Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

jpkoning.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 126 posts

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#101

Post by owl57 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #97
Canada wrote: post #45

There already is such tracking going on, exchanges do freeze balances sometimes. The problem is that if the stolen coin gets traded before exchanges can freeze them you wind up with a lot of innocent people holding those coins and it's not practical to freeze those later. Consider these two scenarios: A stolen bike vs a stolen sack of coffee. In the case of the bike, if you can find it you can take it back from someo…

> The problem is that if the stolen coin gets traded before exchanges can freeze them you wind up with a lot of innocent people holding those coins and it's not practical to freeze those later. Isn't this fundamentally _not_ how it works in the traditional financial world? If you are paid in ill-gotten money it can certainly be clawed back no matter how innocent you are.

Are you sure? Do people in some countries lose their money if they, for example, sold their car to a bad guy?

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#102

Post by lawn »

dylkil wrote: post #85
CallMeMarc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[1] is about Bitcoin Cash, not Bitcoin. [2] is basically a Tumbler/Mixer based on a smart contract which there are plenty of available (at least non-smart contract ones)

anything useful on bitcoin cash is easily ported to bitcoin, vice versa. with cashfusion not even the server owners know which transactions belong to who, which isnt the case with normal mixers[1]. [1] https://medium.com/@james.waugh28/is-cashfusion-really-anony...

No, it's not "just copy it" because Bitcoin Cash has some OP codes that Bitcoin doesn't have. See OP_CHECKDATASIG for example.

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#103

Post by GBiT »

Canada wrote: post #91
GBiT wrote: post #70

I think this year we will see the first international orders to miners do not process some addresses and freeze that coins. I know a lot of here thinks, that it's not possible, but bitcoin has only a few big miners. And if they will get orders they will have to comply or fight it in courts. It's not possible to mine anonymously, because you need hundreds of millions to invest into miners and a lot of power.

Unidentified parties mine blocks all the time, so it's doubtful that blacklists sent to the well known pools would be effective. Are they just supposed to orphan mined blocks that contain blacklisted inputs or outputs? How can anyone reasonably be expected to comply with a demand to fork Bitcoin? Surely any pool that adopted such a policy would lose most of their members pretty quick. Same for any pool that leaves mo…

You can say they will lose miners, but don't forget, to get a few percent of hash power you need to invest millions right now. it needs only 3 orders in USA, China and Europe and more than 51 percent of hash will be under order.

Small miners will not be able to include, because of orphaning. I agree, that it's not easy process and its expensive.

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#104

Post by GBiT »

allovernow wrote: post #71
GBiT wrote: post #70

I think this year we will see the first international orders to miners do not process some addresses and freeze that coins. I know a lot of here thinks, that it's not possible, but bitcoin has only a few big miners. And if they will get orders they will have to comply or fight it in courts. It's not possible to mine anonymously, because you need hundreds of millions to invest into miners and a lot of power.

I imagine it isn't impossible to rent a warehouse under some shell company and fill it with mining hardware in a random non-us country without anyone knowing the owners' identities.

You can, but don't forget, that you have to by miners, get cheap electricity and if you want a result, you have to have major share of hash power. Other way you will not be able to include transactions if majority pools will not agree to include them too.

Don't forget, that this pool should be part of criminal organizacion because I don't think any businessman will invest hundreds of millions of dollars and risk his mining operations shut down.

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#105

Post by solotronics »

The fungability/tainted coins/traceability problem is potentially solved with the recent Taproot Schnorr signatures proposals. BIP340, BIP341, BIP342. You guys don't seriously think we would sit around and let the man crush bitcoin because of "tainted coins" do you :]

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0341.mediawi...

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#106

Post by protanopia »

Blake_Emigro wrote: post #100
wolco wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone steals your phone. You can sue that someone for the value of lost property if caught or if the police recover money. If he sells down the line. Police will follow the chain and if the property is found it will be taken and it will be used in trial and recovered back to you. The people who bought the used phones may lose them. If they do they can sue the store. If the store hasn't sold them they will lose them…

Pawn shops hold the goods they purchased for 30 days to give time for someone to make a claim against them as property that was stolen from them. (This is my experience in Canada anyway.) In theory, exchanges could do the same thing for deposits above a certain amount, but this would presumably hurt their business the way things work right now.

Don't pawn shops hold items because they are essentially lending money with the item as collateral. They don't sell the items right away because the person that sold them to the pawn shop has the right to repay the loan and reclaim the item within a certain period of time.

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#107

Post by protanopia »

age_bronze wrote: post #67

Is ransom payment even considered "stolen" in the usual sense? You have willingly paid that, nobody took that from you without permission. I wouldn't be surprised if ransom has it's own different definition. Forcing an innocent to hand over bitcoins they had no clue they were tainted will make everyone lose trust in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. What's the point of anonymity when trading when you're culpab…

Does a mugger steal anything? You "willingly" hand them your wallet. In the cryptolocker case, it is to recover your locked file. In the mugger case, it is to not get stabbed.

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#108

Post by protanopia »

stanferder wrote: post #37
londons_explore wrote: post #21

An evildo-er wanting to hide bitcoins has many routes to do so: * A Mixer * gamble on one of many online casinos * buy physical darknet goods with them * Hack someones account on an exchange and use it. * The above, but use the coins to 'pump-n-dump' a tiny altcoin. Be one of many 'investors' making money out of the change in altcoin price. * Go margin trading with them, but make sure to loose them all in a margin ca…

What if governments define every output to a mixer transaction to count as receiving stolen goods if any of the inputs are the result of criminal activity? Apart from that, every option you suggested just hands the problem off to the next person. Eventually people won't want to transact at all because they don't want to receive tainted bitcoins.

I think this Wired article provides a good explanation for how stolen Bitcoins should be handled.

https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-blockchain-fifo-dirty-co...

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#109

Post by protanopia »

shkkmo wrote: post #28
dylkil wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bitcoin related privacy features are getting much better [1] as are ethereums [2] [1] https://news.bitcoin.com/how-to-obscure-bitcoin-cash-transac... [2] https://medium.com/@tornado.cash/introducing-private-transac...

How are CashFusion or tornado.cash different from other mixers?

I believe in the case of a mixer, you need a trusted third party to be the mixer.

Re: A 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex

#110

Post by protanopia »

samatman wrote: post #46
samatman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limit is practical, not legal. (IANAL). In practice, the law is not trying to 'get' people who innocently receive stolen money or goods. In the example you gave, it would be up to prosecutorial discretion what to do; trying to claw back one salary's worth of already-spent money is probably not worthwhile. But if someone shows up and tries to deposit a couple grand worth of marked bills, they can expect to be take…

Apparently the actual answer (I did say I'm not a lawyer!) is "it depends". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_of_stolen_goods The state-level standard appears to vary, the most common case is 'should have known', rather than 'knew for a fact'. With Bitcoin, where all transactions are a matter of public record, I'd hazard that 'should have known' is baked-in. It will be interesting to see what case law is estab…

The transactions are public but the reasons for them are not. Usually ransomware victims don't publicize the fact that they were attacked. Even if they do, they additionally don't publish in which transaction they transferred the ransom. There isn't a practical to determine whether a specific transaction that a wallet received was from ransomware.
Post reply on HN