Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

$14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

blog.clain.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 96 posts

Re: $14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

#41

Post by csense »

caterama wrote: post #14
rb808 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any authorities that help track down stuff like this now? If you can pay taxes on it you'd think the police would help investigate a theft.

On one hand, the authorities are mocked for incompetency (see recently: surveillance cameras on the open internet, 26-year-old EMT shot by police raiding the wrong home) and yet we expect them to handle cases like this? This seems like a double standard. Is there a solution?

Yes.

You should assume the government will always have a lot of incompetence and abuse in the application of its power.

So give government as little power as possible.

Re: $14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

#42

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

Too bad this theft did not affect the founders of Ethereum like the DAO exploit did. Otherwise, they would have found a way to reverse this and get people their money back from the hacker, even if it meant changing the protocol and upgrading existing binaries.

Re: $14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

#43

Post by [deleted] »

arcticbull wrote: post #9
save_ferris wrote: post #2

This is an interesting piece, and it highlights one problem I’ve noticed with crypto in general recently, which is that these kinds of investigations are largely being carried out by private entities who build platforms around this type of forensics without any real ability to go after the exchanges that have permitted this laundering. Between this and Bitfinex refusing to submit to an external auditor and other even…

Not your keys, not your coins™ -- with that as the core philosophy of cryptocurrency, can you even say this was stolen, let alone laundered? It sounds like the person with the keys transferred the coins into another wallet. Resolved: behaves correctly. At least, as intended anyways.

[deleted]

Re: $14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

#44

Post by verdverm »

jasonlingx wrote: post #39
dudus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely don't need to trust these players most of the time. Your coins can sit in an offline wallet out of their reach for the majority of the time. What you use them for is liquidity. Since you probably won't find a private party to buy/sell from. Realistically if you want to buy, or sell coins you have to go through one of them. And yes that kinda sucks because none of them are trustworthy., so you have some…

>The larger problems comes from the risk they inject in the market just by existing. They will be hacked, fail KYC, or straight up scam exit with all their customers money and that will impact the value of the market as a whole. Have you heard of Lehman Brothers? Enron? Madoff? The vast majority of scammers, criminals still use fiat. By your reasoning that would make fiat more risky. >For my risk tolerance, crypto is…

It's for speculation and to get rich quick. That's how myself and a bunch of millennials used it. We had digital money beforehand, it's way easier to use than cryptos, and I get a legal safety net.

Re: $14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

#45

Post by krapp »

csense wrote: post #41
caterama wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, the authorities are mocked for incompetency (see recently: surveillance cameras on the open internet, 26-year-old EMT shot by police raiding the wrong home) and yet we expect them to handle cases like this? This seems like a double standard. Is there a solution?

Yes. You should assume the government will always have a lot of incompetence and abuse in the application of its power. So give government as little power as possible.

I would rephrase that to "give government as little power as necessary."

If you give government as little power as possible, because you believe all government is maximally incompetent and abusive, you might as well just do away with it altogether and have anarchy.

Allowing a government at all implies at least some trust that government can have some positive societal effect.

Re: $14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

#46

Post by bpodgursky »

arcticbull wrote: post #21
cortesoft wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is anything fundamental about cryptocurrency that would make them entirely immune to theft. You can both believe that the blockchain is working as intended and that the coins were stolen.

I don't disagree although the system philosophically, at it's core, has no concept of theft, of permission, or reversal. Keys = coins.

The law is capable of finesse in situations like: "I point a gun at your head and tell you to empty your bank account via ATM". Sooner or later, criminals are going to figure out that the weak link in crypto is the people, and all the secure wallets in the world won't save users facing physical violence.

There has to be a place for legal enforcement in this world; "blockchain is the final word" doesn't lead to a society people actually want to live in.

Re: $14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

#47

Post by ipnon »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #42

Too bad this theft did not affect the founders of Ethereum like the DAO exploit did. Otherwise, they would have found a way to reverse this and get people their money back from the hacker, even if it meant changing the protocol and upgrading existing binaries.

A point one of the founders of Ethereum has made:

If you do not like a particular cryptocurrency, you can always use your own. Ethereum is an open source platform whose value, like paper money, is only the price that people are willing to pay for it.

Re: $14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

#48

Post by ashtonkem »

arcticbull wrote: post #9
save_ferris wrote: post #2

This is an interesting piece, and it highlights one problem I’ve noticed with crypto in general recently, which is that these kinds of investigations are largely being carried out by private entities who build platforms around this type of forensics without any real ability to go after the exchanges that have permitted this laundering. Between this and Bitfinex refusing to submit to an external auditor and other even…

Not your keys, not your coins™ -- with that as the core philosophy of cryptocurrency, can you even say this was stolen, let alone laundered? It sounds like the person with the keys transferred the coins into another wallet. Resolved: behaves correctly. At least, as intended anyways.

That’s certainly an argument that can be made, but not one that’ll fly if you want more adoption.

Re: $14M in ETH stolen from Upbit were laundered in May through well-known exchanges

#49

Post by ashtonkem »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #42

Too bad this theft did not affect the founders of Ethereum like the DAO exploit did. Otherwise, they would have found a way to reverse this and get people their money back from the hacker, even if it meant changing the protocol and upgrading existing binaries.

The fact that losses can only be reversed if you’re sufficiently well connected to the developers is a major problem.
Post reply on HN