6 ms·
The structure of this auction is amazing! 1. All bids are paid up front, and you never get your money back, even if you aren't the highest bidder. So if people
by danielvf 10y ago
The structure of this auction is amazing!
1. All bids are paid up front, and you never get your money back, even if you aren't the highest bidder. So if people bid $50, $70, and $100, they collect $220.
2. No one can verify what is actualy up for sale before the auction.
3. There is no way for the world to know that they actualy delivered the goods after the auction.
4. There is no way for the highest bidder to know that they will actually receive the goods.
5. There is nothing stopping the auctioneers from bidding. This not only raises the price, but they still get to keep every bidders money even if the high bid is their own.
Everything about this auction is lined up to incentivize a scam.
- dadver 10y ago>Everything about this auction is lined up to incentivize a scam. Yes, however the contents of the free sample seems very real. Without having dug into the binaries it's hard to tell, but it's hard to imagine someone wrote this to scam 1 million BTC out of the net.
- softawre 10y agoWith 1 million BTC on the line, you have a hard time imagining that someone would do this? People do work for a lot less..
- spynxic 10y agoYes.
- softawre 10y agoMaybe it's the language? Given what I've read this seems real. However, with that much money on the line (if that figure is correct), you could fake almost anything.
- dadver 10y agoI'm curious if they (in lack of better English) didn't mean 1 million USD in BTC. 1 million BTC is -a lot of money-, even for a release of Equation Group material.
- JosephRedfern 10y agoThat's 6.3% of all Bitcoin currently in circulation. A crazy amount.
- tedmiston 10y ago1,000,000 Bitcoin == 563,770,000.00 USD https://www.google.com/search?q=1000000+btc+in+usd https://www.google.com/search?q=1000000+btc+in+usd
- acveilleux 10y agoSort of... When trading that large a fraction of the whole pool of BTC, the trade itself would drastically alter the value of a BTC. To the point that I'd be surprised if someone could openly acquire that large number of BTCs before being priced out of the market. The block chain makes it worse because everyone can see the progress of the buyer and there's no market maker with anywhere near this level of liquidity.
- oswald 10y agoA private transaction of BTC wouldn't effect the market value of BTC. It is correct to say 1M BTC = 565M USD; the market price of BTC/USD is only effected when the BTC is sold on an exchange.
- EthanHeilman 10y agoAlmost no single entity has that much BTC (as of 2016 only ~15 million Bitcoins exist), to acquire it someone would have to aggregate the Bitcoins from many other entities by via buys on a Bitcoin exchange. This would cause a massive spike in the price of Bitcoin. Interesting to note: there has been no new Bitcoin block for the last 1 hour 23 minutes. This happens from time to time, but it is a little suspicious. See https://blockchain.info/ https://blockchain.info/
- pests 10y ago
- ars 10y ago> Yes, however the contents of the free sample seems very real. The only people who could verify if it's real are the Equation Group themself. For anyone else it's impossible to verify - it's just some names. So: If it's real the Equation Group will bid - probably a lot. If it's fake no one will bid. So it'll be easy to tell which it is.
- tedmiston 10y agoPlease ignore; corrected below. > So it'll be easy to tell which it is. ~~How can you tell how others have bid?~~
- objclxt 10y ago> If it's real the Equation Group will bid - probably a lot. Why? You have no guarantee what you're bidding for will remain private, and you don't want to give it legitimacy by bidding. Who's to say if it's real the Equation Group wouldn't bid, under the assumption that it's already out there and you have absolutely no guarantees that anyone you're dealing with would keep their word.
- ars 10y agoThey would bid to try to track them, not to try to keep it private.
- jandrese 10y agoWouldn't the Equation Group just hack their systems and erase the code?
