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Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

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Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#261

Post by dragonwriter »

x-complexity wrote: post #256
EGreg wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it.

> Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it. The economic costs of performing such an attack is extremely expensive: It's why despite the "Oh, they can just double-spend & make it go to 0" rhetoric, this attack is too costly to launch against BTC - The amount of ha…

> The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars.

You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money.

For significant national governments, it is not.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#262

Post by [deleted] »

skc wrote: post #169
kijin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The South Korean justice system is notoriously lenient on white-collar crime, and it's exceedingly rare even for violent criminals to be murdered in a Korean prison. The popular perception is that you can spend a couple of years in prison and enjoy your ill-gotten gains for the rest of your life with no further repercussions, provided you've hidden your money well enough. Guess what, the whole point of crypto is that…

>>The South Korean justice system is notoriously lenient on white-collar crime Then I wonder why he didn't just turn himself in, do the time and come out after a couple years and enjoy his spoils. I'd imagine prison in SK is bearable enough.

[deleted]

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#263

Post by janmo »

janmo wrote: post #96
ardit33 wrote: post #89

Wrong country to hide. Montenegro is a Nato member, and a US ally, and will do whatever the US say. Dritan Abazovic (the prime minister) is himself half Albanian, half Montenegrin, and he is very pro western. You can't hide in pro US countries. He should have maybe taken a train to Serbia (not a US ally), then a plane to Russia and hide there. Ps. For some reason criminals think small countries are safe, but capturin…

So far he isn't wanted in the US, but in South Korea

EDIT: now in the US too

https://twitter.com/tier10k/status/1639020334920728578

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#264

Post by noneoftheaboveu »

steveBK123 wrote: post #183

What is the point of having a zillion magic internet moneys if you can't get yourself off the financial grid and living in a non-extradition country? Cmon. What a bunch of jokers. I think it's a hugely bearish case for crypto that none of the crypto guys have been able to use it to avoid authorities for more than a few weeks/months. That's literally one of its alleged use cases. "The government can't control it". SBF…

I think Arthur Hayes converted much to fiat > 100m usd and gave this to the US government and did never go to prison. He is the man, amongst all of them. Arthur, my friend, where have u been?

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#265

Post by kijin »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #113
kijin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The South Korean justice system is notoriously lenient on white-collar crime, and it's exceedingly rare even for violent criminals to be murdered in a Korean prison. The popular perception is that you can spend a couple of years in prison and enjoy your ill-gotten gains for the rest of your life with no further repercussions, provided you've hidden your money well enough. Guess what, the whole point of crypto is that…

> South Korean justice system is notoriously lenient on white-collar crime Is this because of the courts or prosecutors? I don't see the latter being lenient with a fugitive.

The courts for the most part. Or at least that is the public perception.

The sentencing guidelines maintained by the courts have all sorts of criteria for reducing the sentence that can be compounded to skew the result heavily towards the low end of the legally mandated range, and many times even below the legal minimum. For example, people who were drunk when they committed crimes often get away with lower sentences because "they probably weren't aware of what they were doing." Bonus points if you have a wife and kids to feed, pay a token amount to your victims as compensation, get your mom to write a letter to the judge, and/or act like you're sorry on your day in court. Some of these criteria have good reasons, but allow them to be compounded and that's how you end up with "you're guilty of raping your coworker, but you may go home."

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#266

Post by wolverine876 »

EGreg wrote: post #241
steveBK123 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As we saw from the SVB weekend of tweets, none of the VCs who were going to reinvent the banking system with crypto actually understood how the existing one works, so...

Right and the same VCs were also trying to reinvent every other system including our social interactions. You think they understand those?

And some of them control LLM AI.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#267

Post by x-complexity »

dragonwriter wrote: post #261
x-complexity wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it. The economic costs of performing such an attack is extremely expensive: It's why despite the "Oh, they can just double-spend & make it go to 0" rhetoric, this attack is too costly to launch against BTC - The amount of ha…

> The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars. You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money. For significant national governments, it is not.

> > The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars.

> You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money. For significant national governments, it is not.

It isn't, especially with a country that has access to their own effectively bottomless currency like the USD. However, such an expenditure on such a large scale would be noticeable in terms of power draw & cutting-edge ASIC/silicon manufacturing purchases, the latter of which is currently booked to the brim by Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and others.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#268

Post by kkielhofner »

steveBK123 wrote: post #254
yucky wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi Nakamoto = NSA, so the point remains. That being said, Monero still remains untraceable.

NSA inventing crypto honestly seems like one of the less implausible conspiracies. I mean they basically compromised Tor already. They have a vested interest in tracking decentralized communications and assets. The pseudonymous nature coupled with its public ledger actually make it great for an NSA type entity to track fund movement by people who think they are operating in the darkness.

The US government invented and funds Tor (more or less).

Along your lines of thought I think it’s obvious “Satoshi” shows up out of nowhere, drops exquisite crypto code that provides an open network that attracts exchange of funds that largely end up being illicit, and then sits on wallets worth significant amounts of money to anyone other than the US government (current Satoshi wallet value is $42b, estimated annual NSA budget alone is $65b and all in it’s likely many multiples of that). The US government can and does spend trillions on war. If it came to that taking down bitcoin is a rounding error.

It has NSA written all over it and given what we already know of the capabilities of the NSA if it wasn’t created by them one way or another (push come to shove) the US government could shut it down at the bat of an eye.

Anything else is bitcoin maxi wishful thinking.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#269

Post by defrost »

kkielhofner wrote: post #268
steveBK123 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSA inventing crypto honestly seems like one of the less implausible conspiracies. I mean they basically compromised Tor already. They have a vested interest in tracking decentralized communications and assets. The pseudonymous nature coupled with its public ledger actually make it great for an NSA type entity to track fund movement by people who think they are operating in the darkness.

The US government invented and funds Tor (more or less). Along your lines of thought I think it’s obvious “Satoshi” shows up out of nowhere, drops exquisite crypto code that provides an open network that attracts exchange of funds that largely end up being illicit, and then sits on wallets worth significant amounts of money to anyone other than the US government (current Satoshi wallet value is $42b, estimated annual…

Others might think it equally obvious that Satoshi is Yet Another Bourbaki of computational algebraists who can no longer sign a cryptographic quorum.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#270

Post by vlovich123 »

x-complexity wrote: post #267
dragonwriter wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars. You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money. For significant national governments, it is not.

> > The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars. > You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money. For significant national governments, it is not. It isn't, especially with a country that has access to their own effectively bottomless currency like the USD. However, such an expenditure on…

You realize that the US government has many supercomputer clusters it owns directly to support its own data collection and analysis needs right? If the US decided BTC was a meaningful security threat, they have a lot of power they can bring to bear and anyone thinking otherwise is fooling themselves. This is the country that deployed a very sophisticated worldwide Trojan to make an attack on a nuclear reactor in a hostile country. The key here is if they can take over a huge swath of available worldwide compute no problem, they wouldn’t even need to touch their sufficient in house and commercial compute resources available to them.

Bitcoin proponents love to pretend it’s undefeatable and confuse IT in government with offensive capabilities. They also liked to think it was anonymous until researchers put in a modicum of effort to show how it’s not. They get the strategy of the attack fundamentally wrong. They think it’s to take over Bitcoin. It’s not. Driving value to zero is sufficient. And that is a much different case (making transactions take longer and longer, disrupting on-ramps and off-ramps, doing hostile take overs of data centers running mining operations, perhaps in conjunction with other governments, having spies infiltrate these groups, etc etc etc). As the xkcd joke goes, your super duper cryptography is no match for a guy with a $5 wrench.

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