94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by syncsynchalt » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #345

ghaff wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entirely dependent on location, lifestyle, family status, etc. Yes, with $2m you can retire tomorrow and get something like $100K/year in pretty much guaranteed income not pegged to inflation. (You can argue the numbers but certainly ADDED: Yes, you're "rich" but not jet-setting in business class at resort hotels, multi-million dollar coastal city condo, eat at top restaurants on a regular basis etc. rich. Which is a…

Wait, how would you guarantee 5%? I don't see "put it in an index fund" as "pretty much guaranteed".

The market return for the past century has been something like 7% (after inflation). If you're investing in time spans longer than 10 years then typically you expect something in that range.

Past performance does not promise future results, and the world could end tomorrow, but it's not a bad idea to plan that you'll get an average of 5%+ on market investment.

(I'll note that you're responding to someone saying "pretty much guaranteed" and dropped that qualifier in your question).

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

#472

Post by qaq » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

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…

One would imagine there are pretty severe consequences to doing an attack like that far outside of the realm of the technical complexity.

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

#473

Post by toast0 » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #411

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You can be careful to not comingle funds or participate in KYC, but you have no forward security --- the person you paid (or their successor payees) can always comingle funds or participate in KYC. At which point, they may recall you paid them.

Also, I can't imagine it's very convenient to manage a large number of separate keys.

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

#474

Post by delecti » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

camjohnson26 wrote: post #407

delecti wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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, bu…

Satoshi was probably Hal Finney, who passed away in 2014. The most likely explanation of what happened to the keys is that they weren’t properly safe guarded early in development because no one thought that one day bitcoins would be worth $20,000 a piece. When Finney died their total value was “only” around $45 million.

If Satoshi is Hal Finney, and dead, then "what happened to the keys" isn't an interesting question. If this were Satoshi reemerging, then "what happened to the keys" isn't relevant, because they're clearly fine.

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

#475

Post by pank5241 » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

I thought all things on the internet could one way or another b tracked so can they really not find out what the wallets are from?

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

#476

Post by qroshan » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

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.

If my goal is to re-purpose, I would use a General Purpose Computer

The Market Cap of Bitcoin is $184,000,000,000

I have plenty of money to play with.

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

#477

Post by qroshan » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:36 PM UTC

lmpostor wrote: post #430

joshgachnang wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The Market Cap of Bitcoin is $184,000,000,000

Theoretically, I can spend that much to make it's value go to $0. (yes, there are liquidity and other concerns, but you get the point)

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

#478

Post by camjohnson26 » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

thedudeabides5 wrote: post #388

shmerl wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't sound like evidence. Conjecture at most.

My blockchain might be a little rusty, but is it possible to tell the order in which a coin was mined (vs the total) from the information in the chain? If so, should be possible to find satoshi coins relatively easily, no?

Bitcoin doesn’t really work like that, a “coin” is just a value tied to an address, so individual coins are never transferred. What you can do is see all the incoming transactions to an address to identify which addresses received the earliest mined coins.

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

#479

Post by qroshan » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:42 PM UTC

lmpostor wrote: post #429

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

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.

There is a reason you are lurking in HN instead of working in a hedge fund.

The theoretical maximum value one can gain from Bitcoin going to $0 is it's market cap ($184,000,000,000).

If you take out the liquidity and risk, I can spend upto $184B to make the Bitcoin go to 0.

If you are state actor, you can direct all the energy and all the computers to attack Bitcoin

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

#480

Post by miguelmota » Mon, Sep 09, 2019, 10:46 PM UTC

tradertef wrote: post #432

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test tx of 0.1 before sending. https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/9895f1e94d0df7fd04e1289f34... I usually test with 0.00001

That transaction cost 0.00530724 BTC or 55$. Why is it different than the final one?

The final transaction is a total of 13611 bytes in size while the test one is 1220 bytes. There is a fee per byte in the Bitcoin UTXO model. An unspent transaction output (UTXO) contains information about who can spend the bitcoin so there is a fee attached to every byte of information in a UTXO because miners spend computing power processing every byte. The final transaction contained 15 UXTOs which made it a lot larger in size than the test one which only contained 4 UTXOs. The final transaction had a fee of 480 satoshis per byte and the test one had a fee of 435 satoshis per byte.

13611 * 480 = 6533280 sats which is 0.06533280 BTC which is ~$675 USD

1220 * 435 = 530700 sats which is 0.00530700 BTC which is ~$55 USD

if you're wondering why the fee per byte is not the same for both transactions, it's probably because the recommended fee fluctuates depending on network congestion throughout the day. If you're wondering why the transaction fee per byte is higher than average, well it's probably because the sender is a billionaire who doesn't really care and just wants their transaction processed quickly.