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BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

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Re: BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

#121

Post by kobeya »

wbl wrote: post #84
nubela wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elaborate. Your statement says nothing but "I'm a software engineer so believe me what I say Slack app sucks'

Analysing monero traceability is hard. Early wallets picked addresses to use in bad ways. A lot of academic work us needed. Luckily ZeroCoin exists.

I don't know why you are being down voted, since you said exactly what I was alluding to. Monero's ring signature traceability is very hard to analyze. Even if the ring signature is not broken in a cryptographic sense, transactions can still be linked by the other fingerprints they leave, or by wide spectrum analysis.

It's a bit like a game of sudoku. A mixin input could have 4 different coins, and technically you can't be certain from the signature which is the real input. But in reality you can do downstream or source analysis and come up with probabilities for whether the prior transactions were authored by the same wallet, or associate with other keys used by other mixin inputs. Every little bit adds to the probability of two addresses being linked, and it really doesn't take many bits of information to confirm or eliminate mixin inputs as being real or fake.

This is notably different from how ZeroCoin operates, where the anonymity set is everyone and it is fully untraceable. However ZeroCoin has problems with respect to performance and deployment :\

Re: BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

#122

Post by kobeya »

modeless wrote: post #97
kobeya wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an actual cryptographer who has looked into it, I wouldn't put too much faith in Monero's fungibiliry. The story is not as good as the PR would have you believe, and is really not all that different from Bitcoin with CoinJoin.

That's interesting! I haven't really looked into it in detail. So are there any actual anonymous coins out there?

Not any that are scalable or trust-free.

Re: BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

#123

Post by PeterisP »

dboreham wrote: post #30
lettergram wrote: post #16

I still don't understand, the U.S. is charging a Russian with a white collar crime? The crime was committed outside the U.S., he didn't come to the U.S., the servers weren't in the U.S., Mt.Gox was based out of Japan, and Greek police arrested him. I've seen this enough to know this is common, but what is going on with this world?

Because all money transits through US banks? (to a first approximation)

Pretty much all dollars do; similarly to how a transfer of Euros (even if it's from Nigeria to China) is likely to go through EU.

Re: BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

#124

Post by __s »

SwellJoe wrote: post #104
dest wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may get it back in the future, if they open again… or not. Sorry for your loss It is reasonably well-known that it is dangerous to leave money on exchanges. BTC is only yours when it's in a wallet with a private key that is known to you, and no third party.

I've lost more in my own local wallets due to losing both of the USB flash drives that contained the keys (as ridiculous as it sounds, I think my girlfriend's cat stole one of them). Realistically, I've come to think cryptocurrency just isn't for me; it's too damned easy to lose. I also forgot my passphrase for some other BTC (I think I remember it, but it doesn't work, so, there those went). It's not huge sums; 1 BT…

On the passphrase front: https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover may be useful

Re: BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

#125

Post by piaste »

atemerev wrote: post #112
reitanqild wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course there's no victims in money laundering. It's a victimless crime that has the sole purpose of helping prosecutors when they aren't able to find a real crime. While the laundry operation is victimless it often directly assists crimes that have very real crimes: Trafficking Drug abusers [0] Illegal weapons trade [1] [0]: Esp. as since it is currently illegal they suffer a lot as getting their drugs means d…

Right. And cars manufacturers assist kidnappers and bank robbers escapes. And cell phones can be used as remote detonators. And end-to-end cryptography... no, this is an abomination , you shouldn't even think of it unless you willingly submit your private keys to the appropriate government agency for safe escrow to aid lawful investigations! (I would have put /s here, but all these lines will be used at face value so…

Money laundering is knowingly assisting criminal activities. You're actively hiding where the money comes from, exactly because you know it comes from illegal sources. (If the source were legal but embarrassing, all you'd need is standard bank privacy, not active laundering.)

The car-related analogy isn't a car manufacturer. It isn't even an anonymous, stealth rental car service (although plenty of crimes could benefit from it).

The analogy is a taxi service that advertises itself as willing and able to crash through police barricades.

Re: BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

#126

Post by Cthulhu_ »

modeless wrote: post #67
openmosix wrote: post #22

The question for me is: why US? He is a Russian citizen, the company is based in Bulgaria, servers in Russia, legal HQ in Cyprus and all the services operated from Seychelles - arrested in Greece. The MtGox hack affected a Japanese company. I'm not debating the nature of the crimes, etc - I am just wondering, when does it become a US case? I can get the "there were US customers" - but why not Europe? Or Japan? Or Rus…

Look at the actual charges in the indictment. All the BTC-e stuff is not what he's charged with. He's charged with transferring stolen Mt Gox Bitcoins to Tradehill, a San Francisco based exchange (now defunct). That's the US connection that will seal his extradition. They also allege that BTC-e is (at least partially) hosted in the US and does business with many US companies, which is likely true. But that's not what…

Only way to launder BTC - break the history chain, so to speak - is to first pull it out of the network - which requires either an exchange, or like a street deal (cash for BTC). Exchanges require identification so either there's a dodgy one that doesn't ask for that, or you get a mule.

Anyway, then you have cash money, you buy BTC back. Or keep the cash, I mean I wouldn't want to keep BTC if I had stolen it. It's pretty much worthless on its own - as proven by pretty much all media always going about $4 billion instead of 600K+ BTC.

Re: BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

#127

Post by quickthrower2 »

benwilber0 wrote: post #57
ryanlol wrote: post #2

There's been no mentions of coin seizures anywhere as far as I can tell. Usually you'd see some boasting about that. Perhaps these guys were actually smart about their cold storage?

Page 6 article 20 says they operated their servers in the United States. If that's true then I'm pretty sure they've already been seized. They were probably on aws

That could just be the web farm. The clearing might be done from Russia.

Re: BTC-e and its founder charged in 21-count indictment over hack of Mt. Gox

#130

Post by celticninja »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #126
modeless wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the actual charges in the indictment. All the BTC-e stuff is not what he's charged with. He's charged with transferring stolen Mt Gox Bitcoins to Tradehill, a San Francisco based exchange (now defunct). That's the US connection that will seal his extradition. They also allege that BTC-e is (at least partially) hosted in the US and does business with many US companies, which is likely true. But that's not what…

Only way to launder BTC - break the history chain, so to speak - is to first pull it out of the network - which requires either an exchange, or like a street deal (cash for BTC). Exchanges require identification so either there's a dodgy one that doesn't ask for that, or you get a mule. Anyway, then you have cash money, you buy BTC back. Or keep the cash, I mean I wouldn't want to keep BTC if I had stolen it. It's pr…

Actually you don't need to get it to cash, change it to another crypto such as LTC or ether on an exchange, send it off exchange to another exchange and buy back btc to have unlinked coins. You could also use a mixer for the alt coin as you move it between exchanges for further obfuscation. Most exchanges that deal in alt coins only require ID/verification if you want to exchange to fiat, so crypto to crypto can be done on anonymous accounts.
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