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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

#411

Post by cwkoss »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #364
cwkoss wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin enables privacy when used properly, but privacy is not an inherent feature.

In what way does it do that? Or in other words, what makes that sentence more true than sentences replacing the word Bitcoin with the words phone/email/pigeon carrier/etc? Genuine question, not rhetorical - I don't really follow bitcoin.

Those alternatives require a durable namespace for 'targeting' your communications: a phone number, email address, physical location the pigeon arrives, etc.

Bitcoin can be used with novel targets (receiving addresses) for each uniquely received transaction: i.e. instead of having one bank account with all your transactions, each transaction is in its own anonymous bank account. By doing this, outsiders cannot know that two transactions are owned by the same person without that owner otherwise revealing the association via co-mingling funds or revealing ownership off-network (ex. sending to exchange that does KYC+AML).

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

#412

Post by [deleted] »

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.)

[deleted]

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

#415

Post by pepepupu »

shorts_theory wrote: post #47
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.

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?

Bitcoin network is designed for transparency. If you seek for privacy, then privacy coins like Beam, Grin is for you.

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

#416

Post by joshgachnang »

qroshan wrote: post #390
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So, if I were a hedge fund, I can effectively short Bitcoins and spend a piddly amount to build a datacenter to carry a 51% attack. If the attack fails, I can re-purpose my datacenter

Repurpose it how? You'd need ASICs to mount a 51% attack. Using a few quickly googled numbers, you'd need ~56EH/s to double the network and mount a 51% attack. An S9 does 14TH/s, so you'd need ~4 million, at $3k each.

So around $12 billion (plus the datacenter, operations, etc). You'd pretty much send BTC to being worth $0...and then you're stuck with $12 billion in useless hardware.

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

#417

Post by bduerst »

LAMike wrote: post #329
ChrisClark wrote: post #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…

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.

Only if the attack is from the outside, which is not a requirement. It's not mutually exclusive.

The miners who control the bitcoin network are already centralized on a handful of organizations in China. If they colluded on this attack they would take over >51% of the network because, hey, they already own and operate most of that computing power you're eluding to.

Edit: There is also no evidence that the price would plummet from this, and given the history of theft, scams, forks, etc. involving bitcoin that do not drastically affect the price, I don't think it would either.

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

#418

Post by magna7 »

perennate wrote: post #73
shorts_theory wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think it was really "meant to be anonymous". The original whitepaper at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf has a section on privacy, which mentions that public keys can be kept anonymous but acknowledges that all transactions are announced publicly: > The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to a…

> Recently there are newer cryptocurrencies like Monero and ZCash that focus specifically on anonymity/privacy.

There's also zero knowledge proof contracts on Ethereum that provide privacy, like the mixer tornado.cash

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

#419

Post by helpPeople »

esotericn wrote: post #404
Stevvo wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume the value of bitcoin is somewhat logical, the Etc 51% attack proves otherwise; in the short term holders would rather sustain the delusion.

Well, it doesn't _prove_ it; it's just a data point. The Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems are rather different.

Ethereum users are different than Bitcoin users.

Lots of reasons for this, but I think Ethereum users are less technical and without a better word "suckers".

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