which confuses me about Bitcoin the most. It's meant to be anonymous, yet with some diligent data mining, it can become pretty clear who's who from their spending patterns by observing the ledger. How is that remotely anonymous?

>It's meant to be anonymous, yet with some diligent data mining, it can become pretty clear who's who from their spending patterns by observing the ledger. How is that remotely anonymous?

It's not anonymous anymore. Transactions are being tracked to the ip addresses they originated from. This tracking has been going on since 2014[0]

From the article:

>But there is no top-down coordination of the Bitcoin network, and its flow is far from perfect. The Koshys noticed that sometimes a computer sent out information about only one transaction, meaning that the person at that IP address was the owner of that Bitcoin address. And sometimes a surge of transactions came from a single IP address—probably when the user was upgrading his or her Bitcoin client software. Those transactions held the key to a whole backlog of their Bitcoin addresses. Like unraveling a ball of string, once the Koshys isolated some of the addresses, others followed. >

>Ultimately, they were able to map IP addresses to more than 1000 Bitcoin addresses; they published their findings in the proceedings of an obscure cryptography conference. ....

[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/why-criminals-cant-h...

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