Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

281–290 of 901 posts

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

#281

25 years max for stealing billions? God bless America. > Lichtenstein and Morgan are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and conspiracy to defraud the United States, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statut…

maybe 25 after a plea deal

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you would only need to memorize one seed to spawn infinite key pairs

can you elaborate? I find this very interesting. We can't choose which private key we get. So is it possible for 1 seed to generate all of them? Doesn't that break information theory (Shannon's compression limit)?

You use a 2048 word dictionary (a random choice in that wordlist represents [log 2048 =] 11 bits of entropy) then you generate a random string of 132 bits to be your cryptographic seed which is a sequence of 12 words from the wordlist which you memorize.

From that seed you can generate for all practical purposes an infinite number of private keys for any and all purposes in existence. Using cryptographic one way functions such as a hash or PRNG.

Example: truncate_as_needed ( sha512 (seed | 2022 | wallet_title | priv #123) ) = private key #123

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

#283

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".

how has anything changed in this sense? The owners of bitcoins are always whoever has the crypto keys, that isn't an imperative it's just a fact, now the fed has the keys.

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

#284
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.

There are "local bitcoin trading" groups that do exactly this - convert bitcoin to cash at a discount. But obviously you can't do this for billions of dollars and you expose yourself to personal monitoring and capture.

I'd bet there's a non-zero chance your exchange counterparty at one of these groups is an undercover cop.

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

#286

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/

This is just unreal. this guy was living a double life of being the greatest criminal ever. So among our community was a $4 billion hacker, just nonchalantly posting. I don't think he will be commenting anytime soon again if this really is him https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=il like your neighbor being a serial killer or something

I don't understand why he wouldn't move to somewhere that doesn't have an extradition policy with the US. If you go down that path, it seems like you should probably be willing to abandon your life. It's the same with Ross Ulbricht, seems like it would be terrifying living with that sword of damocles hanging over your head absolutely constantly.

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

#288
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just unreal. this guy was living a double life of being the greatest criminal ever. So among our community was a $4 billion hacker, just nonchalantly posting. I don't think he will be commenting anytime soon again if this really is him https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=il like your neighbor being a serial killer or something

I noticed both on twitter and his HN posts, there's a big gap between 2015 and 2019.

Always keep posting to avoid suspicion.

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

#289
post #258

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".

What is a "true crypto believer" anyways? As a matter of practicality, everyone that interacts with financial assets of any sort are bound to laws imposed by some government. Equating "whoever has the keys" to ownership feels more or less equivalent to saying "finders keepers" is a valid justification for taking possession of a physical leather wallet. Or "We broke up, but I fed the dog, so it's mine". Or whatever. A…

> A person can believe whatever they want, but when push comes to shove, it's a country's court of law that ultimately determines who legally owns what.

I think you've answered your own question - a true crypto believer does not agree with that. If the smart contract says the Ethereum is mine because you wrote it poorly and I called the transfer money function in the right way ("exploited it"), a true believer would say "yep, it's yours."

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

#290

25 years max for stealing billions? God bless America. > Lichtenstein and Morgan are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and conspiracy to defraud the United States, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statut…

they haven't actually been charged with hacking, just the laundering. the complaint could be amended after investigation and the potential sentence would go up.
Post reply on HN