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/
Crazy, I remember meeting him before our interview.
Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
641–650 of 901 posts
Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
#642Are there any cases involving theft of this scale (or even 1/10th of this scale) that have been successfully prosecuted in the U.S.?
The scale was around $70mil at 2016.
Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it illegal to sell your artwork at an auction, and a criminal happens to be the one to buy it? I honestly don't know. is the onus on an artist or on an "auction house" to vet buyers. If post sale it turns out the money was fraudulent, does the artist need to pay it back? In crypto terms. You the artist simply put a NFT up for auction at OpenSea. You the scammer happened to purchase the artwork on OpenSea. However…
I mean art and other not easily evaluated assets are used for drug trafficking and money laundering. Auction houses are known to be on the trick -- that is passively mainly/ they don't care and work to "pump" the prices of artwork. But of course law enforcement agencies know about it too. It shouldn't be illegal: people should be free to buy what they want. But let's not hide behind our noses.
This only work because they hire the right lawyers, who dinner with the right persons across all law enforcement branches.
Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
#644Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
#645Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. 9/10ths of law is property ownership. I find hilarious that anyone would want less of this concept, not more. My interpretation is that crypto enthusiasts want the "trust of the crowds" not a central…
It's simply that people who begin thought experiments with one island, two people, and three cows tend to reach absolutely unhinged conclusions about how the society should work. Not wanting to live in a world governed by those systems is why I intent to frame them as such. Before we get to the part where some responder concludes, "you should go live in the woods then", I'd rather they did.
Another way of putting it is this. Expansions in the legal concept of property are consequently expansions in the dominion of the state.
Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
#646> 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."
That makes sense, and of course storing them in cloud storage was a bad idea. However they could have only obtained the warrant /after/ they pretty much knew Lichtenstein was the culprit.
How did they determine Lichtenstein was the person who had the bitcoins?
Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
#647> 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." That makes sense, and of course storing them in cloud storage was a bad idea. However they could have only obtained the warrant /afte…
Given that these clowns were not exactly low profile about their wealth, I imagine their opsec was less than optimal.
Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you consider every mixed_cash as bad, you would be forced to assume that the entire cryptocurrency is bad bec of how the money flows. That's exactly what's happening, according to this page that was on the HN front page a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30224637
Thanks for the link. Millions of innocent people use cryptocurrencies. Even if you assume a currency is bad, its impractical to think that millions of people are bad.
Do you have a estimate on people using cryptocurrencies on a monthly basis (even in orders of magnitude)
Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does "stolen cryptocurrency" actually mean? For example, if one person says it was stolen from them, and the holder says they legitimately acquired it, then how is any solution supposed to decide who is correct? For fiat currency, there's usually a court system that can be used to determine ownership. Though often they explicitly exclude cash from that - if somebody legitimately acquires bank notes that were pre…
> For cryptocurrency, which jursidiction's justice system is going to determine whether something has a "stolen" marker or not? It's the same decision process as the normal justice system. Broadly speaking, you can analyze it as follows (for civil complaints): 1. Is there a clause in the contract that says "disputes follow XYZ jurisdiction"? Then that's the jurisdiction. (And adding such a clause is Contracts 101 mat…
That decision process would lead to different people coming up with different results. For example, it's not possible for me to look for a clause in your contract with a third party. I don't even having any way of knowing if the contract you might show me is the one that applied to a cryptocurrency transaction. So if you claim that your cryptocurrency was stolen in that transaction, and your favored court agrees it has jurisdiction and concurs, I still have no way of verifying any of that.
Your decision process might work for you, but it's not meaningful for establishing consensus in a cryptocurrency.
Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean art and other not easily evaluated assets are used for drug trafficking and money laundering. Auction houses are known to be on the trick -- that is passively mainly/ they don't care and work to "pump" the prices of artwork. But of course law enforcement agencies know about it too. It shouldn't be illegal: people should be free to buy what they want. But let's not hide behind our noses.
This only work because they hire the right lawyers, who dinner with the right persons across all law enforcement branches.
More simply, they might get away with it because, by and large, they're not actually laundering illegal funds, but merely using the exact same tricks to obscure all sorts of socially disreputable but not actually illegal stuff. Of course, there's a real gray area since arguably a lot of disreputable stuff should also be illegal. But by the same token, some people might genuinely want more privacy depending on their circumstances.