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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

#391

Post by cortesoft »

lubesGordi wrote: post #372
homologate wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What makes the US so special that they can go flip a business operating in the Ukraine?

Because no one is able to stop them.

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

#392

Post by delecti »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #265
delecti wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The identity of Satoshi isn't known. Why should anyone have presumptions about them? I agree it would be a huge story, but "Satoshi's private keys were presumed lost" wouldn't be in the top 10 reasons why.

What are you talking about, it would be the number one reason why.

"What happened to the private keys" is only an interesting question if we know something happened to them at all.

For all anyone knows, Satoshi is a government biding its time, aliens, a hacker with a messy apartment, dead and their inheritors don't know what they have, already independently wealthy and doesn't care about their wallet, did it all for the lulz and doesn't care about the wallet. It's apparently not, but if this were Satoshi then I find these questions far more interesting: Who is Satoshi? Why was their identity hidden? Why emerge now?

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

#393

Post by kbenson »

lubesGordi wrote: post #372
homologate wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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?

Likely what makes the US special in this instance is that they did it first, and as long as other countries aren't going to make a stink about it (i.e. the US backs up its claims to some degree or the other countries don't want to question them), then it will get away with it.

Rule of law is for people. Countries operate on a mixture of laws, norms, and consensus building. If every country but one decided to raid that one country, and they had the power (as in economic and military power) to do so, what's to stop them? Not a law, which they my nature can just rewrite.

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

#394

Post by bradstewart »

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…

Buy it wouldn't exactly be a secret if you're paying a big mine to do it, or if you purchased every available mining ASIC out there at once (and found enough electricity/cooling to run them all).

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

#396

Post by cortesoft »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #383
lubesGordi wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you now understand why we need something like Bitcoin? (Even if it's gonna a be a newer version of it in the future, or something even more private etc.)

Doesn't this instead just show the Realpolitik nature of currency, that it doesn't matter the technical implementation when a government can still just step in and seize the asset using traditional force?

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

#397

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#398

Post by flyingfences »

legohead wrote: post #246
FDSGSG wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They overpaid big time, fees of approximately $33 would've been sufficient for the transaction to confirm just as fast.

do they have to pay anything? or let's assume they just want to pay $1, and they don't care about how long it takes. would it eventually happen?

It might. It depends on the status of the network at the time. If there is a significantly large unconfirmed transaction pool backlog and a transaction is made with a low enough fee then the miners may simply ignore the transaction for long enough that they let it expire and drop it completely. Theoretically, that transaction still could be confirmed at any time in the future, but, practically, it won't be. So, most wallet software will stop displaying an unconfirmed transaction after a number of days, returning to a pre-transaction available balance.

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

#399

Post by derriz »

mikepurvis wrote: post #137
arcticbull wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International wires are a bad example because they charge a huge FOREX spread. For a high-ticket transfer, you'd need to use a brokerage for the exchange first, which is also very cheap, but a bit more than $25 ($20 per million at InteractiveBrokers). Then a very cheap domestic wire for the last mile. Or, for small-ticket transfer TransferWise is around 0.85% for the whole exchange.

Depending on the regions, you can do tricks with your investment account too— Norbert's Gambit is the famous one for cheaply moving a lot of money between USD and CAD: https://medium.com/young-wild-and-cheap/the-norberts-gambit-...

Is Norbert's Gambit anything but theoretical? It sounds like a guaranteed way to lose money.

Given the tick size, crossing the spread with this ETF is going to cost you around 10bp alone. Never mind that this ETF only holds $45m in assets - you're only going to be able to get a very small amount without eating through price levels. On top of all this you have to carry 3 days of currency risk?

I'm sure other online discount brokers are similar, but I checked Interactive Brokers, since I'm a customer, and they charge max 0.2bp fees, the spreads are around 1bp and there's no currency risk.

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

#400

Post by filoleg »

owenmarshall wrote: post #346
filoleg wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like most things in life, I feel like it is all about the right balance. Penny pinching and then dying a millionaire sounds awful, because what's even the point of having all those millions if you lived like you had nothing the whole time? Just a number on some imaginary scorecard? Wasting away all your earnings and living a life of "luxury" with nothing in your savings is at least just as bad, because if someth…

> Penny pinching and then dying a millionaire sounds awful, because what's even the point of having all those millions if you lived like you had nothing the whole time? Building generational wealth for your progeny. GP said their grandfather died a multimillionaire. That money can go to his children; managed well over their lifetime it will double several times over. And learned frugality on their part means they hav…

>GP said their grandfather died a multimillionaire. That money can go to his children; managed well over their lifetime it will double several times over.

The point is, is it worth it if you do not get to enjoy even a part of that at all? What if you don't have children? Assuming there is nothing after death, the personal result of being a penny pinching millionaire vs. just not having that much money at all would be the same.

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