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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

#421

Post by solotronics »

cortesoft wrote: post #396
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes but the key difference is with cryptocurrency the person that owns the wallet still has to sign the transaction, there is no other way. It's a push model instead of pull. Compare this to traditional banking where a 3rd party (the bank) can aquiesce to a government request without your knowledge or approval.

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

#422

Post by proverbialbunny »

meowface wrote: post #378
proverbialbunny wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exchan…

>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.

It was not. Coins going in and out of btc-e were labeled making laundering through btc-e difficult at best.

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

BTC-e was around longer than those exchanges.

The thing about BTC-e is every time bitcoin crashed btc-e would chug along just fine without going down. All other exchanges would become unresponsive. This made, at that time, btc-e the only "safe" program trading bitcoin platform. (Of course, in hindsight, with the us gov coming in and stealing all that money, safe is a bit of an over statement.)

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

#423

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#424

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

#425

Post by henrikschroder »

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

https://www.crypto51.app/

Bitcoin has long since passed the stage where you could 51%-attack it for piddly amounts of money.

Most other altcoins, though...

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

#426

Post by aalleavitch »

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 just show that Bitcoin is worthless in comparison to a state-backed fiat currency? It doesn't matter if you have all the bitcoin in the world, the US government has more violence at its disposal than you could ever buy, and ultimately violence is the only thing that ensures the ownership of anything. If a government wanted something from you they could just take it, that's the real reason that the money they print has value.

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

#427

Post by parsimo2010 »

homologate wrote: post #371
ineedasername wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is how many have been mined, and are an upper bound of that many bitcoin in circulation. Some of it is stuck with forgotten addresses and passwords, so some are just gone- I think bitcoin won't be used by the time we have enough computing power to track down dead addresses and crack the passwords.

Also, the short term price sensitivity of bitcoin is related to the depth of the order book and not the total market cap of coins. Someone placing a sell order at market rates for 94k bitcoin would wipe out the order books and the price would go way down, and take quite a while to recover. To sell 94k bitcoin without nuking the price they will have to sell at a slow trickle.

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

#429

Post by lmpostor »

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

Hash rate is 90+m terahash and increasing, good luck R&Ding the chips and obtaining enough to achieve. Retail pricing is around 3k per 50 TH/s, and that is just for hardware.

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

#430

Post by lmpostor »

joshgachnang wrote: post #416
qroshan wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

94EH and close to 50TH for top of the line equipment.

Even if we were extremely generous would be a billion in hardware at the very least (I am assuming $500 manufacturing cost)

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