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Earlier quoted context omitted.
People should take care to distinguish pseudo-anonymous chains like btc from anonymous ones like zerocoin. As soon as the ransom payment was transacted, the whole world could watch the chain and see the next step in its travel.
"Wouldn't it be great if we could get criminals to use a 100% public transparent ledger???"
Event 1 as story 2 happens. This always drives me nuts about financial reporting.
Yes, it's a dark pattern in journalism. They hint at causation while having plausible deniability. Used to bother me too when I checked Yahoo Finance, every other day the market would be up/down "as" whatever happened that day that might have anything to do with the economy.
Mostly because anticipation is so important.
Event 1 as story 2 happens. This always drives me nuts about financial reporting.
Correlation is not causation.
I wonder if the future push towards Proof-of-Stake away from Proof-of-Work will one day stop this happening.
Edit: I found the bitcoin address https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1q7eqww9dmm9p48hx5y...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. $2.3 million dollars of BTC isn't too much.
It’s not, but it sets the precedent that the FBI will seize bitcoin without any kind of due process when it is able to recover proceeds from a criminal transaction . This jeopardizes the use of Bitcoin as a currency for cross-border criminal transactions which is a large if not majority share of its use case. So it’s easy to see why its value went down — fewer criminals will want to use it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People should take care to distinguish pseudo-anonymous chains like btc from anonymous ones like zerocoin. As soon as the ransom payment was transacted, the whole world could watch the chain and see the next step in its travel.
"Wouldn't it be great if we could get criminals to use a 100% public transparent ledger???"
(but really the FBI since the Bank Secrecy Act and before)
I find it amusing how all the news reports gloss over the fact that the FBI somehow got access to the wallet’s private key. I’m also wondering why the hackers didn’t request payment in a currency that’s more difficult to trace.
As for anonymity on the receiving end: the BTC can always just be exchanged for a more anonymous currency like Monero. You might think that'd require the criminal to KYC to a [centralized] exchange, but there are decentralized exchanges (i.e. DEXes — on-chain, crypto-for-crypto exchanges with no support for fiat deposit/withdrawal), and these have no need for KYC, since they don't touch the real banking system.
I hope they start seizing Ethereum because it would show how not decentralized and not secure proof of stake system is.
I find it amusing how all the news reports gloss over the fact that the FBI somehow got access to the wallet’s private key. I’m also wondering why the hackers didn’t request payment in a currency that’s more difficult to trace.
Because they need to cash out somehow? Being crypto-currency rich doesn't mean much if you're unable to exchange the crypto-currency for real money.