541–550 of 901 posts
"This is largely symbolic, but it does send a clear message. Like it or hate it, there is a sea change happening in how governments treat cryptocurrency." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29111446#29111572
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$4 billion has got to buy an awful lot of compute time, but still, how did they decrypt the file?
One route would probably be to start with a warrant to search their house in hopes of finding some passwords written down somewhere
This absolutely sounds like parallel construction.
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This is the Adolf Eichmann defense. Trains are just tools, and he was making them run on time. Any infrastructure has a purpose. It’s fair to ask why Bitcoin exists and whose project it is.
And it's official, Godwin's Law [0] has reached crypto. The purpose of Bitcoin is of course to support the Nazi cause. What other purpose could it possibly have? /s Hint: Millions of people use Bitcoin as a: - store of value to protect purchasing power over time - inflation hedge to protect savings from the ravages of inflation - a hedge to protect against corrupt governments manipulating currency - protection from n…
Anyway, I'm not saying that. Eichmann is simply a reductio ad absurdum example of the problems with the "it's just a tool / technology has no moral" position.
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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.
Crypto is also a white supremacy tool: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/02/05/the-charm...
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…
> ...Lichtenstein Email 2 was held at a U.S.-based provider that offered email as well as cloud storage services, among other products. Reads suspiciously like Gmail. Oh no. You stored your keys weakly encrypted on Google Drive?!
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Random example but my passwords look something like chOf$Tyl83fhn@54R. I keep them written down because they are hard to remember. My threat model is no one. Seems so amateur to use a simple password that could be brute forced. Especially with so much on the line.
>Seems so amateur to use a simple password that could be brute forced. Especially with so much on the line. There's selection bias going on because only dumb criminals get caught, so you only hear about the dumb opsec practices of those criminals. Conversely, you'll never hear about the opsec practices of that professional crew with perfect opsec that hacked an exchange/difi contract and disappeared into thin air.
Or, the TLA involved have some sort of crack or acceleration procedure; the TLA say "the criminals were dumb" because the people involved can't combat that without admitting guilt, and who'd believe them. The real reason is the TLA used illegal access and tools that we wouldn't be happy they're using against the civilian population? Oh, and the people using the tools are guilty by association so they're inhibited from whistleblowing.
I ask this every so often during threads regarding stolen cryptocurrency: Is there any solution yet to preventing stolen cryptocurrency funds from being spent? Isn't the only solution to have a central database and require laws to require every transaction to be pre-checked to see if it's stolen funds or not? And not only that, the centralized system will have to be constantly keeping track of wallet mixing to see wh…
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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
That last comment is pretty prophetic: "Like it or hate it, there is a sea change happening in how governments treat cryptocurrency. " Wonder how he feels about that sea change now.
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> 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…
What makes hacking illegal? What if they acquired the Bitcoin without using illegal means Probably not possible in this case, but in DeFi where everything is ruled by smart contracts, what would make executing behavior allowed by those contracts illegal.