351–360 of 901 posts
With so much money involved, I wonder if we can ever really know anything. Enough money, and you can make black == white. E.g. these two were fallguys
Thankfully we have a legal process intended to figure this exact thing out via a process of presenting and considering evidence.
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.
They certainly thought an awful lot of themselves - it's fascinating to dig into their public facing digital trail. If they played by the rules they'd have been living large as part of the .001% of the world.
They bought themselves a giant lead brick and chained themselves to it. It'd be sad if it weren't so stereotypically comical.
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".
Obvious no-true-scotsman. Believing that the goal of crypto is to circumvent laws regarding possession and theft is at most a fringe belief. The fact that this is at the top of HN demonstrates how devoid of merit crypto discussion here is.
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But that's not the way real contracts work. Contracts are an agreement between parties. If there is later a disagreement about what was agreed to, a judge sorts it out.
> If there is later a disagreement about what was agreed to, a judge sorts it out. Only because human language leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Computer output doesn't, or at the very least not nearly to the same extent. If your smart contract is itself legal (you are legally allowed to formalize those terms), and produced an output as a function of it's actual internal operation (and not a random, accidental…
There are contract disputes all the time over what a word or phrase means, and what a judge will look at is which interpretation best aligns with the broad strokes of what the parties were agreeing to. Nobody agrees to a contract that contains "I get to void the entire agreement at my discretion, keep the proceeds, and leave you with nothing"
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> "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 d…
You can obviously do that, but it makes little sense to do so when the system has been built around not taking what the prosecution says at face value or as a source of truth. The job of the prosecution is not to show the facts, it's to prosecute. Yes you don't have to go by the standards of the judicial system & presume innocence here, but why then use the prosecution's case when it only makes sense in the context of how our judicial system works?
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
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.
She's also a rapper, and not a very good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DIuPPmY9mw
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This is a pretty silly argument. I'm not opining on whether or not prosecutions are coercive; I'm certain they are. But a lower conviction rate would be a bad thing: it would mean the DOJ was bringing more cases they weren't certain they would win, and even exoneration comes with immense costs to the accused.
I wasn't replying to a claim that a high conviction rate is a good thing (or better than a lower one). I was replying to a claim that a high conviction rate somehow suggests we should dispense with the idea that, as a society, we should not presume guilt. grumple, who I replied to, seemed to me to be suggesting that because the federal government has a high conviction rate, we should assume the accused are guilty. I'…
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> 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. And if you're released from prison and recover your Bitcoin, you will be arrested again for contempt of court or a similar charge.
Why anyone would use BTC and not some privacy coin for this kind of scenario escapes me.
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Crypto 102: weep for the coins you lost when your cousin spilled soda on the hard drive containing the offline-only copy of your private keys
It's funny! But really there are loads of ways to store your keys physically that are human readable.