751–760 of 901 posts
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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.
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The (alleged) criminal only has to make one mistake to get caught, if the pursuers are good. Steal enough money and the best pursuers will be assigned to catch the perp.
Agreed. But the (alleged) criminal kept private keys on cloud AND used weak encryption. These are extremely silly mistakes. They could have used bitwarden (or a password manager) and they would be good to go. Also the best pursuers needs 6 years (2022 - 2016) to catch them. Plenty of time for the perps to take a lot of measures.
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Laundering within the constraints of a public ledger isn't feasible for long periods of time or large amounts of money - the only way to win that game is to be so small nobody cares. They could have possibly gotten cash from cartels at a steep discount, but that story would probably have ended with a richer cartel and two dead nerds.
I always wonder how many people won this long con by being so small nobody cares. The DoJ document states they already succeeded in taking the funds cross chain and through some privacy enhancing alternative assets. For every idiot dumping millions in a bank account there's got to be someone else living a "modest" but luxurious life looking like a small guy nobody cares about, cashing out a few hundred to a thousand…
Maybe these guys are thinking if you're going to be a criminal, you had better make the juice worth the squeeze. Live large, party extravagantly, and probably just rent everything from hotel rooms to yachts so there's less for the authorities to eventually impound when it catches up to you.
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Yeah, a hardware wallet is good, although for a billion dollars, 100 hardware wallets would be better. Could even go so far as to split a private key into seven horcruxes using Shamir's Secret Sharing and bury them in locations around the world. Memorizing a seed phrase leaves you vulnerable to a $5 wrench attack, I wouldn't recommend it.
You don’t need splitting the private key. Bitcoin has multisig setup. For example, you can setup your wallet such that 6 out of 10 private keys need to sign in order to transfer funds. Spread that 10 private keys out. Or 3 out of 10. Or 2 out of 5. Any n out of m.
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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.
Also crypto people have a problem with central banks manipulating currency by printing more etc. Having stolen coins recovered seems like an OK thing.
Some corollary would apply here. (it's not that anyone particularly loves letting criminals off the hook, it's granting that ability is a slippery slope)
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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That is one of the goofiest reasons I’ve heard when I look at the volatility of crypto. Definitely not a compelling reason.
It might take time, but the fact that the government can't print free bitcoins as it does with fiat to pay off its usurious debt and devalue everyone's hard work is a compelling basis.
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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.
It's similar to privacy and surveillance. To secretly monitor a single individual's communications, law enforcement should have to get probable cause, present their case to a judge and obtain a court order. Dragnet surveillance of all communications all the time is a Very Bad Thing. Financial surveillance and seizure is currently at the Very Bad Thing stage and bitcoin helps move us back toward a better balance betwe…
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That requires that you did something that you are very sure the country you end up in won't just prosecute you for themselves. If your crime is massively embarrassing to the US govt you go to Russia, or heinous sexual assault of a 13yo, France. But I think most of the usual culprits in this case would just prosecute you.
We disagree it was heinous and believe it's prescribed, thank you. Polanski is a French citizen and will not be given to the US, but if an american is demanded, we ll give him back on the double. It s what they seem not to explain in movies: we protect our brothers in citizenship against exaggerated foreign conviction, but not foreigners.
https://idlewords.com/2010/05/an_annotated_letter_from_roman...
A link in there has expired. Archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100130223615/http://www.thesmo...
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> consequently expansions in the dominion of the state. So your concerns are about restriction of liberties? or society moving away from small government? Are you a supporter of cryptocurrencies?
I'm saying that state legitimation of crypto conferring ownership status is an expansion of state power. State power should not be expanded.
When the government steps in, it's not usually to say _you_ own it but rather _they_ own part of it. If you own it of course you owe them nothing of it. Government finally getting their greedy hands out of private property would be a huge step up.
This is even more obvious when I present it this way. Yesterday there's a cow in my yard. The next day my neighbor says he recognizes the cow as my cow. The neighbor has ceded over power of the cow, now recognizing I have full control of the cow and they're removing any claim of power they had. It's a contraction or break even of, not expansion, of my neighbor's power.
Ownership means you have full control over your crypto. Paying taxes on it means you don't have ownership, but rather partial ownership. If the state is conferring you full ownership, it would appear their power is decreasing. If the state is taxing crypto, then they're taking away ownership status and instead attributing some of it to themselves -- THEN it's an expansion of power.