Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

571–580 of 747 posts

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

#571

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 c…

Whether or not it’s legal, you probably wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy your profits.

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

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the amount of trivialization and conflation irks me 1. "51% attack" is not a thing as in "one has to have 51% of hashpower to perform it". it's just that with 51% of hashpower it becomes relatively cheap to perform such attack. one can throw enough money at the problem and get lucky to perform large reorg with just 10% of hashpower. the lower the number - the more lucky attacker has to get. 2. "rewriting a block" or…

> it's just that with 51% of hashpower it becomes relatively cheap to perform such attack The qualitative difference is that with 51% of hashpower you can sustain the attack indefinitely. Other miners might get the occasional block and temporarily take the lead but in the long run you'll always have the longest chain using only blocks you've mined yourself. With less than 50% there's a chance that you can revert a tr…

That assumes that every other miner all mines the old chain. If you and ‘dumb’ miners that just use the longest chain add up to 51% then luck is enough.

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

#573

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 c…

Whether or not it’s legal, you probably wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy your profits.

Why? Bitmex doesn't care how much money you make using their platform. They make money on the fees. And you can use them anonymously.

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

#574
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…

Does the time it would take to spin up enough compute to carry out a 51% attack decrease its likelihood? I.e more blocks are being written every day, so you need to do additional work to create the alternate chain?

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

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, because historically major cryptos have allowed known attacks to succeed if they targeted a member of the public at large, and have defended only if they targeted named insiders. The expectation, at this point, is that defense will only occur if you are an elite insider. An unknown user may or may not be such an elite, and thus may or may not get defense.

> I disagree, because historically major cryptos have allowed known attacks to succeed if they targeted a member of the public at large, and have defended only if they targeted named insiders. Surely you aren't going to make such a statement without examples! I can think of examples where things were attacked, including some of the largest value destructions, and insider status didn't help. For example, the multisig…

> the multisig thing that happened to Gav Wood

I wasn't sure what you were referring to, but it looks like maybe https://cointelegraph.com/news/parity-multisig-wallet-hacked...

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

#576

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?

Ostensible justification: some trivial amount of money laundering could be traced to the US (iirc a few thousand dollars worth). Real justification: Extraterritoriality is a thing you get to do when you're an empire.

  Trivial amount of money laundering

  BTC-e 
haha?

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

#577
post #473
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You can have one secret master key and then derive many keys from that [1]. Without the master key you cannot tell that they are linked. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_derivation_function

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

#578
post #49

From the top twitter comment: > 0.06BTC in fees? Why so expensive? Just gotta say, its pretty amazing we live in a world where 1 billion dollars can get transferred pseudo-anonymously in a reasonable time frame, only costing the transfer party $600. As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison, Western Union has a transfer limit of $2500 per transaction, and a $20 fee per transaction. If you were to initiate a $1,00…

Do you really think people use 400,000 transactions costing $20 apiece to move large amounts of money? If you keep a billion dollars in a bank account (!) you can simply call your private banker and have it done with no fee.

  As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison

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

#579

From the top twitter comment: > 0.06BTC in fees? Why so expensive? Just gotta say, its pretty amazing we live in a world where 1 billion dollars can get transferred pseudo-anonymously in a reasonable time frame, only costing the transfer party $600. As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison, Western Union has a transfer limit of $2500 per transaction, and a $20 fee per transaction. If you were to initiate a $1,00…

I think you're confusing the real-world version of you that has to pay $20 per transaction with a hypothetical billionaire version of you. People moving large amounts of money around don't do 400,000 transactions at $20 a pop.

  As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison

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

#580
post #75

From the top twitter comment: > 0.06BTC in fees? Why so expensive? Just gotta say, its pretty amazing we live in a world where 1 billion dollars can get transferred pseudo-anonymously in a reasonable time frame, only costing the transfer party $600. As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison, Western Union has a transfer limit of $2500 per transaction, and a $20 fee per transaction. If you were to initiate a $1,00…

No human being would ever transfer 1B through 'Western Union'. I am sorry, but that's not a legit comparison.

  As a really stupid, non-real-world comparison
Post reply on HN