401–410 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/
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'm sitting here trying to understand their mindset. 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 w…
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Circumventing property law has absolutely been a selling point of crypto, front and center, since its inception. The real no-true-Scotsman is saying, "Those who want an extra-governmental system of property aren't the real crypto fans." Yes, they are. In reality, crypto's true purpose is a moving target, so it can never be criticized because that's not what crypto is really about.
> In reality, crypto's true purpose is a moving target, so it can never be criticized because that's not what crypto is really about. Bitcoin is a tool. Like hammer or a shotgun. You can use it whatever way you want. There is no centrally defined "purpose".
Any infrastructure has a purpose. It’s fair to ask why Bitcoin exists and whose project it is.
Here's how the fed caught them: "The DOJ said it was able to seize the funds after an FBI search warrant of one of Lichtenstein's cloud storage accounts found a file containing cryptocurrency addresses and their corresponding private key that granted access to funds stored within."
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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."
haha right! I would have bridged them to the Ethereum network and sent it to everyone with an ENS registered
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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.
Mixing is not laundering. The difference is that laundering provides you with an explanation for wealth and/or income. Example of laundering: buy a business (with clean or borrowed money), have fictional customers "spend" their cash money at your business every day, then report your income and pay taxes. Now if anybody asks about where you got your money, you have a seemingly legit explanation. Mixing does none of th…
At least, that’s how I think about it.
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A fancy (or even basic) dictionary attack has a very high chance of working.
It doesn't unless you chose something stupid like "correct horse battery staple" or "word + word + number". 7 words chosen from 1000 word dictionary password encrypted AES 256 cannot be cracked with existing technology, 8 words impossible with future tech.
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".
As a crypto unbeliever I hate this too. Legal enforcement legitimizes crypto as property. It expands the definition of property by institutionally conferring the status of "owned" to a functional configuration of bits distributed over thousands of computers. Do we have this concept for other things? yes. But I'd rather like to contract the space of property rather than expand it.
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Well you don't want to lose those keys ... there is a bit of a conundrum there (granted you don't have to do it the way they did either). 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.
I'm not invested in crypto or really at all interested in it. That said, my mentor seems pretty excited about it and is pretty heavily invested as of the past few months. I advised him to do something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing and distribute it across a wide number of storage mechanisms, physical, digital, and custodial. For instance, in google drive, in drop box, in a bank safety dep…
Why would a Russian national with so much BTC to launder, who hasn't touched it in 6 years suddenly perform the action from New York City of all places from within the USA.