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Feds seized $311M in Bitcoin, then hacker stole it back

bloomberg.com

11–20 of 229 posts

Re: Feds seized $311M in Bitcoin, then hacker stole it back

#11

It's not immediately clear to me that this is illegal. If anything, the Feds didn't "seize" the Bitcoin, they forcibly acquired a license to the wallet's private key. If they didn't understand that the license was non-exclusive, well, that's not the fault of the other licensees.

sure Bloomberg's headline uses the word "stole" as if that was the crime

Gary is accused of money laundering and other crimes, because of the money laundering and other crimes. Money laundering is a tacked on charge that requires discovering an illicit origin of the funds. Then subsequent actions, such as the laundering through additional mixers, depositing in BlockFi for collateral with clean funds loaned against the dirty ones, and using those clean funds, can all be criminalized.

Re: Feds seized $311M in Bitcoin, then hacker stole it back

#12
If you find yourself in the similar situation, use RenVM to get your bitcoin over to an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine, many networks use EVMs now), then you have many more options.

You can still use Tornado cash. You can still withdraw from Tornado cash to new addresses. You can use those funds in those new addresses to buy and pump the price of the the smallcap tokens you already owned with your salary money. Decentralized exchanges that utilize liquidity pools remove the need for matching orders, liquidity pools are mixers on their own. It doesn't matter who you sell your pumped tokens to, you are just depositing them in the liquidity pool and getting the more liquid token back - USDC, Ether, etc.

A couple 8,000% gains later and you're just another crypto trader that got in early and believed.

Re: Feds seized $311M in Bitcoin, then hacker stole it back

#15

If you find yourself in the similar situation, use RenVM to get your bitcoin over to an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine, many networks use EVMs now), then you have many more options. You can still use Tornado cash. You can still withdraw from Tornado cash to new addresses. You can use those funds in those new addresses to buy and pump the price of the the smallcap tokens you already owned with your salary money. Decent…

(other things to note:

- for the bitcoin transaction, you should do this from a machine or VM running Tor system wide.

- for the EVM transactions, you can do this from the Tor machine as well, but also consider running your own node because in EVMs the nodes do not know which node saw a transaction first. Whereas using a remote note such as Infura or Alchemy has lots of records. Most of the Ethereum stack is Javascript heavy so this undermines the desire to use Tor browsers and operating systems, but it doesn't really require Javascript, thats just what the communities built. It is tricky (but not impossible) to run an Ethereum node over Tor, as the default behavior is that the protocol cannot find the other nodes - but once it does it can download blocks just fine, so either tunnel or hardcode some nodes to connect to. But remote nodes over API connected via Tor may fit your use case well enough. Just things to be conscious of.)

Re: Feds seized $311M in Bitcoin, then hacker stole it back

#17
post #9

It's not immediately clear to me that this is illegal. If anything, the Feds didn't "seize" the Bitcoin, they forcibly acquired a license to the wallet's private key. If they didn't understand that the license was non-exclusive, well, that's not the fault of the other licensees.

It may not technically be theft, but surely there’s an assortment of crimes committed by doing what he did, including but not limited to fraud, conspiracy, and interference with an investigation.

Are you just naming random crimes?

Re: Feds seized $311M in Bitcoin, then hacker stole it back

#19

> Agents built a detailed financial picture of Larry. Inspecting his cloud accounts... Scariest part of the article.

scary? did you just wake from a 15 year coma?

you store anything in a big-corp cloud, which you haven't personally encrypted, with keys that only you possess, then assume it's all backed up in fed repos (somewhat hyperbolic, especially for non-crims, but not far fetched by any means)

that's neither new, nor news (sadly)

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