17 ms·

I'd take issue on two points. First, "wallets' don't exist in the Bitcoin protocol. Second, the tool being used is not sophisticated enough to list the inputs a

by aazaa 7y ago

I'd take issue on two points. First, "wallets' don't exist in the Bitcoin protocol. Second, the tool being used is not sophisticated enough to list the inputs and outputs, giving the false impression that something unusual is "unknown." Try this link to get details: https://blockstream.info/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb58e7c7b2422b2d7529afc675208ce2ce09ed7d https://blockstream.info/tx/4410c8d14ff9f87ceeed1d65cb58e7c7... There are numerous inputs and a single pay-to-script-hash (P2SH) output. The relatively high fee is due in part to the large number of inputs. ~400 satoshis/byte is high by today's standard but not too unreasonable as early as 2017. We can't tell anything about the identity of the owner(s) of the new coin from the block chain alone. Making a transaction this large is a security risk. It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. Now that the value resides in a single coin, any subsequent transaction faces the same risk. Plunking this much value into a single coin seems like an odd strategy at best. Not to mention the destruction of privacy in combining all those inputs into a single transaction with a single output. I can think of one reason you might want to do this. A consortium/trust has formed in which individuals pay into a common pool of money. That money is then protected with a multi signature script (consistent with the P2SH type). Given a threshold of signatures, the money can be spent, subject to other constraints. These will remain unknown until the first payment is made. At that point we'll know the number and identity of all the eligible keys and the threshold needed to make payment. If so, this transaction can be thought of as a kind of digital charter for the consortium in that it defines how the money can be spent going forward. Edit: to be clear, the "bounty" I'm talking about can't be directly claimed just by mining some blocks. Instead, it would have to be claimed as part of a double spend of either the transaction in question or as subsequent transaction of the now-enormous output. Most likely, there would be collusion of some kind between a miner and the owner of the keys. I'm not saying this will happen, but the bigger the transaction, the greater the risk.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
> It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. I don't really agree with that statement. Yes, someone could mount a 51% attack to rewrite that block. However, it would be pretty straightforward to see what was happening (and which nodes were the malicious actors). If that did happen, the possible outcomes would be: 1. The value of bitcoin would fall to basically 0. The reason bitcoin has any value at all really has to do with trust - belief that the protocol is secure and can't be broken. In this case, an easily detectable spending "override" would cause faith in the protocol to evaporate. 2. Note I don't believe #1 would happen. The response would be all the other miners who do have a vested interest in bitcoins success would put all their resources in ensuring the original block was maintained. I.e. the options aren't between one address getting the billion+ dollars or another address getting a billion+ dollars. The options are one address getting a billion+ dollars or everyone's bitcoin going to 0. Edit: Another likely possible outcome is you could get what happened to Ethereum when the DAO was hacked: a fork to Ethereum vs. Ethereum Classic. But it's still important to note Ethereum Classic is worth a teeny fraction of what Ethereum is.
- ur-whale 7y ago
  >The value of bitcoin would fall to basically 0 Yes indeed. There are a number of very interesting game-theoretic feedback loops built into bitcoin that enhance security. This is one of them.
  - mochris 7y ago
    I disagree, because historically major cryptos have allowed known attacks to succeed if they targeted a member of the public at large, and have defended only if they targeted named insiders. The expectation, at this point, is that defense will only occur if you are an elite insider. An unknown user may or may not be such an elite, and thus may or may not get defense.
    - scottlocklin 7y ago
      > I disagree, because historically major cryptos have allowed known attacks to succeed if they targeted a member of the public at large, and have defended only if they targeted named insiders. Surely you aren't going to make such a statement without examples! I can think of examples where things were attacked, including some of the largest value destructions, and insider status didn't help. For example, the multisig thing that happened to Gav Wood (the second time). If your lone example is the Dao attack, that looked like successful governance to me.
      - jefftk 7y ago
        > the multisig thing that happened to Gav Wood I wasn't sure what you were referring to, but it looks like maybe https://cointelegraph.com/news/parity-multisig-wallet-hacked-or-how-come https://cointelegraph.com/news/parity-multisig-wallet-hacked...
        scottlocklin 7y ago
        Yep, that's the one. The astounding, insane decision to use "libraries" aka delegate call in any immutable smart contract always boggled my mind. The amount of space saved is so ludicrously small as to beggar belief. Hope the 10k or whatever worth of space savings (about 20 transactions worth) was worth it. Anyway, he didn't get a roll back, and the $200m in value that disappeared didn't either.
lawn 7y ago
> It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. To do what exactly? Nobody can redirect the transaction to themselves and the best they can do is erase it. 51% attacking the network will cost you a lot, and you won't actually win anything in your attack. Even if the owner of the coins is the attacker, you can only win by double-spending the transaction by reversing a payment to someone else. Of course if we're talking about such a large transaction you should wait for more confirmations, making the double-spend attack so much more difficult to pull off. Anything you would get in return, like a bank transfer or parts of a city, would have a much longer settlement time. Being afraid of your Bitcoin transaction being reversed should be the least of your worries.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Being able to erase a billion dollars gives you a colossal amount of power to blackmail the owner of that billion dollars.
  - ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
    You can't erase the bitcoins, just the transaction. If you did that, they'd still be in the source wallet.
  - lawn 7y ago
    With only six confirmations it's extremely hard (in practice impossible) to reverse, which happens in around an hour. Just wait a few hours, or even a day, and the risk is basically non-existent. There are a million other things to worry about at that point (including someone hitting you with a wrench until you send them money). The transaction now has 572 confirmations. Nobody will ever reverse that.
- qroshan 7y ago
  If the liquidity is enough, 1) Short Bitcoin to the tune of several Billion dollars. 2) Do a 51% attack and essentially prove it's worthlessness. 3) Profit
aalleavitch 7y ago
Someone just announced the existence of Blackbeard's buried treasure
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jkoberg 7y ago
LocalBitcoins pinged me and said I need to establish 2FA or move my funds due to an inactive account, I wonder if they finally swept all those inactive accounts out. I started using it back in the $50 days, so some thousands of bitcoin may have been a lot less of a deal when they got deposited
amiraliakbari 7y ago
You really misused the term "coin". In Bitcoin protocol you don't "put value" into something named a "coin". "Wallet" is far more widely used and well-defined.
- kragen 7y ago
  "Wallet" is widely used and well-defined, but it doesn't refer to something that can be observed in the blockchain. In the blockchain we can observe keys and scripts; a wallet is a usually-encrypted data file containing a potentially large number of keys.
- anticensor 7y ago
  Bitcoin operates on transaction inputs and outputs, which work like coins in that their denomination do not change during spending.
- spuz 7y ago
  The OP didn't misuse the term "coin". In Bitcoin it refers to the value of a single input or an output. When the OP says "Plunking this much value into a single coin seems like an odd strategy at best" they mean "Plunking this much value into a single unspent transaction output seems an odd strategy".
- celticninja 7y ago
  I think 'address' is better. The value has been assigned to an address on the bitcoin network. The value of the address is denoted in 'coins' The holder of that 'address' is the owner of the coins. Multiple 'addresses' controlled by the same owner would exist in a 'wallet'
rfbrowne 7y ago
Totally agree!
ivoras 7y ago
> Making a transaction this large is a security risk. It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it ... accomplishing exactly nothing as all that would do would be returning the money to original spenders. Really, the amount of misinformation floating here is unexpected. > Now that the value resides in a single coin, any subsequent transaction faces the same risk. Non sequitur. A rollback of such a block would, by significance be somewhere between "mildly annoying" and "introducing suspicion that future transactions could also be rolled back." In any case, coins would end up where they are supposed to, and no theft can be done. There would be increased risk of double spends, but worried parties could always invest in more (legit) hashpower. > A consortium/trust has formed in which individuals pay into a common pool of money. Speculation, but reasonable. It makes business sense. > That money is then protected with a multi signature script (consistent with the P2SH type). Given a threshold of signatures, the money can be spent, subject to other constraints. These will remain unknown until the first payment is made. At that point we'll know the number and identity of all the eligible keys and the threshold needed to make payment. Speculation, but too wild. Basically wishful thinking. > Edit: to be clear, the "bounty" I'm talking about can't be directly claimed just by mining some blocks. Instead, it would have to be claimed as part of a double spend of either the transaction in question or as subsequent transaction of the now-enormous output. Most likely, there would be collusion of some kind between a miner and the owner of the keys. I'm not saying this will happen, but the bigger the transaction, the greater the risk. Again, wild speculation. So the theory is that someone collected $1B in BTC just to pull off a massive double spend stunt? At that level, it's likely that rubber hose cryptanalysis would resolve the issue quite efficiently.
foobarbecue 7y ago
What do you mean by "a single coin"? Do you mean a single transaction?
- celticninja 7y ago
  the mean a single address, which contains all the coins (94k in this case)
  - foobarbecue 7y ago
    That's what I figured. Weird to call it a coin. There are no coins in bitcoin.
    - celticninja 7y ago
      Coins are just the metric used to quantify the amount on an address.
      - foobarbecue 7y ago
        No. That's called the balance. "Coins" are not a thing. That term is not in any of the bitcoin glossaries or used on any exchange.
baby 7y ago
The point about a wallet not being a thing in Bitcoin makes zero sense as anyone understand what the tweet means. Your second point makes even less sense. A bug bounty on what exactly? Why would anyone attempt to erase this transaction when it can be resubmitted?
AiDirex 7y ago
why does this make it a bounty? even if you are an alien and have any power to game with bitcoin, such as doing a 51 percent attack, finding private keys, etc. you still have the whole blockchain of bitcoin to play with and probably you would start with many small transactions to go unnoticed. Anyway, what makes the value of bitcoin is its security, knowing that it can be hacked or gamed will make it worthless.
illumin8 7y ago
> Making a transaction this large is a security risk. It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. This is incorrect. It creates a billion dollar bounty only for the sender if they want to commit fraud by effectively reversing the transaction and trying to double-spend the coins by sending them elsewhere. Anyone with 94k BTC would probably be harming themselves by simply driving the value of BTC to almost 0 by performing such an attack. It would be extremely obvious to everyone once this transaction was reversed due to a chain reorg.

