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

#561

Post by flyGuyOnTheSly » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:16 AM UTC

Imagine how much money you could make by creating a bogeyman bitcoin wallet!

Step 1, Consolidate 94,000 BTC into one single address the entire crypto world is now watching.

Step 2, Send 1,000 BTC from bogeyman bitcoin wallet to exchange crypto wallet.

Step 3, Freak the shit out of the market. Promptly sell the entire lot in one single market sell order.

Meanwhile you've got another 50,000 BTC or whatever sitting on contracts leveraged with 100x margin in a short position across multiple accounts... essentially netting you 100,000 BTC profit if you can manage to tank the price just 2% on the 3 funds that Bitmex follows to create their index price... and you totally would selling 1,000 BTC at once from a well known superwallet.

Rinse and repeat... Eventually, I imagine you wouldn't even need to sell the coins on the exchange... just moving them there would be enough... (which would probably be illegal at least in the USA, see below)

And when the market gets wise... and everybody else starts shorting the price when you move your coins... you BUY 1,000 BTC in a single market order... stop hunting everyone's "sure things" (with mostly tight stops) and probably making you 500% return on a 5% move the opposite way... placed on longs of course.

(I am working on an algo bot, I think about this kind of stuff all day long!)

I had better start saving!

Side question... would this be legal? Moving the coins to exchange, signalling that you were going to sell based on precedent, and then not selling would be illegal by the nature of equities laws on fake bid or ask walls to move the price... like some trader at goldman was just arrested over for doing the same in the gold markets.

But just selling a lot of coin while you have another lot of coin in short positions would be perfectly legal, right?

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

#562

Post by solotronics » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #446

solotronics wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could prevent you from spending the coins, though, by threatening anyone who accepts a transfer of the 'seized' coins.

Enforcing illegal torrents failed. I think a cryptocurrency ban would be similar. Also, the US made it illegal to hold gold between 1933 and 1974 but almost nobody turned in gold to the feds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

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

#563

Post by owenmarshall » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

merpnderp wrote: post #557

owenmarshall wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Penny pinching and then dying a millionaire sounds awful, because what's even the point of having all those millions if you lived like you had nothing the whole time? Building generational wealth for your progeny. GP said their grandfather died a multimillionaire. That money can go to his children; managed well over their lifetime it will double several times over. And learned frugality on their part means they hav…

Lol that money went to my grandmother who liked to gamble and gamble she did for a decade until it was all gone.

lmao, ouch. Have a will drawn up, friends ;)

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

#564

Post by mikeryan » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:24 AM UTC

the_gastropod wrote: post #494

mikeryan wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

This is where your premise breaks down. There are millions of people who do this who are not “wealthy”. They’re just “retired”. Acquiring real wealth requiring vastly more then your means to the point where the ratio of income to expenses doesn’t really mean much.

Even if you consider Buffet a penny pincher that’s not how he created his wealth.

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

#565

Post by RandomBacon » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:27 AM UTC

pathseeker wrote: post #414

gesman wrote: post #413

Whats' an excitement? We don't start threads every time Brinks truck passes by with someone else's money

A brinks truck with a billion dollars in cash would be worth a thread. :)

Thankfully we can't see inside the Brinks truck as it passes us on the road.

Money should be private. I wouldn't want anyone to know how much money I was transfering.

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

#566

Post by miguelmota » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:29 AM UTC

bredren wrote: post #500

miguelmota wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well yes obviously it doesn't matter but that fee is way higher than average for a fast transaction meaning they're ok with spending a lot more than the average sender.

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

#567

Post by ryacko » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:33 AM UTC

Most of the comments in this thread are unaware of offline transactions. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Offline_transactions

Furthermore, Bitcoin mining is run by pools. Only the pools have to be hacked for a 51% attack to occur.

I haven’t read all 500 comments in this thread, but they all largely seem to be the same.

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

#568

Post by kragen » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

lonelappde wrote: post #550

kragen wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of mounting the attack with general-purpose computers would be orders of magnitude higher than the US$12B calculated above, just from the energy bill. Check out https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison ; the ASIC AntMiner S9 gets 10 billion hashes per joule, while on https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparis... you can see that the most efficient GPUs get 2–3 million hashes pe…

Are ASICs totally useless for non Bitcoin computing?

Yes, that's what the “AS” stands for.

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

#569

Post by the_gastropod » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

mikeryan wrote: post #564

the_gastropod wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Live beneath your means (aka save part of your income) This is where your premise breaks down. There are millions of people who do this who are not “wealthy”. They’re just “retired”. Acquiring real wealth requiring vastly more then your means to the point where the ratio of income to expenses doesn’t really mean much. Even if you consider Buffet a penny pincher that’s not how he created his wealth.

I guess it depends on your value of wealth. I'd pin it somewhere around the "never needing to work again" level. Sounds like your definition is quite a bit higher.

Funny enough, though, Buffet got started working a pretty regular job, saving over a million in inflation adjusted dollars before starting his business.

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

#570

Post by kenneth » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:52 AM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #82

radlad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks typically have limits on how much you can withdraw or transfer with any given method in a day.

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!).

I run a VC fund. We move store money around in large amounts (6-7 figure transfers, 7-8 figure balances). Our bank loves us and doesn't charge us any fees for anything ($0 wires etc). Having millions parked with them allows to lend the money which is how they make their revenue. They don't care about fees.