161–170 of 421 posts
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In $5 wrench we trust. - Bitcoin
That doesn't appear to be how they seized the funds though, the criminal hasn't been caught so they must have hacked his devices to gain access to the private keys. No $5 wrench involved.
It boggles my mind that people like this don't set up multi-sig wallets using hardware devices that are physically not in the same location.
In my experience, folks who dabble in crypto and even seasoned users always underestimate how hard and tricky of a problem proper self-custody actually is.
And when they do think about it, it's always too late.
And by the way, multi-sig is not the only thing you want to be thinking about.
Cold walletting is another that most people miss.
Also, avoiding concentrating a large number of coins on a small number of addresses (not that I know this was done in the cast of this scam) is another thing most people miss when in fact this was from day one listed as bad practice by IIRC Satoshi himself.
And finally, to mention the standard counter-argument to self-custody: the $5 pipe wrench attack only works if the attackers know the coins exist.
For those interested in plumbing the depth of the problem, the glacier protocol is a good place to start:
From this article they got $15B ( https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/bitcoin-doj-chen-zhi-pig-but... ). At what point do you say, "That's enough money?" Did they think the scam was going to go on forever?
You underestimate the intensity of human greed.
Wow. $15 billion is an astronomical, nearly unfathomable amount of money in Cambodia. This must have been a huge operation. It's almost 1/3 of the country's entire GDP! Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.
> 1/3 of the country's entire GDP $15 billion is a huge number to be sure, but it's unclear from the article how many years it took to acquire.
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not really? presumably many people transfer via platforms like Coinbase that use a shared wallet system. You can't just "send the money back where it came from" as those wallets might not actually be controlled by the funds owner.
Coin base keeps transaction logs. Unless this went through a mixer, Bitcoin is quite transparent. Still easier to just transfer it all to the Treasury of course and screw the victims which is probably what will happen.
With the recent insane moves in quantum stocks almost makes me wonder if there’s a possibility the NSA or other USG agency is far enough ahead of publicly known capabilities in quantum computing to brute force private keys/break encryption and this info is leaking into markets. Of course the more likely explanation is that this was a sophisticated albeit classical hack (infrastructure, social engineering, surveillanc…
I would go with the likely explanation here.
Wow. $15 billion is an astronomical, nearly unfathomable amount of money in Cambodia. This must have been a huge operation. It's almost 1/3 of the country's entire GDP! Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.
Cambodia is just a proxy, a land where the Chinese gangs act with impunity. Earned with slave work, money is laundered in casinos and no Cambodian is seeing a cent of it.
Might as well say "nearly unfathomable amount of money in Congo" because that's just how disconnected the money is to the country.
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Why would the government bother prosecuting/seizing it if the money was going to the victims?
Um maybe because the government isn't supposed to work for profit but to enforce the law and do the right thing for victims and society? If they're going to be only prosecuting crimes where there's something in it for them it's going to be a very unsafe society.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
not really? presumably many people transfer via platforms like Coinbase that use a shared wallet system. You can't just "send the money back where it came from" as those wallets might not actually be controlled by the funds owner.
Coin base keeps transaction logs. Unless this went through a mixer, Bitcoin is quite transparent. Still easier to just transfer it all to the Treasury of course and screw the victims which is probably what will happen.
* It's not as simple as sending the transaction back to the previous holder
* With some basic detective work the paper trails exist to find many of the victims and verify the amount that was lost.