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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

#141

Post by adrianN »

donalhunt wrote: post #120
isostatic wrote: post #99

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

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. :/

You can transfer 100k Euros for free within SEPA. Probably more.

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

#142

Post by hinkley »

bureaucrat wrote: post #32

Watching things like this, I think bitcoin could eventually replace the government-backed currency. Everyone can watch them move. If you spend 1$ from that wallet to buy even a mars bar, your identity will be known to others. How CLEAN and clear is that?

You understand that many transactions among influential people are not denominated in dollars, right?

Power is money is truer than money is power.

If anything, it seems to me like dollars are used in two ways. One, to 'make change', to balance out a transaction. Two, as a salve to ease stress about expectations of quid pro quo. Or maybe that's just two ways to say the same thing.

Money balances the books of a somewhat cynical gift economy.

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

#144

Post by heptathorp »

parliament32 wrote: post #62
blunte wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which case it’s extremely unlikely that you would name another valid address; so your transaction would eventually be invalidated.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik there is no "eventual" invalidation in bitcoin: either the destination address fails the checksum (so nodes immediately reject the transaction), or you send the funds to an (unused) address where they'll sit forever.

You are mostly correct. Except only your Bitcoin client sees the checksum/address, the raw transaction has just the pubkey hash encoded in the address. So there is no checksum for other nodes to check. If you accidentally crafted a transaction with the wrong hash in the scriptPubKey, the network would happily accept it.

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

#145

Post by vkou »

Lordarminius wrote: post #105
ColanR wrote: 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.

>The anonymity is still not perfect, especially against state-level actors. With PirateChain it is, but true anonymity brings with it other technical challenges.

It also brings legislative challenges, such as 'prove that your money did not come from running an international assassination ring'.

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

#146

Post by umvi »

hirsin wrote: post #133
umvi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What are the implications of only buying Wheaties for breakfast? That doesn't scream wealth to me, but I also don't eat breakfast cereals, so have a blind spot.

It was mainly a joke for people familiar with breakfast cereal prices; I consider a box of cereal that is less than ~$2.50 to be a "good deal".

I've never, ever seen Wheaties for never on sale.

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

#147

Post by hbosch »

magashna wrote: post #92
jedberg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be free with a bank. If you have that much money with the bank, they will bend over backwards for you. For example with E*Trade I think any wire is free if you have 1 million with them.

Could you actually transfer 1B in one transaction?

Why not? Are you implying that it would technically break some sort of system or something like that? If I legally own a billion dollars in a Swiss bank, and I want to move it to a Cayman Islands bank, there is certainly a room full of well-paid men in fancy suits that will gladly accommodate that.

Or, perhaps more similar to the topic, if I wanted to move a billion dollars from one UBS account to a new UBS account, I certainly could. Some special guy would probably have to turn the key for me, but if I have a billion dollars in a UBS account I surely know that man by name. And also, I would have the benefit of doing it privately, unlike with Bitcoin.

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

#148

Post by behringer »

RandomBacon wrote: post #101
airstrike wrote: post #84

I'm mostly puzzled by the fact that someone would let $1 billion sit in a wallet without earning interest...

Bitcoin is essentially deflationary. If Bitcoin maintains its utilitarian value, it will only grow in monitary value since less and less coins will be minted until no coins are minted, and also as people lose access to their keys. I speculate that in the future, Bitcoin might become valued so highly, that people don't even bother using it in favor of other coins, and as people don't use it, no one then accepts it, th…

No matter how unpopular it becomes, it'll just be lowered in value, eg, deflated, but still usable. It will never fail unless the cryptography underlying it (or a bug in the design) causes it to fail.

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

#149

Post by arcticbull »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #136
arcticbull wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International wires are a bad example because they charge a huge FOREX spread. For a high-ticket transfer, you'd need to use a brokerage for the exchange first, which is also very cheap, but a bit more than $25 ($20 per million at InteractiveBrokers). Then a very cheap domestic wire for the last mile. Or, for small-ticket transfer TransferWise is around 0.85% for the whole exchange.

How is that comparable at all? The original transaction is BTC->BTC. Why are you comparing to a currency exchange?

Fair point!

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

#150

Post by merpnderp »

mlindner wrote: post #90
compiler-guy wrote: post #81

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.

My grandfather was similar. Died a millionaire while never making more than $30k/year. He just paid for things in cash and made sure to always invest. The only luxury he ever spent was on my grandmothers car. Everything else was on a budget and cheap as could be.
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