is there a statute of limitation on ransom crimes such as these?
The UK doesn't have statutes of limitations for criminal offenses
A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
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Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
#82There already is such tracking going on, exchanges do freeze balances sometimes. The problem is that if the stolen coin gets traded before exchanges can freeze them you wind up with a lot of innocent people holding those coins and it's not practical to freeze those later. Consider these two scenarios: A stolen bike vs a stolen sack of coffee. In the case of the bike, if you can find it you can take it back from someo…
if the goods are effectively interchangeable, then I don't see why you wouldn't just rule that 8 pounds of beans were stolen so you give him 8 pounds of beans out of the bin. They don't have to be literally the exact same beans.
Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
#83I wonder how this would go down in Australia. Precedent set from Gamer's vs Natwest is that the buyer retains ownership rights, so long as they purchased the product in good faith that the seller owned the original product or had the right to sell it. So if I buy your stolen car without knowing it is actually yours and was stolen, I retain ownership of the car and you have no legal remedy to retrieve it from me. http…
"So if I buy your stolen car without knowing it is actually yours and was stolen, I retain ownership of the car and you have no legal remedy to retrieve it from me."
No, the relevant law doesn't apply to stolen goods. It only applies to goods that were obtained by the seller with the consent of the original owner.
"Where a person having bought or agreed to buy goods obtains with the consent of the seller possession of the goods or the documents of title to the goods, the delivery or transfer by that person or by a mercantile agent acting for him of the goods or documents of title under any sale pledge or other disposition thereof to any person receiving the same in good faith and without notice of any lien or other right of the original seller in respect of the goods shall have the same effect as if the person making the delivery or transfer were a mercantile agent intrusted by the owner with the goods or documents of title."
Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many upstanding people—and even large companies like payment processors!—process their received funds through a mixer “just to be safe”, i.e. to escape any coincidental untoward paper-trail that attaches to their funds two or three steps back. You know how they say that every US dollar bill has a little cocaine on it? Using your suggestion, every dollar bill would be marked tainted as drug proceeds.
That's as dumb as laundering clean money “just to be safe” or covering up a crime you didn't commit “just to be safe” (hey Reiser). If your coins are clean, mixers make them dirtier and this has been known all along.
They're not trying to hide the proceeds of a crime, they just want to protect their privacy from anyone snooping on the transactions. The government is not the only party interested in how people are spending their money, and criminals are not the only ones with a legitimate reason to want to keep their financial dealings private.
Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
bitcoin related privacy features are getting much better [1] as are ethereums [2] [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/how-to-obscure-bitcoin-cash-transac... [2] https://medium.com/@tornado.cash/introducing-private-transac...
[1] is about Bitcoin Cash, not Bitcoin. [2] is basically a Tumbler/Mixer based on a smart contract which there are plenty of available (at least non-smart contract ones)
anything useful on bitcoin cash is easily ported to bitcoin, vice versa.
with cashfusion not even the server owners know which transactions belong to who, which isnt the case with normal mixers[1].
[1]https://medium.com/@james.waugh28/is-cashfusion-really-anony...
Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
#86There already is such tracking going on, exchanges do freeze balances sometimes. The problem is that if the stolen coin gets traded before exchanges can freeze them you wind up with a lot of innocent people holding those coins and it's not practical to freeze those later. Consider these two scenarios: A stolen bike vs a stolen sack of coffee. In the case of the bike, if you can find it you can take it back from someo…
This analogy makes no sense and is fundamentally antithetical to what a blockchain is.
Bitcoin literally has chain of hashes that mark a chain of custody and provably verifies transfers between addresses. Just because actors along the route are mixing it into a big wallet and distributing it out only means they are facilitating money laundering and could be easily be proven to have done so, and every transaction that touches that transaction is complicit.
Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
#87Is ransom payment even considered "stolen" in the usual sense? You have willingly paid that, nobody took that from you without permission. I wouldn't be surprised if ransom has it's own different definition. Forcing an innocent to hand over bitcoins they had no clue they were tainted will make everyone lose trust in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. What's the point of anonymity when trading when you're culpab…
> What's the point of anonymity when trading
You don't have a right to trade anonymously; sorry, but that's called money laundering.
Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
#88There already is such tracking going on, exchanges do freeze balances sometimes. The problem is that if the stolen coin gets traded before exchanges can freeze them you wind up with a lot of innocent people holding those coins and it's not practical to freeze those later. Consider these two scenarios: A stolen bike vs a stolen sack of coffee. In the case of the bike, if you can find it you can take it back from someo…
You said "Bitcoin works like the coffee example not the bike." after "Now you can't identify your distinct stolen coffee anymore." But you can identify distinct stolen/tainted Bitcoin. Just like you can identify distinct stolen banknotes. The difference (according to the article) is that banknotes have special legal status meaning that they're effectively fungible after being spent.
We should also carefully distinguish:
* Bitcoin proponents desire that bitcoin work like the earlier currency example, where an innocent actor who receives stolen currency at part of some transaction for a good or service is protected from having to return those bitcoin.
* Whether an innocent actor in that position is in fact liable or protected in that scenario is fundamentally up to the state(s) involved and their legislative choices.
This (as with the centralization of mining, and exchange prominence) seems to be another example where Bitcoin is -in practice- far more subject to the powers of states than its proponents respresent.
I postulate that few if any states will see any advantage in granting that kind of protection to bitcoin transactions, as states have incentives to ensure their own currencies can be transacted without rigorous detective work, and do not have these same incentives with bitcoin.
Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
#89There already is such tracking going on, exchanges do freeze balances sometimes. The problem is that if the stolen coin gets traded before exchanges can freeze them you wind up with a lot of innocent people holding those coins and it's not practical to freeze those later. Consider these two scenarios: A stolen bike vs a stolen sack of coffee. In the case of the bike, if you can find it you can take it back from someo…
You said "Bitcoin works like the coffee example not the bike." after "Now you can't identify your distinct stolen coffee anymore." But you can identify distinct stolen/tainted Bitcoin. Just like you can identify distinct stolen banknotes. The difference (according to the article) is that banknotes have special legal status meaning that they're effectively fungible after being spent.
The real difference is that coffee and banknotes are property, whereas cryptocurrency is an entry in a distributed database. One can "steal" (or at least gain unauthorized access to) a private key, but one cannot "steal" bitcoins. There is no inherent right to have the rest of the Bitcoin network agree that these bitcoins belong to you. Especially not after the authorized owner of the coins (meaning anyone in possession of the private key) has announced to the network that the coins belong to someone else.
Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex
#90An interesting (and sort of related) anecdote:
Some decades ago (unfortunately, so long ago that I can't easily find any references to it - it was probably in the 1980s), there was a robbery of a large number of bank notes in my country. For a while after that, all cashiers at markets had a booklet with the serial numbers of the stolen bank notes, so they would be rejected and/or reported to the police. That was possible because the bank notes were newly issued (so they had blocks of consecutive serial numbers), and had never actually entered circulation (IIRC, they were stolen before arriving at the bank).
While the situation is not identical, there are some similarities: an innocent person (who did not take care of checking the serial number when receiving a bank note) could have their money rejected when trying to buy at a market (and would probably also be questioned by the police).
(I don't recall whether the one(s) who stole the bank notes was/were actually caught; are there other Brazilians here who remember about this case? I think it's not the 2005 robbery, which stole only notes which had already entered circulation.)