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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

#491

Post by nybble41 »

qroshan wrote: post #476
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.

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.

If your plan is to use general-purpose computers for mining then Bitcoin has nothing to worry about. You'll never manage a 51% attack that way, no when all your competition is using ASICs.

Moreover, to gain $184B by shorting Bitcoin you'd need to find someone willing to loan you $184B worth of Bitcoin, and then somehow sell all of it without crashing the price or drawing unwanted attention to your activities. Of course if the price doesn't react the way you expect you could end up paying a lot more than $184B to buy it all back to repay the loan. You shouldn't assume that even a successful (but expensive, and obviously temporary) 51% attack will drive the price down to zero.

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

#492

Post by meowface »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #422
meowface wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was, though. Vinnik created it as a way to help people launder stolen / illicitly-gained cryptocurrency, perhaps in addition to providing standard exchange services. Cryptocurrency from large hacks appeared in Vinnik's personal BTC-e account on several occasions, for example.

BTC-e was perhaps "safe" in that it seemed to be operated competently from a technical standpoint, and it didn't appear to attempt to scam its users (both of which may not be true of Mt. Gox), but it didn't really need to worry about costs due to the absurd amount of profit they were making from their laundering hustle.

It wasn't that they merely turned a blind eye to the laundering. Vinnik personally assisted in the laundering, presumably by working with some of the exchange hackers.

>BTC-e was around longer than those exchanges.

I should've said "a cover to help criminals launder illicitly gained cryptocurrency". There were plenty of reasons to launder cryptocurrency before any large exchanges existed. He didn't help just with exchange hacks. But when exchange hacks started happening, business was certainly booming for him, since that was the easiest way to steal a lot of cryptocurrency at once.

The US government may have inadvertently stolen your money, and other people's, but they did it to reappropriate billions of dollars money stolen from citizens around the world, including American citizens. Vinnik helped intentionally steal money from ordinary people who used Mt. Gox and other exchanges, and pocketed a lot of it for himself. Hopefully some of the money the US government seized will be returned to their rightful owners one day, but who knows.

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

#493

Post by chrisfosterelli »

derriz wrote: post #399
mikepurvis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

Are you in the US? While I've never personally done Norbert's Gambit my understanding is that it's extremely popular for Canadian investors to do if they want to get USD. Might not be vice-versa.

The most common use case I'm familiar with is within RRSPs, as there is sometimes a tax advantage to using US-listed ETFs within them. Most brokerages charge 1.5-2% to do currency conversion so it would be a lot better deal to do Norbert's Gambit to get USD trading funds.

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

#494

Post by the_gastropod »

mikeryan wrote: post #484
the_gastropod wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you may hold the misconception. Only ~12% of millionaires inherited their wealth. The remainder are "self-made", in that they lived below their means, and saved.

No I'm not saying most millionaires inherit their wealth. I'm saying that penny pinching isn't how you create it. Most people create wealth via entrepreneurship. The amount you can create via saving is minuscule compared to starting a business, investment banking, being a lawyer etc. Work creates wealth. Side note, many of the people I know who are wealthy enjoy spending it which is the antithesis of penny pinching.

There are two ways to becoming wealthy:

1. Have wealth given to you.

2. Live beneath your means (aka save part of your income)

I get "penny pinching" can mean being cheap or something. But ultimately, saving is what makes you wealthy. And it's a much more accessible and in your control than winning the lottery of life by starting a successful business, or being some hotshot lawyer.

Side note: Warren Buffet enjoys not spending his wealth, which is exactly penny pinching ;-)

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/people-events/article/2...

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

#495

Post by tunesmith »

syncsynchalt wrote: post #471
tunesmith wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "pret…

I know about that, I meant besides that. An average return doesn't mean a consistent return from year to year - e.g. $100,000 / year from 2 million. I was just curious how other people would invest to target a high probability of 5% each year.

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

#496

Post by [deleted] »

bdowling wrote: post #489
peterwwillis wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have a right to do it, but there's nothing to stop them. 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 f…

If your property is wrongfully seized by the government due to some criminal activity, you can file a claim to get it back. This happens all the time when a criminal is caught with stolen goods. The thieves do not have the best claim. It may take some time and effort to get the property back, but there is a process.

[deleted]

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

#498

Post by nybble41 »

ColanR wrote: post #464
Ambele wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin is not supposed to be anonymous But it can be used anonymously and probably in some industries is still used anonymously. A counterparty that is willing to swap anonymously acquired and sent altcoins for Bitcoin can provide a privacy conscious individual with anonymous Bitcoins. If using proxy-chains, Tor, or a real person in another country to broadcast your trade isn't your cup-of-tea because you don't tru…

> A counterparty that is willing to swap anonymously acquired and sent altcoins for Bitcoin can provide a privacy conscious individual with anonymous Bitcoins. Not if amounts are tracked, rather than addresses. "oh look, this gal X just lost 5.3876BTC and gained 3.76549ALTCOIN, and this other dude Y just gained 5.3876BTC and lost 3.76549ALTCOIN. Geeze, I wonder if they traded." And with the proper graph theory tools,…

The first problem here is that there is no link between the identities across the two currencies. You don't know that X lost some BTC and gained some altcoin. You just know that some BTC was transferred from X to Y and some altcoins were transferred from Z to W—completely different addresses. You also don't know precisely what exchange rate was used, and a privacy-minded service would round to a small number of significant digits (5.4BTC for 3.8ALT) rather than using exact, traceable figures. A proper mixer would probably also use fixed denominations and send each piece to a different address over a randomized timespan.

It's still not immune to tracing, obviously, but it's a much harder problem than just looking for symmetric transactions.

The simplest system, though, is probably just to spend some BTC renting time on a mining rig. It doesn't have to be profitable, just break even. Newly mined bitcoins have no official history to show who paid for the mining.

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

#499

Post by peterwwillis »

bdowling wrote: post #489
peterwwillis wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have a right to do it, but there's nothing to stop them. 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 f…

If your property is wrongfully seized by the government due to some criminal activity, you can file a claim to get it back. This happens all the time when a criminal is caught with stolen goods. The thieves do not have the best claim. It may take some time and effort to get the property back, but there is a process.

Assuming the govt took the money under the auspices of a criminal forfeiture (which I assume because the company was supposedly for money laundering), you would basically need to prove a paper trail to show what specific part of the money they seized was yours, and even then who knows if there isn't a loophole that allows them to basically not respond if the forfeiture was of a foreign company on foreign soil. They took it from a non-US entity, so they may not have any responsibility to give any of it back, because it was not being held by someone in the US [with rights in the US].

(note: IANAL)

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

#500

Post by bredren »

miguelmota wrote: post #480
tradertef wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

You don't have to be a billionaire to want your btc transaction processed quickly.
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