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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?
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Banks typically treat billionaire customers differently too, it's absolutely ludicrous to think they'd have to use hundreds of thousands of transactions (let alone pay for them!).
Maybe. Having worked in the wire room before, that is not inaccurate. That said, transferring one billion would require advance knowledge, multiple signoffs, and adjusting permissions for people. Depending on the institution the payments may have to be split, but odds are the bank would eat the cost to maintain that relationship.
This is largely a feature, not a bug, as various Bitcoin exchanges have discovered.
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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?
On the international stage, might makes right. What makes us special... our military and our threats make other countries concede to our wishes.
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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...
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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?
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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?
A foreign power can have any law it wants, and no other foreign power has to respect it. You can try to sue them, but sovereign immunity, and foreign sovereign immunity, stops almost all of these attempts. The exceptions generally are human rights abuses (by the same state doing the suing...) and commercial transactions.
In this case, the USG stole from money launderers in a foreign country. So not only can people in the US not sue the USG over it (sovereign immunity), people in the Ukraine can't sue the USG over it (foreign sovereign immunity). The thieves would have the best claim, but it doesn't work out well when you claim your illegal business was stolen from. And since it's a foreign power, if the US balks, it would be covered under international law, and guess who enforces international law?
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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…
So, what is the minimum amount you could send with a proper transaction fee? Could someone flood the network with millions of unconfirmed transactions?
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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…