The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by johnpaulkiser » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

dylkil wrote: post #150

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.

Whats worse is Bitcoin's security depends on high fees, but you have articles like this celebrating low fees. Satoshi intended for bitcoin to scale to hundreds of millions of transactions, all paying sub cent fees. All those fees would add up to millions of dollars per day. The fees are what secure the chain when the block reward runs out. Around 2014/2015 some devs who worked with blockstream started campaigning to…

That isn't even slightly true. This debate has been settled a long long time ago.

Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Increasing the block size decreases the number of people that run full nodes. It's obvious to anyone who works on Bitcoin that a linear increase to blocksize can never scale, while maintaining an open and decentralized environment.

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

#232

Post by sukilot » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

newguy1234 wrote: post #229

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.

The risk of doing that is if an authoritarian regime gains power then they can effectively black list you from the financial system. This is absolutely an issue in certain countries.

That's why rich people under unfriendly governments keep capital in multiple different nations.

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

#233

Post by newguy1234 » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

iblaine wrote: post #169

Is it also true that he/she would have paid $480M to move $1B in BTC if it were moved $1 at a time?

Bitcoin isn't good for small transactions obviously. That's why there are other cryptos invented that have next to zero transaction fees.

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

#234

Post by newguy1234 » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

thekyle wrote: post #18

SRTP wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. We have a rough idea of which coins belong to Satoshi, based on when and how they were mined. Satoshi's coins are continuously monitored and have never moved.

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

It is possible but also in the early writings of Satoshi, he always stressed the importance of keeping your key and keeping it private.

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

#235

Post by sukilot » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

centimeter wrote: post #168

Jach wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would Craig (falsely) claim to own not-Satoshi addresses, instead of claiming Satoshi addresses that are less likely to be used (due to exposure risk)?

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

#236

Post by Damorian » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

thekuanysh wrote: post #177

erfgh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have to trust yourself to have 100% flawless security because one slip and you lose that $1B to a Chinese hacker with no hope of ever getting it back.

Why do you have to add “Chinese”?

Anecdote, but I once ran a blog for many years. Country breakdown for traffic was roughly 30% China, 30% Russia, and 30% US. Almost 100% of requests out of China and Russia were hacking attempts, I assume mostly by bots. They've earned a reputation and there's nothing wrong pointing it out. If you operate a website, unless China and Russia are part of your market/audience, I'd suggest blocking them altogether.

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

#237

Post by ypcx » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

timcc50 wrote: post #170

lenwood wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And people would start losing trust in the network if this was happening, thus the value of the currency would start dropping, thus all the network participants including the miners would be in a losing position in the long run, which is not what you are looking for after you have invested money in the mining equipment and the whole operation.

That's why the total "hash rate" (the computational effort spent by all the participating miners) is in direct relation to the perceived value of the currency.

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

#238

Post by RL_Quine » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

grapehut wrote: post #210

RL_Quine wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a one in 2 32 chance of making a typo in an address and it being valid for P2PKH, its even less for modern bech32 addresses.

A 1 in 200 chance doesn't make much sense. In (legacy) addresses there's a 4 byte checksum done with sha256, so it should be something like a 1-in-4-billion (1 in 2^32) chance of a typo being valid. bech32 does something even smarter, but I'm not familiar with the details

The formatting was stripped. I meant 2^32.

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

#239

Post by tossmeout » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

MathCodeLove wrote: post #228

beaner wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? It could be anything. Random descriptions add flavor. Bitcoin is also popular in China anyway.

Not Chinese, I also care. That comment is an example of subtle racism. Image the following comment: "You better buy a good bike lock, else you're at risk of having it stolen by a black man." A comment like the one above would spark near universal outrage at the commenter, and with good reason. It's racist, and the original comment here is the same. Unnecessarily racist.

You're incorrect. Chinese is a nationality, not a race, which means this isn't racism. An accurate description would be that this is stereotyping on the basis of nationality.

As such, a more accurate comparison than "black man stealing a bike" would be to something like a "Nigerian scammer," which is an archetype I don't think most of us have a problem with. Other examples I never see complaints about: "Russian hacker," "American imperialist," etc.

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

#240

Post by RL_Quine » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #211

RL_Quine wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. The basic idea is that signer can choose a ECDSA nonce (k) that they know, and leak the private key. If I choose a known nonce for my signature, I can recover the private key from the published transaction instantly. With some ECDSA magic, you can even produce a nonce that is only recoverable with another key that you hold. So a hardware wallet for example can backdoor transactions to leak the seed through the…

If you never reuse an address, all of this concern goes away. Spending any funds from an address means spending them all, and then any private key leaked no longer matters.

That's not actually true, as most private keys are deterministic produced. Leaking one key from a HD wallet leaks them all.