- Kadin 10y agoSure, but there's no incentive to hold anything back. Let's say you break into a server and steal 10 vulnerabilities, from an organization (e.g. the NSA) who are never going to acknowledge how many vulnerabilities they had or were stolen. If you want to get the most in the auction, the best thing you could possibly do is to release all 10 of your vulnerabilities for free, claiming that it's just a teaser, and that you have many more. Then you take in bids and disappear. It makes no sense to only release 2 or 3 and hold back the remainder; the unreleased ones are essentially wasted because they didn't actually contribute to any bidding activity: nobody knew they existed when they were bidding. That they exist at all is a happy surprise to the winning bidder, but with no further sales, customer goodwill isn't worth anything. There's really no incentive to actually follow through on the sale at all. The only purpose of the "goods" to the seller is to attract bids, but with nobody to verify what's actually for sale, the best strategy is to use everything for what amounts to advertising, in the hope of gaining more attention and attracting more bids. I wouldn't dump it all at once, if I were them, though. I'd do an initial release, and them some more once the initial bids (if there are any) slow down, and keep doing that over and over until the market is entirely worn out and all the vulnerabilities have been disclosed. That's the profit-maximizing strategy, I think.
- ajdlinux 10y agoAlternatively, the whole auction is a ruse to confuse people before they drop the whole thing for free.
- omginternets 10y agoWho would that benefit and how?
- chinathrow 10y agoThe seller (they get the money) and everyone else (the world can use the dump for free) but the payer (he payed what the rest of the world got for free).
- DangerousPie 10y agoI also like this part: > Q: When does auction end? A: Unknown. When we feel is time to end. Keep bidding until we announce winner.
- VMG 10y ago> Everything about this auction is lined up to incentivize a scam. Actually if they could tie their identity to some positive reputation, the other points wouldn't be so bad (they could still attempt an exit scam). The fact that they are so honest about the refunds actually makes me think it's not a scam, since scammers would probably lie and promise the opposite.
- jfktrey 10y agoThat's what they want you to think.
- justindocanto 10y agoIf somebody tells you "you are not getting you're money back", I think that no longer makes it a scam. You know exactly what you are getting into at that point.
- Leon 10y agoIt can still be a scam if you don't receive the goods.
- chatmasta 10y agoThis is effectively a "penny auction," which, as you point out, benefits nobody but the auctioneers.
- tedmiston 10y agoPlease ignore; corrected below. ~~A silent penny auction :|~~
- ktRolster 10y agoNot to mention the complete insults to anyone who would want to buy it. A government would handle this by trying to chase down the autioneers. If they wanted the data, they would buy it from Kaspersky, assuming it's real.
- daveloyall 10y agoThe auctioneers indicate that they have the "server side" code. Kaspersky would only have the "client side" code. ...The client gets infected with malware and sends the data home... to some server. The server side.
- acqq 10y agoBut the servers are uninteresting, the clever part is just the client code. And that in original source form, not as the binary. But also much more until the 0-days used are patched.
- qyv 10y agoIt would be reasonable to assume that the data in the auction contains as-of-yet undiscovered exploits. this also makes sense when you consider we will not likely know who walks away with this.
- tedmiston 10y ago> 4. There is no way for the highest bidder to know that they will actually receive the goods. Or for the highest bidder to even know that they won.
- pr0zac 10y agoIts very easy to tell who the highest bidder is. https://blockchain.info/address/19BY2XCgbDe6WtTVbTyzM9eR3LYr6VitWK https://blockchain.info/address/19BY2XCgbDe6WtTVbTyzM9eR3LYr...
- gwern 10y agoIf they were really serious, they would be using Dark Leaks.
- phelix001 10y agoThis is most likely a honeypot to make a list of potential enemies of the state.
- CAAD10 10y agoIt makes sense if they know they've released information that the person who this was leaked from can absolutely verify it's legitimacy, and wants to keep it secret at all costs while also maximizing return.
- not_anit_woman 10y agoCorrect! This is why they are doing it this way.
- benmmurphy 10y agoit actually makes no sense to set it up like a penny auction. like if you are scamming why not just let people bid by sending you bitcoin then promise to return it if their bid fails but then instead just keep the coin. if you are legitimate then why run it like a scam. i'm sure there is some explanation.
- satyajeet23 10y agoTHIS: https://blockchain.info/address/19BY2XCgbDe6WtTVbTyzM9eR3LYr6VitWK https://blockchain.info/address/19BY2XCgbDe6WtTVbTyzM9eR3LYr...