Wild-ass guesses:
1) Someone at the NSA 2) Barack Hussein Obama 3) Me
I hope the national-security apparati have a handle on this -- wouldn't want the evidence of a smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud...
Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
451–460 of 474 posts
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#452Is it only me, but such things make Bitcoin seem somwhat... less private... than real money?
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fedwire and other real time gross settlement services (RTGS) are almost instantaneous. SWIFT transfers usually are not: SWIFT is a way to communicate messages about transfers between banks, but they would still need a way to do the actual settlement. This could be very fast in the case of two large banks in different countries: if you are a customer in bank A, which has a correspondent account with B, and the recipie…
The Fedwire transaction better be instantaneous -- interest on intraday overdrafts accrues by the minute. http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_policy.htm#...
Overdraft fees up to $150 are waived. Very generous of the Fed.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
There have been more than one block chain splits. I think you are talking about the hard fork that happened in May, which was planned for and not an unexpected accident. If you conduct a transaction and it is included in the shorter block chain, then by definition the network doesn't recognize the transaction and you keep your money and just send again.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, exactly none of the blockchain splits that have happened so far were expected to happen.
That hard fork was rolled out over a period of two months, with warning (whilst older clients were sent messages to upgrade) and smaller splits are part of the protocol and happen quite regularly. as expected (like when two miners hit the same block within seconds and they wait for the network to recognise the block).
That is the justification Satoshi Naakamoto gave in the original paper for waiting for 6 blocks for a full confirmation.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the key get into the token, and how do you know there wasn't a copy made before that?
For example Trezor hardware wallet ( http://www.bitcointrezor.com/ ) generates its private key when it is first initialized. This way, the key never exists outside of the wallet.
Not sure that solves he upthread probem. If I give you a Treznor hardware wallet containing a private key to $150million worth of bitcoins - would you trust me not to have anther copy of that key? Or would you transfer them immediately to a wallet with a private key I could never possibly have known?
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides cost there is also risk- a transfer of this size in the light of day would raise a lot of questions- Where did this money come from? Was tax paid? And depending on the reason for the transaction regulators may interfere or freeze the funds.
"Where did this money come from?" I guess, not from you. Is that the reason to question it? "Was tax paid?" What makes you think that this money supposed to be taxed?
If it is a transfer between two accounts owned by two different people - I guess that this huge amount would be taxable with some amount.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this transaction was nearly instantaneous Aren't Bitcoin transaction times generally in minutes?
Not exactly. To be sure it isn't a double spend it needs to be part of the block chain at least six down from the most recent block generated. Each extra block on top of the block where your transaction exists is a confirmation. For smaller purchases, ie not $150 million worth it's near instantaneous.
Yeah, I would bet that credit card fraud with chargebacks is probably more likely than the double spend scenario so it would make sense for a company just not care about verifying.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the key get into the token, and how do you know there wasn't a copy made before that?
For example Trezor hardware wallet ( http://www.bitcointrezor.com/ ) generates its private key when it is first initialized. This way, the key never exists outside of the wallet.
Trezor supports exporting the key for backup purposes.
Re: Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf Researchers can easily track such trivial ways of "attempted anonymization". >>> We found out that there is a huge number of tiny transactions which move only a small fraction of a single bit- coin, but there are also hundreds of transactions which move more than 50,000 bitcoins. We analyzed all these large transactions by following in detail the way these sums were accumulated and…
Got it. I did not properly understand the relationship between wallets and addresses. That is also a pretty cool paper as well. Thanks for the link.
Unfortunately, the authors of the paper did not understand the relationship between wallets and addresses very well either.
The recommend use of Bitcoin is that every payment you receive should be to a new address. This maximizes privacy and its necessary when you may have multiple concurrent payment in order to sort out which one you've received. Common wallet software (including the reference client) also always pays change to a new address.
... so it's a bummer that the authors of the paper went on to describe every coin assigned to an address which has never spent as in savings (roughly 60% of them), if not for a couple things engaging in the bad practice of address reuse they would have found 100% in "savings".