121–130 of 901 posts
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".
It seems that Tornado Cash ( https://tornado.cash/ ) could have been used to launder the funds. I wonder if: - Laundering happened before Tornado Cash existed, so Tornado Cash was not used - They used something like Tornado Cash, but the funds were still traceable
They could have used something like wbtc, to bridge the bitcoin to Ethereum and then swap to eth to run it through tornado. But wbtc is a custodial wrapping service that would require kyc. There are other wrapping services that don't, but they have nowhere near that much liquidity on Ethereum to execute the trade to eth needed to run it through tornado.
The other problem is that tornado has limited liquidity itself. At the moment there is about $500M USD worth of eth in tornado. You would do yourself no good to dump a large multiple of that into the pool all at once.
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A good guess is that "laundering" billions of dollars is inherently a non-trivial problem, and perhaps not feasible at all without cooperation from shady real-world actors outside the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem. This is actually good news for small-scale users who just want to keep their microtransactions reasonably private - the usual mechanisms might actually work well enough for that case.
I agree. But if not for privacy, why use crypto at all? Even bank accounts are reasonably private, if you are not doing anything considered suspicious by society. Also, with mixers such as tornado_cash, laundering money is , sadly , pretty trivial.
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Well, the police had a search warrant, so the police could have found them if they had had them in their possession anyway. Sure, they could have destroyed them, losing the money but maybe not getting arrested?
vitalik (ethereum founder) used an interesting system. He split the key in 2. Wrote both on paper. Gave 1 paper to family and kept the other. Even if the police raid him (hypothetically), they cannot raid the houses of his family and friends at the same time This way the police or anybody else cannot get your private key.
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Possession is probably a better word than ownership, sure. 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…
> Possession is probably a better word than ownership, sure. I want to stress that I don't consider this a minor 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 Yes. Cash can be stolen by a pickpocket. But two things make this not a difference in degree, but in kind: 1. You can't…
I hope that it's cathartic for you; I just wanted to discuss how possession works in cryptocurrencies.
My apologies for using the word ownership instead of possession, lazy language on my part.
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Well, the police had a search warrant, so the police could have found them if they had had them in their possession anyway. Sure, they could have destroyed them, losing the money but maybe not getting arrested?
vitalik (ethereum founder) used an interesting system. He split the key in 2. Wrote both on paper. Gave 1 paper to family and kept the other. Even if the police raid him (hypothetically), they cannot raid the houses of his family and friends at the same time This way the police or anybody else cannot get your private key.
...why not? Police coordinate raids all the time.
> “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…
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Well, the police had a search warrant, so the police could have found them if they had had them in their possession anyway. Sure, they could have destroyed them, losing the money but maybe not getting arrested?
Keys are conspicuously easy to hide. My PGP master key that I've been using for some time is hidden on two devices which would be difficult to identify much less locate and are encrypted as well.
> “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…
There's a lot of evidence in the statement_of_facts however it's unclear how much of it can only be reconstructed with the private keys. Interested parties should really look to what was known to grant the search warrant. https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1470186/downl...
Search warrants are given on reasonable doubt. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, the feds have reasonable doubt on everyone. So it is always possible for them to get a search warrant.
I emphasized private keys, bec without them, no matter how much doubt the feds had, they couldn't prove anything.