by aazaa 7y ago

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

> It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. I don't really agree with that statement. Yes, someone could mount a 51% attack to rewrite that block. However, it would be pretty straightforward to see what was happening (and which nodes were the malicious actors). If that did happen, the possible outcomes would be: 1. The value of bitcoin would fall to basically 0. The reason bitcoin has any value at all really has to do with trust - belief that the protocol is secure and can't be broken. In this case, an easily detectable spending "override" would cause faith in the protocol to evaporate. 2. Note I don't believe #1 would happen. The response would be all the other miners who do have a vested interest in bitcoins success would put all their resources in ensuring the original block was maintained. I.e. the options aren't between one address getting the billion+ dollars or another address getting a billion+ dollars. The options are one address getting a billion+ dollars or everyone's bitcoin going to 0. Edit: Another likely possible outcome is you could get what happened to Ethereum when the DAO was hacked: a fork to Ethereum vs. Ethereum Classic. But it's still important to note Ethereum Classic is worth a teeny fraction of what Ethereum is.

ur-whale 7y ago
>The value of bitcoin would fall to basically 0 Yes indeed. There are a number of very interesting game-theoretic feedback loops built into bitcoin that enhance security. This is one of them.
- mochris 7y ago
  I disagree, because historically major cryptos have allowed known attacks to succeed if they targeted a member of the public at large, and have defended only if they targeted named insiders. The expectation, at this point, is that defense will only occur if you are an elite insider. An unknown user may or may not be such an elite, and thus may or may not get defense.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    > I disagree, because historically major cryptos have allowed known attacks to succeed if they targeted a member of the public at large, and have defended only if they targeted named insiders. Surely you aren't going to make such a statement without examples! I can think of examples where things were attacked, including some of the largest value destructions, and insider status didn't help. For example, the multisig thing that happened to Gav Wood (the second time). If your lone example is the Dao attack, that looked like successful governance to me.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      > the multisig thing that happened to Gav Wood I wasn't sure what you were referring to, but it looks like maybe https://cointelegraph.com/news/parity-multisig-wallet-hacked-or-how-come https://cointelegraph.com/news/parity-multisig-wallet-hacked...
      - scottlocklin 7y ago
        Yep, that's the one. The astounding, insane decision to use "libraries" aka delegate call in any immutable smart contract always boggled my mind. The amount of space saved is so ludicrously small as to beggar belief. Hope the 10k or whatever worth of space savings (about 20 transactions worth) was worth it. Anyway, he didn't get a roll back, and the $200m in value that disappeared didn't either.

lawn 7y ago

> It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. To do what exactly? Nobody can redirect the transaction to themselves and the best they can do is erase it. 51% attacking the network will cost you a lot, and you won't actually win anything in your attack. Even if the owner of the coins is the attacker, you can only win by double-spending the transaction by reversing a payment to someone else. Of course if we're talking about such a large transaction you should wait for more confirmations, making the double-spend attack so much more difficult to pull off. Anything you would get in return, like a bank transfer or parts of a city, would have a much longer settlement time. Being afraid of your Bitcoin transaction being reversed should be the least of your worries.

