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

washingtonpost.com

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

#501

Post by axiosgunnar »

gruez wrote: post #15
fxtentacle wrote: post #4

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".

Seems like a win to me. The government had to physically go to their house and arrest them to get to their funds, whereas normally all they had to do was call up their bank and had their money frozen. 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.

> The government had to physically go to their house and arrest them to get to their funds

Would be the same with cash

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

#502

Post by vmception »

austincheney wrote: post #230
codespin wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting point, but if the government considered whoever had control of the coins the rightful owner and not stolen, would it be laundering then? It doesn't sound like a problem of taxes.

Laundering is any process to legitimize illicit income. It does not matter who owns the coins or other assets in question. What matters is if the coins represent any vehicle of fund transfer that originate from any form of criminal enterprise or other unreported financial activity.

which is why they weren't charged with actual money laundering. they only got them with conspiracy which is a super weak charge.

a money laundering charge requires an illicit origin, which means it can only be a tacked on charge after charging or proving someone was involved in the illegal activity.

the government just doesn't know, they just find everything this couple did to be super suspicious. they clearly had control of an excessive amount of cryptocurrency that they were reintegrating into the economy. the government doesn't seem to know if they were actually involved in the heist, or how, or to what extent.

simply obfuscating money isn't illegal. obfuscating an illicit origin is. lets see if the government can get to the bottom of this "conspiracy to obfuscate money of an illicit origin".

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

#503

Post by ratg13 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #69
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?

What users?

Bitfinex had to take a percentage of user's assets away due to the theft.

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

#504

Post by mmh0000 »

More people needs to learn about CoinJoins[0].

"CoinJoin is a trustless method for combining multiple Bitcoin payments from multiple spenders into a single transaction to make it more difficult for outside parties to determine which spender paid which recipient or recipients. Unlike many other privacy solutions, coinjoin transactions do not require a modification to the bitcoin protocol."

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin

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

#505

Post by jacquesm »

mmh0000 wrote: post #504

More people needs to learn about CoinJoins[0]. "CoinJoin is a trustless method for combining multiple Bitcoin payments from multiple spenders into a single transaction to make it more difficult for outside parties to determine which spender paid which recipient or recipients. Unlike many other privacy solutions, coinjoin transactions do not require a modification to the bitcoin protocol." [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wi…

Great idea, now you are not only liable for your own activities, but also for lots of other activities possibly much worse than your own.

This seems to be a pretty nerdy idea of 'how the world works' that could easily spectacularly backfire.

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

#507

Post by Barrin92 »

initplus wrote: post #484
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". I really don't understand these arguments. The law still applies whether or not you use cryptocurrency. Using cryptocurrency doesn't free someone from the consequences of their actions. Illegal acts are st…

If we have the government to weigh in on which transactions are legitimate or not, why do we need a distributed ledger? Cryptocurrencies are trustless, but if we can trust the government to rule on ownership fairly why do we need a trustless system?

>why do we need a distributed ledger?

well the most obvious answer to that question is, we don't.

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

#508

Post by ryan_lane »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #450
dazilcher wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kyle Rittenhouse would like a word with you.

My experience was that people did not look at the evidence- they jumped to a conclusion.

Yeah, because if you happen to look at the evidence, the fact is that he took a gun across state lines, to "protect people's property" at a protest, and he ended up killing people, it would be pretty easy to come to the conclusion that he's guilty of at least manslaughter. Of course, he was charged with murder, and that's harder to prove. The fact that he was found not guilty doesn't mean he's innocent. It means he's not guilty of the crime they were prosecuting him for.

He's not someone I'd hire for anything, he's not someone I'd want my friends and family around. He's not someone I'd want attending any protest I was attending. He's not a good person, and he's a clear and present danger to society. These are the decisions that I, as an individual, am free to make because I'm not the government, and I don't have to abide by "innocent until proven guilty" for how I personally judge people.

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

#510

Post by tevon »

colinmhayes wrote: post #5
danso wrote: post #3

The statement of facts is linked to from the press release, and describes generally how the Feds were able to trace the stolen funds (they found a file listing private keys, after gaining access to the suspect's cloud storage) https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1470186/downl... > The 2017 transfers notwithstanding, the majority of the stolen funds remained in Wallet 1CGA4s from August 2016 until January 3…

$4 billion has got to buy an awful lot of compute time, but still, how did they decrypt the file?

Is it me or should he have literally just gotten a hardware wallet, transferred everything to that account, then burned the old key?

Of course that txn would show up on-chain, but if you don't have possession of the private key for the first account, and no digital device has ever "seen" the hardware account then he would've been fine.

This is assuming the key piece of evidence was his private key, and he wouldn't have been prosecuted without it.

Additionally, putting your key in cloud storage sounds like the dumbest thing ever... Just memorize your seed phrase and write it down. Its 4bn for christ sake.

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