Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

decrypt.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 369 posts

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#161

Post by matthewdgreen »

Jtsummers wrote: post #122
matthewdgreen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're having a discussion on HN about a specific person moving a specific amount of money around. That by itself is basically the opposite of privacy.

Ansil849 already said this, but when talking about things like this there are actually multiple related, sometimes orthogonal, factors: Anonymity - the quality of the user being unknown Privacy - the quality of the user's actions being unobserved Authenticity- the quality of the user's actions being certainly the user's Bitcoin provides pseudonymous transactions, which may approach anonymity if the user is careful. I…

Yes, I have a PhD in cryptography and designed two of the first privacy-preserving extensions to Bitcoin. Bitcoin provides pseudonymity. If no other information can be inferred about a transaction from other sources, users may be able to protect their privacy. In practice this is extremely challenging, and the information leakage this post is discussing is highly unnecessary, and a weakness of Bitcoin.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#162

Post by centimeter »

_jal wrote: post #72
ipython wrote: post #39

Unpopular opinion: why do we care so much about making it cheaper for rich people to move money around? Do we think somehow that will “trickle down” to us mere mortals and put western union and their ilk out of business?

Even more unpopular opinion: humans should be as free as capital. Making capital transfers easy while restricting the movement of real people ghettoizes and traps people for corporate convenience and cost savings.

> humans should be as free as capital.

Capital doesn't put a drain on the social welfare systems of the country you're sending it to.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#163

Post by greenshackle2 »

vmception wrote: post #53
greenshackle2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine there are also fees involved to turn $1B worth of bitcoins to local currency.

There are, there is also a parallel global economy that allows for obtaining goods, services and investing in private equity or other assets directly using bitcoin, so those conversion fees are not an issue for the bitcoin owner. To counter the easiest rebuttal, there probably are only about $1bn worth of things to buy using bitcoin any given day, most of which are other new digital assets that would not be a great i…

Yeah, if you're fully buying into BTC, doing BTC transfer makes obvious sense.

I was trying to see which is cheaper for the use case of "I hold USD in the US, I want to spend it locally as HKD in Hong Kong", which I think is what pbhjpbhj is asking.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#164

Post by centimeter »

kchoudhu wrote: post #121

Pretty sure the fund I work for moved several billion dollars for free on Friday...and will do the same thing again this Friday, the Friday after that, and the Friday after that. Cryptocurrency's obsession with fees is baffling. Fees are not why moving money is hard.

Building relationships with brokers that allow you to move billions of dollars "for free" is hard and expensive.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#165

Post by ForHackernews »

hh3k0 wrote: post #87
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to argue that a financial transaction - a service provided by a bank where THEY take all the risk and responsibility of said transfer - should be free of charge? I mean if I transferred a billion and my bank made a mistake, I would not lose any money. Make a typo in your bitcoin transaction, and you're screwed.

You're just as screwed if you make a typo in your bank transaction, though.

lol no you're not. call them up and they'll fix it.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#166

Post by centimeter »

sammycdubs wrote: post #46

I don't want to sound like a narc, but it seems like a really good idea to have some degree of oversight and safeguards on financial transactions of that magnitude.

And obviously the people who invented and developed Bitcoin disagree. "Oversight and safeguards" translates in practice to "mostly ineffectual but otherwise repressive bureaucracy".

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#167

Post by RL_Quine »

Drip33 wrote: post #111
pjc50 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it happens - as does putting the value in the "fee" box!

I've never heard of someone successfully and unintentionally fat fingering a Bitcoin address typo to a valid Bitcoin address nobody owns. Fee box is a different thing, the recent $2.5m ETH headline you saw was not an accident but an attack/blackmail. Bitcoin core itself prevents you from using too high of a fee without an express override in the config.

You have a one in 232 chance of making a typo in an address and it being valid for P2PKH, its even less for modern bech32 addresses.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#168

Post by centimeter »

Jach wrote: post #75
thekyle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always imagined that Satoshi probably lost the private keys to those early wallets.

Maybe. But in the latest Cra1g Wr1ght drama, he claimed to the court that some early addresses people thought might have been Satoshi's belonged to him. A message surfaced afterwards which was signed with those addresses calling Cra1g a liar.

The addresses used there were not Satoshi addresses, but other addresses mined around the same time.

Re: The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees

#170

Post by timcc50 »

lenwood wrote: post #151
aey wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. You can bribe the miners with your old private key if you act fast enough :)

How do you contact a miner? Can you give an example of this? I've read this before but I'm curious to learn more specifics.

You would need to know them personally. There are lots of big mining farms around the world, and many smaller ones. You would need to be friends with the big ones to pull anything like this off.
Post reply on HN