Waterluvian 7y ago
Being able to erase a billion dollars gives you a colossal amount of power to blackmail the owner of that billion dollars.
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
  You can't erase the bitcoins, just the transaction. If you did that, they'd still be in the source wallet.
- lawn 7y ago
  With only six confirmations it's extremely hard (in practice impossible) to reverse, which happens in around an hour. Just wait a few hours, or even a day, and the risk is basically non-existent. There are a million other things to worry about at that point (including someone hitting you with a wrench until you send them money). The transaction now has 572 confirmations. Nobody will ever reverse that.
qroshan 7y ago
If the liquidity is enough, 1) Short Bitcoin to the tune of several Billion dollars. 2) Do a 51% attack and essentially prove it's worthlessness. 3) Profit

aalleavitch 7y ago

Someone just announced the existence of Blackbeard's buried treasure

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jkoberg 7y ago

LocalBitcoins pinged me and said I need to establish 2FA or move my funds due to an inactive account, I wonder if they finally swept all those inactive accounts out. I started using it back in the $50 days, so some thousands of bitcoin may have been a lot less of a deal when they got deposited

amiraliakbari 7y ago

You really misused the term "coin". In Bitcoin protocol you don't "put value" into something named a "coin". "Wallet" is far more widely used and well-defined.

kragen 7y ago
"Wallet" is widely used and well-defined, but it doesn't refer to something that can be observed in the blockchain. In the blockchain we can observe keys and scripts; a wallet is a usually-encrypted data file containing a potentially large number of keys.
anticensor 7y ago
Bitcoin operates on transaction inputs and outputs, which work like coins in that their denomination do not change during spending.
spuz 7y ago
The OP didn't misuse the term "coin". In Bitcoin it refers to the value of a single input or an output. When the OP says "Plunking this much value into a single coin seems like an odd strategy at best" they mean "Plunking this much value into a single unspent transaction output seems an odd strategy".
celticninja 7y ago
I think 'address' is better. The value has been assigned to an address on the bitcoin network. The value of the address is denoted in 'coins' The holder of that 'address' is the owner of the coins. Multiple 'addresses' controlled by the same owner would exist in a 'wallet'

rfbrowne 7y ago

Totally agree!

ivoras 7y ago

> Making a transaction this large is a security risk. It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it ... accomplishing exactly nothing as all that would do would be returning the money to original spenders. Really, the amount of misinformation floating here is unexpected. > Now that the value resides in a single coin, any subsequent transaction faces the same risk. Non sequitur. A rollback of such a block would, by significance be somewhere between "mildly annoying" and "introducing suspicion that future transactions could also be rolled back." In any case, coins would end up where they are supposed to, and no theft can be done. There would be increased risk of double spends, but worried parties could always invest in more (legit) hashpower. > A consortium/trust has formed in which individuals pay into a common pool of money. Speculation, but reasonable. It makes business sense. > That money is then protected with a multi signature script (consistent with the P2SH type). Given a threshold of signatures, the money can be spent, subject to other constraints. These will remain unknown until the first payment is made. At that point we'll know the number and identity of all the eligible keys and the threshold needed to make payment. Speculation, but too wild. Basically wishful thinking. > Edit: to be clear, the "bounty" I'm talking about can't be directly claimed just by mining some blocks. Instead, it would have to be claimed as part of a double spend of either the transaction in question or as subsequent transaction of the now-enormous output. Most likely, there would be collusion of some kind between a miner and the owner of the keys. I'm not saying this will happen, but the bigger the transaction, the greater the risk. Again, wild speculation. So the theory is that someone collected $1B in BTC just to pull off a massive double spend stunt? At that level, it's likely that rubber hose cryptanalysis would resolve the issue quite efficiently.

foobarbecue 7y ago

What do you mean by "a single coin"? Do you mean a single transaction?

celticninja 7y ago
the mean a single address, which contains all the coins (94k in this case)
- foobarbecue 7y ago
  That's what I figured. Weird to call it a coin. There are no coins in bitcoin.
  - celticninja 7y ago
    Coins are just the metric used to quantify the amount on an address.
    - foobarbecue 7y ago
      No. That's called the balance. "Coins" are not a thing. That term is not in any of the bitcoin glossaries or used on any exchange.

baby 7y ago

The point about a wallet not being a thing in Bitcoin makes zero sense as anyone understand what the tweet means. Your second point makes even less sense. A bug bounty on what exactly? Why would anyone attempt to erase this transaction when it can be resubmitted?

AiDirex 7y ago

why does this make it a bounty? even if you are an alien and have any power to game with bitcoin, such as doing a 51 percent attack, finding private keys, etc. you still have the whole blockchain of bitcoin to play with and probably you would start with many small transactions to go unnoticed. Anyway, what makes the value of bitcoin is its security, knowing that it can be hacked or gamed will make it worthless.

illumin8 7y ago

> Making a transaction this large is a security risk. It effectively establishes a billion dollar bounty for any party who can rewrite enough blocks to erase it. This is incorrect. It creates a billion dollar bounty only for the sender if they want to commit fraud by effectively reversing the transaction and trying to double-spend the coins by sending them elsewhere. Anyone with 94k BTC would probably be harming themselves by simply driving the value of BTC to almost 0 by performing such an attack. It would be extremely obvious to everyone once this transaction was reversed due to a chain reorg.