111–120 of 369 posts
Seems like HN might be blocked as referrer here... clicked on the link and got a 404. If I go to the link directly it loads.
Whoops. Ditch it and nuke the drives. Works for me.
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It's pretty impossible to beat the $5 wrench attack (or in the case of the government, 5 years in prison) unless you have anonymity, which Bitcoin does a very bad job of.
Luckily there is Monero https://www.getmonero.org/
Very curious how they convinced this anonymous hacker to give up $1B to the federal government. The filing makes it sound like it was voluntary, but I doubt it really was.
What do you even do with that much bitcoin realistically? It's dirty, so any attempt to turn it into fiat puts you at risk of being found. Whoever had it refused to touch it for 7 years, likely because they knew it was a fast-track to getting arrested. Giving that money straight to the feds in exchange for immunity might be more attractive than trying to hide the reason you became a billionaire.
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The point of bitcoin is that you can drive across the country "carrying" $1B worth of assets, and if you get pulled over by the cops it won't be found. Try doing that with gold bars or stacks of cash.
Plenty of rich people drive or fly across the country all the time "carrying" $1b worth of assets. They're called bank accounts, and you can access them with these things called "check books" and "debit cards" that you can use in infinitely more places than you can transact Bitcoin or other crypto.
Your account can be frozen and confiscated with little recourse.
I'm not the most saavy BTC person, but isn't part of the allure of bitcoin the ability to evade this type of seizure?
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The Feds seized it from "Individual X" who hacked the account, they didn't hack and seize the account directly
You're assuming there actually is an Individual X. It is possible he was fabricated in order to hide that the Feds indeed did gain the password for the wallet.
"On November 3, 2020, Individual X signed a Consent and Agreement to Forfeiture with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of California. In that agreement, Individual X, consented to the forfeiture of the Defendant Property to the United States government."
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Yes, but they didn't hack into the wallet. They basically found the person who was in-charge of the wallet and forced their hand (read: civil forfeiture) in order to gain access to the bitcoin.
I'm not sure civil forfeiture is the right term for what happened here. I don't think the government can compel individual x to give them the wallet's key. Unless they found the key laying around I'd say they likely they built a case against them and used that to get them to trade the billion dollars in exchange for dropping the case.
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Yes and it took the US Gov 8 years to come up with a way to do so with mutual cooperation after knowing the identity of the owner and having a way to communicate with that owner. Very different than any random judge or municipal police freezing anything they want. Have a stash that people dont know about, no series of shell corporations and foundations required.
>mutual cooperation This is some quality spin, so kudos for that. You make it sound like the government and the individual in question came to a friendly agreement, when what happened was the government discovered the person's identity and used the powers available to them to get a consent to forfeiture out of them. >Very different than any random judge or municipal police freezing anything they want. Not at all. Jus…
Very curious how they convinced this anonymous hacker to give up $1B to the federal government. The filing makes it sound like it was voluntary, but I doubt it really was.
I find it extremely amusing that the US government has over the last several years become one of the world's largest traders in bitcoin. It's not quite the path many were predicting back in the early 2010s, but Bitcoin has been full of surprises. If history is any guide, the bitcoin will be auctioned off sooner rather than later.