They couldn't spare even 0.5 for fees?
Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
401–410 of 474 posts
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can have multiple addresses per wallet but BTC is still stored in addresses, not wallets. So if you have some BTC in address A and none in address B then you can't use B to buy anything. If you transfer money from A to B that leaves a record.
But you have no idea if address A and B belong to the same wallet, right? As in, I can create address A, get coins into it, then create addresses B-Z, disburse coins into them, then collect them again? Could I reasonably create enough addresses to create plausible deniability that I actually owned all the coins at all times? Alternatively, could I use a web wallet to bounce coins around to obfuscate ownership?
The real problem occurs when you want to buy something that costs X, and all the addresses you control have fewer than X coins. You have to join the coins from multiple addresses within the wallet, and this joining provides very strong evidence that the same user controls all these addresses. So if one address is known to belong to a particular user, we now know (more or less) that all addresses belong to that user.
This joining means that even if you've been super careful to never link address A to you because you've done sketchy things with A, if at some point in the future (even distant future) you join A with another address that the someone CAN track, they now know you own A.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just as people say, "the market can act crazy, longer than you can remain solvent" about trading stocks on Wall Street, so I would point out that gold's value "as money" has been around a lot longer than even the lifetime of Methuselah. People have been using gold in some form for thousands of years - I don't see that changing anytime soon.
People used silver for a long time too, but it was demonetized in 20th century. http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/silver-a-brief-history-of-d...
People still buy silver as an investment, I hesitate to say "as money" ; although I told in Mexico you can buy and sell silver in many banks (I don't know the details however).
In the USA, gold was demonetized (1933) before silver (1965) in the currency when used in the USA. The dollar was convertible into gold internationally however.
The international gold window was closed by Nixon in 1971.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#404Might be the german govt. They've been advocating open source and linux for a while now. Maybe trying out buttcoins.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same is true of any foreign currency. I could send $150 million in Russian rubles to my sister, and she wouldn't be able to do jack with it until she finds someone willing to give her dollars for it. With the amount of money involved, getting it all converted at once would be extremely difficult. That's exactly the point. If you had $150 million in rubles, you could transfer it for only a nominal fee ($20 for my…
> If you had $150 million in rubles, you could transfer it for only a nominal fee ($20 for my bank, although you can get a lot cheaper if you regularly did transfers like that) to any account in the world that could hold rubles. I have no counterproof, but I find this hard to believe.
I've only transferred / had transferred internationally sums around 50-100k, that was just a nominal fee.
http://www.stgeorge.com.au/online-services/business-banking/...
Telegraphic Transfer (TT) Request $20.00 per transaction or item
Pretty sure that would be fine up to ~$1 million. Anecdotally I know TT happen for sums in the range of $10-$100 million (there was a case where ~$150 million was stolen by a rogue TT in Australia to overseas bank accounts).
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
What country are you in? In the UK bank transfers happen within a couple of minutes. You can login to your bank, transfer money to someone elses bank, they'll login, and see the money.
My guess is the previous commenter is in US. There's an excellent episode of the podcast "planet money" which addresses exactly this question, and which also explains why the system in the UK is much faster. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-...
Nope. Third-world here. I don't think it'll take a couple weeks in the US.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your point stands, but most thefts occur on third party sites/applications where the address of the coins and their private key are stored in a central location. Owners of the bitcoin should transfer their coins to a private wallet. I don't understand how so many sites can't use password hash generation to secure the private keys, or something to keep it more secure. The first link you posted was a site run by an 18…
Sorry to digress a little, but I'm sensitive on age issues :) Pinkie Pie won his first $50k award by creating a 0-day sandbox escape on Chrome, by chaining 10 different vulnerabilities. He was 19 (now almost 21). Two years before, at 17, he released jailbreakme.com, all by himself, which was a 0-day able to jailbreak all iOS models shipped to date by just visiting a website. Age means nothing by itself, but the point…
Sorry, didn't mean to put down the skills of young people! I'm 28 and I work on lots of security related systems, and although I understand most all of it, I wouldn't attempt to build a Bitcoin exchange without someone with years and years of hardened workplace experience. That's all I meant ;)
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your point stands, but most thefts occur on third party sites/applications where the address of the coins and their private key are stored in a central location. Owners of the bitcoin should transfer their coins to a private wallet. I don't understand how so many sites can't use password hash generation to secure the private keys, or something to keep it more secure. The first link you posted was a site run by an 18…
Because "online wallet" sites are the sort of bad idea that _needs_ to have access to the private keys. If you can spend bitcoin out of an "online wallet", the person in control of the software managing that wallet _does_ have access to your bitcoin. Even if they've tried to set things up "securely", the very best they can do is achieve Lavabit levels of security - if they (or someone coercing them) wants to, they'll…
True.
I may be wrong here - but is the private key only required to send the money? So, if the user kept the key and it wasn't recorded on the server...or if they use some type of password hash for encrypting it, then there wouldn't be hundreds or thousands of wallets stolen at once. The user would enter their password when they want to transfer funds, the hash is calculated, private key decrypted, transaction made, and the private key is never recorded anywhere.
But, this would require the user to NEVER forget their password, or else they lose their money.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous by default, not anonymous. Anonymity is a choice. CoinJoin [1] and other trustless mixing software projects are aiming to make anonymity a push of a button. This is being implemented into DarkWallet [2] where mixing happens automatically in the background. [1] http://bitcoinmagazine.com/6630/ [2] http://www.indiegogo.com/at/darkwallet
Owners of pseudonymous accounts can be identified if you're willing and able to do the required correlation legwork.
Not if several parties swap each other's transaction histories using an anonymous mixer on Tor.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, because making sure someone isn't buying a nuke on the black market and is paying the taxes they owe is just terrible. Don't get me wrong, the regulatory framework for money transfers seems to suck, but I don't want to go from "shitty regulation" to "zero regulation", I want to go from "shitty regulation" to "smart regulation".
>I want to go from "shitty regulation" to "smart regulation". I'm tempted to conclude this is something that happens so rarely you may as well count the times it happens as a rounding error. It's a bit like saying government will just work if we only vote for the right candidate.
I'm tempted to conclude this is something that happens so rarely you may as well count the times it happens as a rounding error.
Everyone's tempted to conclude things like that, but there's a subtle fallacy happening when we do. Generally speaking, we notice government programs of all stripes when they get in our way. When they don't get in our way, we don't. It's very easy for someone paying attention to the news to be able to rattle off incidents where the FDA and FEMA and the SEC screwed up, because the screw-ups are in the news. But when they do their job correctly we never hear about it. Basically, the dataset we carry around in our heads about How Well Government Works is substantially biased toward instances of failure.
The only way to really measure how useful a regulation is or isn't is to determine what it is the regulation is supposed to address and examine a substantial set of "before and after" data points; trotting out vivid but essentially anecdotal examples of WHEN REGULATORS GO BAD makes for great editorializing, but it doesn't actually tell us very much.