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Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

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Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#331

Post by dllthomas »

Karunamon wrote: post #269
dllthomas wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though I have every expectation of mixing falling afoul of AML laws, if not presently then soon.

The legislators can make whatever they want illegal, but that doesn't make it necessarily enforceable. Thing about mixing is, since any person (or autonomous process) can generate wallets and send BTC to those on the fly, how do you prove that you used a tumbling service and not that you gave coins to a guy who gave coins to a guy who split them up into separate wallets who each gave coins to a guy, etc etc etc. As B…

It is much easier to enforce than money laundering with cash. It still takes investigation beyond staring at the block chain, quite obviously, but that isn't anything new. Consider some simple undercover work. If I send you coins to be mixed, we can track what happens to those coins. Now we know every address that participated in a mixer, and can tie the addresses to people when coins are spent (with, fully acknowledged, a certain amount of elbow grease).

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#332

Post by prodigal_erik »

jMyles wrote: post #28
brokentone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to know 194,993.50000004 BTC changed between two addresses - these could be owned by the same individual, could be different accounts for the same individual. Anything else, USD, goats, Yuan, securities, etc that may have been traded would not be reported/recorded in the BTC transfer. edit: corrected by josephagoss, ty

Goats aren't tracked by the blockchain?

Recording goat ownership in a Web-accessible medium would be absurd. Chrome routinely teleports goats in large numbers: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=31482

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#333

Post by ramchip »

nly wrote: post #133

Hardly. If you tried to sell 195,000 coins you'd wipe out all the exchanges and cause a crash. Talking numbers, you could sell them all on BTC-E right now, bagging you just $7M, and take the price down to ~$36. You can spread that around the exchanges of course, if you're quick, but you're still nowhere near $147M at current market depth.

That's the case with anything in large amounts. I can say I have $147M in Microsoft stock, but that doesn't mean I can sell the stock suddenly in one minute without making the price tank.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#334

Post by [deleted] »

jganetsk wrote: post #192
fragsworth wrote: post #64

Consider this: They paid $0.00 for the transfer of $150 million dollars. A direct (i.e. not based on third party credit, regulations, etc.) transfer of wealth of this magnitude between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Depending how safely you want to make the transfer, and how far the entities are on the globe, it can cost hundreds of thousands to million…

Utterly incorrect. They did not transfer a single dollar. For them to turn those Bitcoins into dollars, they will have to pay more than $0.00. Possibly A LOT more. They may not even be able to turn those bitcoins into dollars for a while, and in all likelihood it will not be $150 million dollars.

[deleted]

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#335

Post by SilasX »

ceejayoz wrote: post #316
SilasX wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two words: inflation.

That's one, and banks hardly help with inflation at today's 0.01% interest rates.

True, but other than the recent years it was necessary and effective to put your money in a bank to counteract inflation.

Sorry about the fencepost error. (Perhaps I was originally intending to say "inflationary finance"?)

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#336

Post by dragontamer »

IgorPartola wrote: post #311
wmf wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have multiple addresses per wallet but BTC is still stored in addresses, not wallets. So if you have some BTC in address A and none in address B then you can't use B to buy anything. If you transfer money from A to B that leaves a record.

But you have no idea if address A and B belong to the same wallet, right? As in, I can create address A, get coins into it, then create addresses B-Z, disburse coins into them, then collect them again? Could I reasonably create enough addresses to create plausible deniability that I actually owned all the coins at all times? Alternatively, could I use a web wallet to bounce coins around to obfuscate ownership?

http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf

Researchers can easily track such trivial ways of "attempted anonymization".

