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94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

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Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#111
I'd take issue on two points. First, "wallets' don't exist in the Bitcoin protocol. Second, the tool being used is not sophisticated enough to list the inputs and outputs, giving the false impression that something unusual is "unknown." Try this link to get details:

https://blockstream.info/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb58e7c7...

There are numerous inputs and a single pay-to-script-hash (P2SH) output.

The relatively high fee is due in part to the large number of inputs. ~400 satoshis/byte is high by today's standard but not too unreasonable as early as 2017.

We can't tell anything about the identity of the owner(s) of the new coin from the block chain alone.

Making a transaction this large is a security risk. It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. Now that the value resides in a single coin, any subsequent transaction faces the same risk. Plunking this much value into a single coin seems like an odd strategy at best. Not to mention the destruction of privacy in combining all those inputs into a single transaction with a single output.

I can think of one reason you might want to do this. A consortium/trust has formed in which individuals pay into a common pool of money. That money is then protected with a multi signature script (consistent with the P2SH type). Given a threshold of signatures, the money can be spent, subject to other constraints. These will remain unknown until the first payment is made. At that point we'll know the number and identity of all the eligible keys and the threshold needed to make payment.

If so, this transaction can be thought of as a kind of digital charter for the consortium in that it defines how the money can be spent going forward.

Edit: to be clear, the "bounty" I'm talking about can't be directly claimed just by mining some blocks. Instead, it would have to be claimed as part of a double spend of either the transaction in question or as subsequent transaction of the now-enormous output. Most likely, there would be collusion of some kind between a miner and the owner of the keys. I'm not saying this will happen, but the bigger the transaction, the greater the risk.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#112

As far as the fees being so cheap, and every one else guessing about how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation, F. Scott Fitzgerald is relevant: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is…

> how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation No idea about the billionaires, but I can shift £5k from a current account to another current account with another bank for the princely sum of £0.00

Are you talking about wire transfers? In the US both banks would charge a transaction fee.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#113

It’d be very interesting if this was part of the court ruling against Craig Wright: https://cointelegraph.com/news/craig-wright-challenges-court...

Probably not. If that guy could show he really had the bitcoin (dubious in itself) and was handing it over as part of a court settlement, that would be news.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part which confuses me about Bitcoin the most. It's meant to be anonymous, yet with some diligent data mining, it can become pretty clear who's who from their spending patterns by observing the ledger. How is that remotely anonymous?

I don't think it was really "meant to be anonymous". The original whitepaper at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf has a section on privacy, which mentions that public keys can be kept anonymous but acknowledges that all transactions are announced publicly: > The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to a…

There’s a lot of different veils to privacy in transactions.

There’s the IP record of the user hitting the server that processes their request (it might be your own box if you’re storing the whole chain yourself but most people use thin clients). Then there’s the list of inputs (cryptonote based currencies like monero use ring signatures which provide obfuscation but not binary privacy). Then there’s the list of outputs, which may be able to be linked to inputs revealing the transaction graph (zcash helps solve this with their circuit proving technology, but it’s limited in temporal scope by the fact that there’s a transition between transparent and hidden addresses). Then there’s the amounts of a given transaction (modern cryptocurrencies use range proofs to conceal the amounts but older currencies don’t).

To recap, there’s access information like IP, transaction information that can be used to reassemble the transaction graph, and balance information which, again, can be used to reassemble the transaction graph. The broad point is that if you can assemble the transaction graph, any additional information, like a list of known addresses, will severely deprecate the privacy of the entire system.

There are potentially ways around this, but they all involve breaking transaction linkability, which is fraught with peril for a variety of reasons (such that no currency has actually achieved this in a meaningful way so far).

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#115
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important qualifier on that that's missed for most "the very rich". The "rich" are often quite penny pinchers. My grandfather is "rich" (several millions, and in a very cheap place to live in the midwest) but he lived his entire life being extremely strict on spending and controlled personal finances very carefully. He still complains when there's large money to be spent on something that should be cheap.

I found out that my grandfather was a multimillionaire later in life as well, but I would never have guessed because he lives in an inconspicuous house in a middle class neighborhood and drives an inconspicuous car (Honda CR-V). He complains about milk and gas prices like most people and basically just doesn't telegraph his wealth at all (except by buying exclusively Wheaties as his breakfast cereal). He grew up duri…

Maybe this is just me, but I don't actually consider having a couple million dollars as "rich", I know a couple folks worth hundreds of millions, and the way they behave are certainly different.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#116
post #94
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's meant to be anonymous Unfortunately, Bitcoin (BTC) is not anonymous, as you pointed out. It never was; and with tax laws requiring copious transaction information, it is particularly easily traceable. That's the idea behind Monero & Co., which tries to mix things up a bit (literally). The anonymity is still not perfect, especially against state-level actors.

Bitcoin can be anonymous though in certain use-cases. You can create a new bitcoin public/private key pair on a computer that has never (and will never) touched the internet. Once you send the coins from an address to this new address, the network will now know the IP address of the sender, but it won't know anything about the unknown recipient.

It knows that in some way/shape/form the old address is associated with the new address, so most likely it is the same entity, or a transaction partner. Bitcoin is not supposed to be anonymous, and very unsuitable for use-cases where you want any kind of anonymity guarantee.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#117

As far as the fees being so cheap, and every one else guessing about how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation, F. Scott Fitzgerald is relevant: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is…

Important qualifier on that that's missed for most "the very rich". The "rich" are often quite penny pinchers. My grandfather is "rich" (several millions, and in a very cheap place to live in the midwest) but he lived his entire life being extremely strict on spending and controlled personal finances very carefully. He still complains when there's large money to be spent on something that should be cheap.

Yeah. The very rich intrigue me. I wonder what they think, where they go, what they eat, and what they watch. Can't be the same shit we got.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation No idea about the billionaires, but I can shift £5k from a current account to another current account with another bank for the princely sum of £0.00

Are you talking about wire transfers? In the US both banks would charge a transaction fee.

Probably, it's the same in The Netherlands, wire transfers are instantaneous and free.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically crypto will never replace government backed currency if the world economy and politics is stable . Look at Turkey. Venezuela. Argentina. China. North Korea. People are already not trusting government backed currency. I don’t mean to over generalize. I just want to say it’s not just a dream. It’s possible.

And if the world economy and politics isn't stable your USB key isn't going to buy you something to eat any more than your amex. At least cash can be burnt for warmth.

Nope, you got it wrong. Look at Venezuela.

If people can trust people they can trade. With crypto government trust can be replaced.

Re: 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

#120

As far as the fees being so cheap, and every one else guessing about how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation, F. Scott Fitzgerald is relevant: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is…

> how expensive it would be to do it in a normal banking situation No idea about the billionaires, but I can shift £5k from a current account to another current account with another bank for the princely sum of £0.00

Try doing 100K in EUR/USD/GBP...

It's likely not free (but probably not outrageous either)... Last time I did something like that the transaction cost was small (On the flip side, I saw a payment go through for one our suppliers today. $50 invoice. > $25 processing fee because it was a european bank processing a USD transaction. :/

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