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$7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved

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Re: $7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved

#101
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or make a donation 1GVR2qbKgT4uVUQMYVgPhQxFcKRJBVYMo4 I actually wonder what would happen to me, if I suddenly received some of that stolen bitcoin.

Memorize your private keys. Destroy any physical or digital copies of the keys in a “boating accident”. Tell the authorities you can’t recover the funds. Wait 25 years or so. Move to somewhere outside jurisdiction or extradition from the relevant authorities. Cash out.

or... sell them back to bitfinex at current market price like a BOSS!

Re: $7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved

#103
post #56

Funds like this can be frozen when 51% of mining pools start censoring transactions. Pools are now beginning to do this. I expect there will be a lot of BTC like this that starts to realise they need to be trying to dump it / escape into monero as quickly as they can

There's a difference between pools not accepting txs in their mempool, and pools refusing to build on other miners' blocks that contain them. Pools are beginning to do the former (which doesn't cost them), not the latter (which would cost them dearly). Only if a majority of hashpower does the latter will censoring be effective (and then no longer cost them again).

A hashpower majority is not needed. For the latter, if a single digit percentage of the hashpower decides to enforce the ban, other miners in the network have an economic incentive to join the ban as well.

The reasoning is explained here https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2020/11/12/how-could-regu...

In short, if a miner chooses to include banned transactions in its block, it means that block cannot be built off of by fully regulatory compliant miners. Fully compliant miners will be still building off the previous block in the chain. If fully compliant miners win the hash race and mine the next 2 blocks, the original miner's block will not be part of the longest chain, and they will lose all their block reward.

Re: $7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved

#104
post #16
post #8

Here’s an interesting question — if you receive BTC from one of these addresses as payment for something, do you refuse it? You know it’s stolen and you might worry someone else who you might pay in the future would be able to track down that it’s stolen, so do you ask for “clean” BTC that isn’t linked to known theft? I don’t necessarily know the answer here. This is something that you can’t do with paper bills

Can one even refuse it? If someone just sends tainted coin to my address, am I screwed?

what is tracked is outputs and inputs, not addresses. addresses are derived from a public key or a script.

when a block is mined, an output is created, outputs can only be spent once. a bitcoin transaction is just a list of existing outputs (inputs) and new outputs to create (outputs). each output is created with a lock script, to spend the output you must provide the unlock script which normally contains at least a signature and a public key

returning the output that corresponds to the unwanted transaction should do

Re: $7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved

#105
post #91
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fencing stolen property is a fresh crime with a new countdown.

It would be easy to use satellites to find the person with hundreds of Tesla's in their front yard.

people in crypto buy lambos

Re: $7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved

#106
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you receive BTC from one of these addresses as payment for something, do you refuse it? You cannot refuse a BTC transaction. You could return it in a subsequent transaction, and pay the transaction fee, but I would imagine your address would be forever tainted by a number of illicit address/transaction tracking algorithms.

That's an interesting angle to cash out... just start sending to 1,000s of addresses - who's to say which addresses are owned by the criminals, and which are owned by other people? They'd get less than cashing it all out themselves obviously, but it would take forever to unravel what actually happened (if possible ever)

Send it to 7,500 random wallets, including your own, and you can keep as many millions as wallets you have. Most people will keep the money, making them indistinguishable from your own wallets.

IANAL, but if crime prescription is possible, you could transfer to 5,000 wallets and keep the rest for your pirate-themed retirement island.

Re: $7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone pays you in cash, do you really look up the serial numbers of all the bills you receive?

This isn't so far fetched. Cash registers already have Internet connections and can be outfitted with cameras to record all bills going in, except maybe those inserted in a stack. And ATMs might already be recording serial numbers of dispensed bills. Essentially they might/could do with currency what they do with license plates, which is track where everything goes and at what times.

  ATMs might already be recording serial numbers
I've been wondering about this forever.

Say John gets bills from the ATM then pays dealer Dylan for weed. Dylan then buys a beer at a bar.

If Dylan gets convicted, and banks collaborate with the police, then John gets subjected to - at least - parallel reconstruction.

Re: $7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved

#109

Funds like this can be frozen when 51% of mining pools start censoring transactions. Pools are now beginning to do this. I expect there will be a lot of BTC like this that starts to realise they need to be trying to dump it / escape into monero as quickly as they can

Monero is mostly traceable still. Source: https://www.sciendo.com/article/10.1515/popets-2018-0025

That article has been debunked for years, it is very old

https://www.getmonero.org/2018/03/29/response-to-an-empirica...

Re: $7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved

#110

Funds like this can be frozen when 51% of mining pools start censoring transactions. Pools are now beginning to do this. I expect there will be a lot of BTC like this that starts to realise they need to be trying to dump it / escape into monero as quickly as they can

Monero is mostly traceable still. Source: https://www.sciendo.com/article/10.1515/popets-2018-0025

It's not, that analysis is from 2017 and the issues described have been mitigated. The Monero team updated mixin sampling algorithm to better reflect real world usage. They increased the ring size from a minimum of 4 in the paper to 11. The team is working on increasing the ring size from 11 to 64, and possibly 128 (provided there is enough block chain space).
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