>>> We found out that there is a huge number of tiny transactions which move only a small fraction of a single bit- coin, but there are also hundreds of transactions which move more than 50,000 bitcoins. We analyzed all these large transactions by following in detail the way these sums were accumulated and the way they were dispersed, and realized that almost all these large transactions were descendants of a single transaction which was carried out in November 2010. Finally, we noted that the subgraph which contains these large transactions along with their neighborhood has many strange looking structures which could be an attempt to conceal the existence and relationship between these transactions, but such an attempt can be foiled by following the money trail in a suciently persistent way

--------

ALL BTC transactions are FOREVER archived in the bitcoin ledger. Its how it works.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#337

Post by XorNot »

toozap wrote: post #179
res0nat0r wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for me right now bitcoin has zero value. Until I can use the millions in coins to pay off my house, buy a car easily, pay my taxes and go out to eat with them, or hassle free convert them to cash in my bank, it is still funny money.

I think you might be missing the point. Bitcoin right now operates more like gold. You can't pay off your house, buy a car, pay your taxes or go out to eat with gold. However, there is a healthy market for exchanging gold for currency. You wouldn't call gold funny money. I think it would be more appropriate to compare bitcoin to gold right now. I have no idea how healthy the market is for exchanging bitcoin for other…

Gold is a physical good with actual useful value. It is hugely overvalued right now, and anyone telling you to "buy gold" usually holds gold and benefits a lot from that.

Those cable "invest in gold" deals are exactly this but worse - they sell you gold more expensive then the commercial market that can never be redeemed for that price.

But it has a real cost of production that represents its relative industrial worth.

Bitcoin is valueless though. Created Bitcoins do not have any industrial value - you can't use them for anything else, even though they have a cost to create. There's no reason, if they lose value, for anyone to buy them from you - whereas with gold if you sit on it long enough, it will become valuable when someone needs gold for some type of industry at minimum.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#338

Post by yelnatz »

res0nat0r wrote: post #152
fragsworth wrote: post #64

Consider this: They paid $0.00 for the transfer of $150 million dollars. A direct (i.e. not based on third party credit, regulations, etc.) transfer of wealth of this magnitude between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Depending how safely you want to make the transfer, and how far the entities are on the globe, it can cost hundreds of thousands to million…

Unfortunately for me right now bitcoin has zero value. Until I can use the millions in coins to pay off my house, buy a car easily, pay my taxes and go out to eat with them, or hassle free convert them to cash in my bank, it is still funny money.

I doubt you can pay your house with gold bars alone.

I doubt you can pay your car with stocks alone.

I doubt you can pay taxes with option derivatives alone.

I doubt a lot of people call those funny money.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#339

Post by mrb »

dguaraglia wrote: post #232
jganetsk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utterly incorrect. They did not transfer a single dollar. For them to turn those Bitcoins into dollars, they will have to pay more than $0.00. Possibly A LOT more. They may not even be able to turn those bitcoins into dollars for a while, and in all likelihood it will not be $150 million dollars.

This is the correct answer. People rave about how "cheap" it is to transfer bitcoin. What about actually buying anything with that 'money'? Sure, you might be able to buy some crap on the internet with bitcoin, but it won't put food in your table anytime soon without you having to pay a good % in fees to convert it to real currency.

"it won't put food in your table anytime soon without you having to pay a good % in fees to convert it to real currency"

False. Last summer, I ate at EVR, a bar/restaurant in New York City accepting Bitcoin. I paid in bitcoins and their processor (BitPay) only charged a 1% fee.

Fees from Bitcoin payment processors are actually quite good compared to credit card fees.

Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer

#340

Post by lutusp »

yelnatz wrote: post #338
res0nat0r wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for me right now bitcoin has zero value. Until I can use the millions in coins to pay off my house, buy a car easily, pay my taxes and go out to eat with them, or hassle free convert them to cash in my bank, it is still funny money.

I doubt you can pay your house with gold bars alone. I doubt you can pay your car with stocks alone. I doubt you can pay taxes with option derivatives alone. I doubt a lot of people call those funny money.

You're missing the point that all kinds of symbolic wealth can be easily converted into other kinds of symbolic wealth. If this weren't true, it wouldn't be symbolic wealth.
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