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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

#701

Post by scottlocklin »

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #673
scottlocklin wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, that's the one. The astounding, insane decision to use "libraries" aka delegate call in any immutable smart contract always boggled my mind. The amount of space saved is so ludicrously small as to beggar belief. Hope the 10k or whatever worth of space savings (about 20 transactions worth) was worth it. Anyway, he didn't get a roll back, and the $200m in value that disappeared didn't either.

wonder if he got to claim that as a loss on a tax form somewhere... hmmm.

Well he's not a US citizen and unless he's insane, his corporations are offshored in a 0% domocile. It's really only a problem for Americans; everyone else who has their shit together can stick their corporate shell on Cayman or whatever.

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

#702

Post by Consultant32452 »

solotronics wrote: post #421
cortesoft wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

I feel confident that any major state actor could completely disrupt the bitcoin market. In traditional banking the government wants to maintain the value of its fiat currency. But the government doesn't care one iota about the value of Bitcoin except potentially for its own nefarious purposes.

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

#704

Post by Drdrdrq »

roenxi wrote: post #597
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 1. The value of bitcoin would fall to basically 0. The reason bitcoin has any value at all really has to do with trust - belief that the protocol is secure and can't be broken. In this case, an easily detectable spending "override" would cause faith in the protocol to evaporate. That seems a little out there. (1) There is something like 1 person who uses bitcoin to move billions of dollars around. The small-time us…

First they came after those with 1b$, but I didn't stand up for them... :D

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

#705

Post by arcticbull »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #602
arcticbull wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No dollars were transferred. If you want to convert it to actual things you can spend you have to pay an exchange at least 1% on either end. You're comparing moving around intermediate representation to something you can actually use, like a bank moving bits around in its internal ledger. WU is not a good comparison for large-quantity FOREX, InteractiveBrokers is one of your many options, and they charge a commission…

> No dollars were transferred. If you want to convert it to actual things you can spend you have to pay an exchange at least 1% on either end. Actually, this isn't true. That's the lowest-cost way of converting the bitcoins to actual things. But if you don't want to interact with an exchange, you have enough BTC that you can easily find someone who will just take your payment in BTC and take on the job of going throu…

It still has to exit and you can’t discount that cost. Nobody will sell you a house for BTC and not exchange them for dollars. That means nobody will sell you the house for face value. You’re still going to have to discount the sale price to cover the exit costs unless you have data that shows otherwise.

For instance, if you came to me and offered me either $500K in dollars or $500K worth of BTC at today's prices (good luck defining that with volatility) I'd say sure, for $550K worth of BTC and I'll exit it immediately. Well, probably not, because I'm sure that BTC is either dirty or avoiding taxes and that's not a conversation I want to have with the IRS/FBI, but that's why you'd have to pay me so much more.

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

#706

Post by ColanR »

nybble41 wrote: post #688
ColanR wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's still not immune to tracing, obviously, but it's a much harder problem than just looking for symmetric transactions. "And with the proper graph theory tools, much more complex interactions could be tracked." > 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…

> "And with the proper graph theory tools, much more complex interactions could be tracked." So you've said, and I already agreed that it isn't impossible. But do you have any real-world examples where someone followed reasonable OPSEC (fixed denominations, mixers, randomized timing) and still had their transactions successfully traced via these "proper graph theory tools"?

Who would have published such an example? When we deal with opsec, we have to consider what is possible, rather than what has been done in the past. We have to do better than merely "locking the house after the thief has gone".

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

#707

Post by mruts »

bogwog wrote: post #387
Erudite_Genius wrote: post #376

The fact that bitcoin even HAS a "dollar value" attached to it is a testament to the FAILURE of bitcoin's original sole objective.

Today it's pretty much just for launderers, criminals, gamblers, and people who don't know how it works/people looking to take advantage of people who don't know how it works.

Is there something wrong with that? Sounds like freedom to me.

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

#708

Post by mruts »

Erudite_Genius wrote: post #376

The fact that bitcoin even HAS a "dollar value" attached to it is a testament to the FAILURE of bitcoin's original sole objective.

How is that even possible? I can't think of a single thing, material or abstract, that doesn't have a dollar value attached to it.

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

#709

Post by filoleg »

owenmarshall wrote: post #563
merpnderp wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Presumably their grandmother was alive when she was gambling the money away, so I do not see how a will would have helped here :) But a good point regardless, most people with any kind of saving should have one drawn up.

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

#710

Post by WoahNoun »

icebraining wrote: post #623
WoahNoun wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lent that money to a shady organization. Once you lent it, it was no longer your property. You then became a creditor of that organization and your coins became their assets. The organizations assets were seized due to systemic criminal activity and they could no longer repay their debts to their creditors. Just like any other financial institution. Some quote about bitcoin enthusiasts rediscovering the reason fo…

Regulations is what made proverbialbunny lose the money; it would probably not have happened had BTC-e been allowed to continue the alleged criminal activities. Of course, that might be worse for the rest of society.

Regulations and criminal law are two different things.

If btc-e were part of a well-regulated financial system, they would have gone through a liquidation process and creditors would have been paid some % on the $ what they were owed.

This is what happened with BCCI when it was raided and shutdown for massive money laundering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Credit_and_Commerce_In...

>Just a month later, BCCI's liquidators (Deloitte, PWC) pleaded guilty to all criminal charges pending against the bank in the United States (both those lodged by the federal government and by Morgenthau), clearing the way for BCCI's formal liquidation that fall. BCCI paid $10 million in fines and forfeited all $550 million of its American assets – at the time, the largest single criminal forfeiture ever obtained by federal prosecutors. The money was used to repay losses to First American and Independence and to make restitution to BCCI's depositors.

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