61–70 of 901 posts
fwiw, it appears one of the named here is a YC Alum: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=il https://www.linkedin.com/in/unrealdutch/
Thin red line between scamming and hustling.
Shouldn't all true crypto believers hate this news? It's the government trying to enforce their opinion of who should own those Bitcoins, thereby taking power away from the owner that the network has decided on, which would be "whoever has the cryptographic keys".
In a hypothetical, if the two did not breach Bitfinex servers (unauthorized access to others systems) but instead managed to "guess" the private key to the Bitfinex wallet and transfer the funds, would this also be a crime? Would this be treated the same way?
I can't see how they can get away from it not being theft. No durable argument could be made in court they thought it was there to take, there is no way they didn't know it was someone else's property.
So most likely,
1) they didn't launder it properly, leading to police being able to trace it to their bank accounts. I wonder if tornado.cash was used.
2) then police had their names, leading to warrants for all online accounts - google account, apple account, etc.
3) they made the big blunder of keeping their private keys in their online account. Most likely a txt file in google drive. That is such a silly blunder. Without the private keys, the police has zero proof of anything. They could have made a hundred excuses for how they got money in their bank account, as long as the police didn't have the private keys. Who keeps their private keys in an online account?
Apparently the biggest criminals make too many silly mistakes. The old saying applies here: "you don't have to be smart, just don't be an idiot"
They had to know what kind of scrutiny would be on those coins forever.
At the time of the theft, the coins are worth $100M+ and they can't touch them. Even worse, anything they do with them will be monitored, researched, dug into, and everything else from law enforcement, amateur detectives, and every major tech+crime group.
Fast forward to now and the coins are worth 50x that.. and now they try to move them? And all the keys are in cloud storage? But it had to be frustrating to be sitting on something so valuable without any way to use it. They had to be stressed and anxious about it.
A life of crime is stupid. A life of crime for something this high profile is far beyond stupid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not waving it away, this isn't a discussion about the legal system. If someone steals steal a fiver from your back pocket then there's no magical wand that the police can wave that teleports the cash back into your hand. They need to come and get it from the kitchen table or wherever the thief has put it assuming they haven't spent it. Most cryptocurrencies are explicitly designed to act as digital cash in this w…
Cash is not a good comparison to cryptocurrency at all. Stealing $70M, or trying to launder $5B in cash, is absolutely not the same thing as doing the same with cryptocurrencies. $70M or $5B is a serious logistical problem to steal, hide, and launder. $70M is 700kg in $100s. > under the control of the owner of the private key, Not owner, no. Temporary viewer is enough. And that's a huge difference.
In the same way that if someone takes your cash into their possession, they might not have legal ownership, but now they have to somehow be involved in its' future transfer (even if that's like, handcuffing them and forcing them to hand it over).
In a cryptographic system you need the key in order to do things. Whether you think it's good or bad to apply that principle to the concept of money is orthogonal to the ground reality of how it actually works.
The original Bitcoin whitepaper explicitly refers to itself as a peer to peer electronic cash system (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf). It's the 7th word in. It's designed to operate in a cash-like manner as opposed to a referential (credit-like? not sure what the term is for this) as in a bank ledger or similar.
Shouldn't all true crypto believers hate this news? It's the government trying to enforce their opinion of who should own those Bitcoins, thereby taking power away from the owner that the network has decided on, which would be "whoever has the cryptographic keys".
Seems like a win to me. The government had to physically go to their house and arrest them to get to their funds, whereas normally all they had to do was call up their bank and had their money frozen. Not to mention, this threat could have been easily mitigated by keeping your funds in a multsig wallet, with the keys distributed in multiple redundant locations.
Having stolen coins recovered seems like an OK thing.
> “After the execution of court-authorized search warrants of online accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan, special agents obtained access to files within an online account controlled by Lichtenstein,” the press release said. “Those files contained the private keys required to access the digital wallet that directly received the funds stolen from Bitfinex, and allowed special agents to lawfully seize and rec…
As far as how exactly they got caught, there was a reward offered by the company it was stolen from. It may have been someone tipped the feds off for the reward.
Does anyone know if Bitfinex will get this returned to them (and hopefully repay users) .. or what the next steps in this story might look like?
> “After the execution of court-authorized search warrants of online accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan, special agents obtained access to files within an online account controlled by Lichtenstein,” the press release said. “Those files contained the private keys required to access the digital wallet that directly received the funds stolen from Bitfinex, and allowed special agents to lawfully seize and rec…