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

Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 901 posts

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#241

Post by lordnacho »

tiffanyh wrote: post #234
d23 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the standard for our criminal justice system, not for us as individuals. It sounds from the release that the justice department has a boatload of compelling evidence against them.

> "It sounds from the release that the justice department has a boatload of compelling evidence against them." You'd hope that before someone is arrested, the prosecutor has ample evidence to prove guilt. I don't understand your point. These individuals have not been proven guilty yet. Why are you editorializing their presumed guilt in this matter. Note: I have no affiliation with these individuals nor case.

He's saying that the law presumes innocence until proven guilty. They don't throw you in jail or take your money until the legal process reaches a judgement, and this is pretty normal and uncontroversial.

But you don't have to keep going for drinks with a person who's just been arrested and let out on bail, you can make up your own opinion as you feel. You can say bad things about him before the judge does, you can deny them business opportunities, your kids don't have to play with his kids.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#242

Post by evdubs »

ratg13 wrote: post #16

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 this hack, Bitfinex account holders took a haircut (30% or so) and were given tokens representing the remainder of their dollar-denominated account balances. Those tokens were paid in full in 2017ish.

Later, the UK, Portugal, and Poland seized $1B or so of Bitfinex customer funds due to the funds being delivered by Crypto Capital Corp who was found to be engaged in money laundering. Bitfinex issued LEO tokens to make up for that asset seizure, and have a clause that if the 2016 stolen bitcoins were recovered, they'd be used to retire the LEO tokens. That's why LEO has greatly increased in value recently. https://cryptowat.ch/charts/BITFINEX:LEO-USD?period=1d

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#243

Post by openhandcrimp »

AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #203
openhandcrimp wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points! Thorchain (a non-custodial service) claims 1.9B total swap volume. So, while not viable today for billions of dollars, the Bitcoin -> Thorchain -> Tornado Cash pathway seems to be viable for smaller amounts. Which doesn't necessarily bode well for recovering stolen bitcoin (and other crypto) in the future. A thief still has to figure out how to convert crypto to fiat. But I am assuming that there are jur…

Once you have crypto in a clean account, what's the problem with providing KYC to convert it to fiat through any exchange?

I was thinking that there are probably thresholds that trigger alarms when large amounts of crypto are converted to fiat. If crypto is coming from a clean address, there is not evidence of illegal activity. But there is still the question of where those funds originated. So I am not sure if government entities can seize those assets...

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#244

Post by rasz »

cam0 wrote: post #233
pdog wrote: post #215

Ilya Lichtenstein (YC S11) is the co-founder of YC-backed MixRank. Heather Morgan, his wife, is apparently a serial entrepreneur, investor, and "contributor" to Forbes.

Her Forbes bio: Heather R. Morgan is an international economist, serial entrepreneur, and investor in B2B software companies. She is an expert in persuasion, social engineering, and game theory.

she also ran Endpass "Bringing you the delightful and secure Ethereum wallet that's easy enough for grandma to use."

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#245

Post by rehitman »

mittermayr wrote: post #135

Sometimes I wonder what the chances are that certain (highly privileged) staff at Google (or other similar data storage or e-mail companies) could run a query across Google Drive looking for a specific public key. Much like a malware scanner, just looking for "a key", just to see if there is an account matching. Unofficially, of course. A rogue employee perhaps. And, what if, in such a case, the employee (in the best…

I haven't work for google, but other cloud provider I worked has very strict production access policy. You cannot just access prod, or run script. Even in cases that you must access prod, it needs special temporary access. (Just in Time Tokens), which is audited, and linked to a case. Few people in management line have to approve the access, and it expires once used. I would say the chance that some random engineer does this is very very low. Unless Google actually does something like that as a product for law enforcment. I have heard few cases of these scripts for things like child abuse images. I have never seen one though in action.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#246

Post by tedivm »

AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #140
Dwolb wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculation, self-sovereignty, ease of use/trade/leverage/exchange

> Speculation You can do that by owning crypto. No need to use it. > Self-sovereignty Majority people use centralized exchanges, which regularly control transactions. > Ease of use/trade/leverage/exchange Fiat banking is much easier to use than crypto. It's also faster. Now everyone uses 1-tap payments. Crypto transactions are more complicated than that. They also take longer. Also are bad for the environment (not as…

Even the apps built off of the "blockchain" rarely touch the blockchain. Companies aren't looking up NFTs on the chain, they're just hitting OpenSea APIs.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#247

Post by akomtu »

paulpauper wrote: post #148
kodah wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

strong passwords. aes256 with even just 7 word password chosen from a 1000-word dictionary cannot be cracked with existing tech

TBH, with 4B at stake, I wouldnt blindly rely on AES. I'd use it as the 1st step, and then additionally encrypt its output with a custom AES-like algorithm (change tge s-box, change the number of rounds, maybe upgrade it to 512 bits). Even if my homebrew algo is weak, there's still standard AES behind it.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#248

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

caseysoftware wrote: post #151
duxup wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering about this. I would think the most obvious path would be to find some other criminals (now you've got new risks) who don't care about the provenance of the coins, will pay cash for some coins at a discount, and you somehow launder that cash.... Could at least get a couple bucks from it, possibly.

Or weaponize the coins. Take 10 BTC and give them to 100 groups/people you don't like. Investigators make their lives miserable for a while. For normal people, that'd be ridiculously expensive but since they didn't pay for the coins and have 100k+ more they can't use, it's "free."

I am genuinely surprised it has not happened already ( or maybe it did, but it did not make news ). If NK hackers wanted to get someone in trouble, connecting someone to one of the wallets listed by OFAC would be relatively effortless.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#249

Post by AlexanderTheGr8 »

MauranKilom wrote: post #190
AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you think about tornado.cash? It's apparently a very effective mixer. I wonder what law enforcement can do if someone ends up using tornado_cash. There is absolutely no way of knowing if the money is good or bad. If you consider every mixed_cash as bad, you would be forced to assume that the entire cryptocurrency is bad bec of how the money flows.

> If you consider every mixed_cash as bad, you would be forced to assume that the entire cryptocurrency is bad bec of how the money flows. That's exactly what's happening, according to this page that was on the HN front page a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30224637

Thanks for the link.

Millions of innocent people use cryptocurrencies. Even if you assume a currency is bad, its impractical to think that millions of people are bad.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#250

Post by giarc »

tiffanyh wrote: post #234
d23 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the standard for our criminal justice system, not for us as individuals. It sounds from the release that the justice department has a boatload of compelling evidence against them.

> "It sounds from the release that the justice department has a boatload of compelling evidence against them." You'd hope that before someone is arrested, the prosecutor has ample evidence to prove guilt. I don't understand your point. These individuals have not been proven guilty yet. Why are you editorializing their presumed guilt in this matter. Note: I have no affiliation with these individuals nor case.

I think the commentor is stating that you and I have no reason to presume innocence until proven guilty. We can make up our own opinion. However, the judicial system has to assume innocence so the defendant can get a fair trial.
Post reply on HN