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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

#371

Post by homologate »

ineedasername wrote: post #355
tyxodiwktis wrote: post #340

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.

There are 17 964 063 bitcoin[0] in circulation which means that this transaction accounts for 0,5261% of all Bitcoin. I wonder how common transactions that account for one half a percent of total markets are.

[0] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/total-bitcoins

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

#372

Post by lubesGordi »

homologate wrote: post #365
passivepinetree wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard about this. Do you have sources about the DOJ theft?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/russian-national-and-bi...

Thanks for posting this. I don't understand how the US can go in and decide BTC-e was a money laundering op and then confiscate bitcoins and put people in jail. Who decides who gets those bitcoins? Surely many other countries have money laundering laws. What makes the US so special that they can go flip a business operating in the Ukraine?

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

#374

Post by jkoberg »

aazaa wrote: post #111

I'd take issue on two points. First, "wallets' don't exist in the Bitcoin protocol. Second, the tool being used is not sophisticated enough to list the inputs and outputs, giving the false impression that something unusual is "unknown." Try this link to get details: https://blockstream.info/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb58e7c7... There are numerous inputs and a single pay-to-script-hash (P2SH) output. The relatively h…

LocalBitcoins pinged me and said I need to establish 2FA or move my funds due to an inactive account,

I wonder if they finally swept all those inactive accounts out.

I started using it back in the $50 days, so some thousands of bitcoin may have been a lot less of a deal when they got deposited

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

#375

Post by keymone »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188
aazaa wrote: post #111

I'd take issue on two points. First, "wallets' don't exist in the Bitcoin protocol. Second, the tool being used is not sophisticated enough to list the inputs and outputs, giving the false impression that something unusual is "unknown." Try this link to get details: https://blockstream.info/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb58e7c7... There are numerous inputs and a single pay-to-script-hash (P2SH) output. The relatively h…

> It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. I don't really agree with that statement. Yes, someone could mount a 51% attack to rewrite that block. However, it would be pretty straightforward to see what was happening (and which nodes were the malicious actors). If that did happen, the possible outcomes would be: 1. The value of bitcoin would fall to ba…

the amount of trivialization and conflation irks me

1. "51% attack" is not a thing as in "one has to have 51% of hashpower to perform it". it's just that with 51% of hashpower it becomes relatively cheap to perform such attack. one can throw enough money at the problem and get lucky to perform large reorg with just 10% of hashpower. the lower the number - the more lucky attacker has to get.

2. "rewriting a block" or "billion dollar bounty" as the GP put it are just conveying wrong ideas. there is zero chance for that $1B to get stolen even if attacker gets 100% of hashrate. all they can do is revert the transaction so that money goes back to original owners by generating a fork in the chain that doesn't include said transaction.

even that is not enough because competing miners (assuming attacker doesn't really have all 100% of hashpower) will still eventually include the transaction because it pays lucrative fees.

the trick here is that in Bitcoin parties agree to finalize the deal only after certain number of confirmations (blocks created after the one that includes the transaction). general rule is to wait for 6 confirmations.

if there indeed was some $1B deal where 94k BTC changed hands i wouldn't be surprised if their agreed upon number of confirmations was ~500 blocks (half the value of transaction in question in miner rewards), which is roughly 3 days wait.

ultimately though i'm pretty sure this was some kind of cold-storage consolidation so no BTC actually changed hands.

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

#377

Post by MiroF »

Smithalicious wrote: post #161
compiler-guy wrote: post #81

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.

Yes, the post included multiple potentially true claims. What is the problem?

Only one claim per comment?

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

#378

Post by meowface »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #218
BluSyn wrote: 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.

It's probably the DOJ. They raided BTC-e and stole 2 billion during the Ukraine War. BTC-e was the longest running bitcoin exchange and the single most reliable. I had more money than I'd like to admit stolen from me. Their statement was only people who participate in tax evasion use btc-e.

BTC-e undoubtedly had a ton of legitimate users, like yourself, but also a lot of fraudulent users. And most importantly, it was established and operated by its founder as a money laundering scheme. He used it used to launder all of the stolen funds from the Mt. Gox hack (worth several billions, depending on when you measure the value), among other things.

BTC-e was a cover to help criminals steal from Bitcoin exchanges and safely dilute the funds.

It sucks that you lost your money, but it was wrapped up with billions of dollars of dirty money, and it's probably tough for investigators to distinguish the two.

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

#379

Post by Skunkleton »

Erudite_Genius wrote: post #376

The fact that bitcoin even HAS a "dollar value" attached to it is a testament to the FAILURE of bitcoin's original sole objective.

I am not a proponent of crypto currency by any stretch, but I disagree with this. The fact that BTC has dollar value simply indicates that BTC can't be spent everywhere the dollar can. IMO the real failure of BTC is runaway deflation, which leads to it being an "investment" relative to fiat currencies.

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

#380

Post by lawn »

ChrisClark wrote: post #342
LAMike wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every second, the amount of hashes computed on the Bitcoin network is equal to every grain of sand on earth, multiplied by 7. There isn't enough computing power available to 51% attack a chain that comes close to justify the $1 billion dollar "bounty" on this transaction.

It's quite possible, as long as the cost of the current ASICs out there is less than a billion. You can match the current world rate and secretly mine. It would be a combination of buying your own miners and renting hashrate, but mostly it would be renting. Maybe paying a big mine to do it for you. When I saw the initial math, they said 40 days. But that doesn't include the fact that as you buy hash power, it's price…

I did some quick math a while ago on the cost to buy 51% [0].

When I did it the network hashrate was 44,000,000 TH/s and if you could buy enough S9i's to the same low price, it would cost you around $650 million. This is excluding any other infrastructure you'd need and of course the power you'd use to perform the attack. And since I did the calculations the hashrate has -doubled-, making it cost quite a bit more than a billion.

Now maybe you can get off cheaper if you try to rent the hashrate. Around $18 million of BTC is mined per day, say you can get 50% for $10 million per day. So yes maybe you can do it for 40 days, if you want to risk a large part of that billion. And face the quite massive risk of tanking Bitcoin's value or facing devs who might launch a "protective hard fork".

(This is assuming you -can- buy or rent enough hashrate, which is very uncertain).

There are checkpoints in BTC, although they haven't been added since 2014.

[0]: https://whycryptocurrencies.com/how_do_cryptocurrencies_work...

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