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Criminal Assets Bureau seizes 6k bitcoin, sale impossible without access codes
- drcode 7y agoIn other news: - Seattle woman wins Kentucky Derby without having a horse - Chicago man wins lottery without having winning numbers
- bowmessage 7y agoNo doubt there are other copies of those codes, but now Collins has plausible deniability :)
- capableweb 7y agoSeems to be a little bit of doubt though: > Much of what he has told the Garda has been supported by a range of witnesses, including those who cleared his house, his landlord and others who helped him break up his bitcoin fortune into 12 accounts. Garda believe he has genuinely lost the codes for the accounts But if they are in on the reward, they might just help corroborate his story in order to get a piece. Who knows?
- 4rt 7y agothey've corroborated that he owned a fishing rod which was disposed of. even assuming the codes were stored there he could have 10 other copies of the same in other places and how would anybody know. they could be encoded in a simple way to make them unrecognisable and unusable to anybody but him.
- 1000units 7y agoIf he had disposed of any napkins in that timeframe they may contain the secret data as well.
- TwoBit 7y agoNo way would he be stupid enough to have these only on a single sheet of paper. Surely he considered the possibility of a fire, for example. And just because witnesses seem to think something only shows that he did the right thing with respect to them too. I might leave as much as $300 with a sheet of paper, but not $50M+.
- jacques_chester 7y agoThere's no intelligence test required to become a criminal.
- ur-whale 7y agoHe sells weed so he's a criminal?
- jacques_chester 7y agoIf they know the wallet address, any movements will be a giant neon sign screaming "hey, arrest me again!"
- psychlops 7y agoOr that someone found the rod in a landfill and enriched themselves. It would be difficult to prove that it was him.
- FDSGSG 7y agoFairly easy to pull off without any chance of getting caught. Get a tails VM and use some Chinese exchanger to change those coins to monero, veeeery slowly spend the monero. Odds are you wouldn't be risking any significant punishment either.
- mattnguyen 7y agoOr use coinjoin
- FDSGSG 7y agoAlso possible, but more difficult and significantly slower.
- bowmessage 7y agoI mean, that would make for an interesting legal case. I feel that you could try and argue though that some Bitcoin 0-day was used to move the funds and retain your deniability... Even the officers hope this happens one day (! good luck to them, if the tech existed the coins would be immediately worthless...) "... officers said they were hopeful advances in technology would one day enable them to access the bitcoin so it could be sold."
- jacques_chester 7y agoDoubling down on perjury as a legal tactic is unwise. I think it would only be interesting in that folks who think crypto is magically law-proof would discover that no, it's not. Not at all.
- psychlops 7y agoIn no real justice system could selling backyard weed justify the seizure of sixty million dollars.
- 1000units 7y agoMarijuana is a Schedule I federally controlled substance, my friend. Have you no respect for Law?
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoHow do you earn that much on "backyard" anything?
- oh_sigh 7y agoThe answer is he didn't earn it on his backyard weed selling. Maybe he got the initial coins from that, but they may have only been worth $10,000 when he received them. It's just that with BTC price rise, it is now worth $60M
- serf 7y agointerest accrued on otherwise nefarious activity. esoteric philosophical questions : if the base money that accrues interest is of 'immoral' origin, is the interest still 'immoral'? Is the act of saving money an action that has a base 'moral' precept? If it's a positive action, does that make the interest less 'immoral' than the money used to make it? What if the interest feeds a 'moral' charity? Just stuff I think about with regards to finance, not that morality matters much practically in the real world.
- bpfrh 7y agoIsn't that kinda the same as evidence generated from a unlawful action? We could apply the same logic/law to that.
- jacques_chester 7y agoThere are extensive bodies of law that deal with these topics, especially in Trusts law. Happily I quit law school before getting any good at them.
- seibelj 7y agoWow this whole story is a lie. The cops actually thought they “seized” the accounts because they knew the addresses, but never had the private keys! What a disaster
- TwoBit 7y agoIs there any actual way to "seize" a bitcoin collection without knowing the master key(s)?
- alanfalcon 7y agoYou can blacklist certain addresses with certain law abiding exchanges, which is more like marked bills than a seizure. What happened here was obviously not a seizure, you’d need the private key(s) AND to have actually moved the bitcoin to a new secure wallet under your control before you could consider them seized.
- RL_Quine 7y agoYou can't really. There's nothing stopping people from just moving them somewhere else, and then the ownership is anonymous again. If you blacklist all of the destinations, what if they send 0.00000001 to every single known exchange, are all of those addresses now on the blacklist? Of course not, this sort of thing is just nonsensical with an understanding of the system.
- three_seagrass 7y agoOf course you can. The regulated exchanges would (best case) just automatically remove the 0.00000001 BTC from the receiving wallet, or (worst case) freeze out the entire wallet indefinitely, while they send it back on the next block. The regulated exhcanges have multiple forms of identification too so the recipient is screwed even if they manage to move it all before that happens.
- RL_Quine 7y ago
- BubRoss 7y agoIf they don't have the private keys and use them to move the balance to addresses that only they control, they didn't really seize anything.
- NullPrefix 7y agoSeize the day
- est31 7y agoThe way I see it is that you can seize a car, airplane or ship without having keys for it. What's important is that the government considers those bitcoins as its property. So if anyone in the future is moving BTC from those addresses, they are infringing upon government property like someone who stole a police car. The government might even auction that right off, although the fact that they don't have immediate access probably reduces the value by a large amount.
- sickygnar 7y agoIt's like they don't know where the car is, only which it is, and put the vin in some stolen car database. Bitcoin seems so terrible privacy wise. It's so much more traceable than cash. I don't know why people don't just use monero. That'd be like everyone on the planet drives the same car, and the only way to identify yours would be to have the keys to it. The analogy works because monero takes a long time to identify yours with your key - you have to check every "car". That's one of the major technological downsides to it unfortunately.
- three_seagrass 7y agoBitcoin is ridiculously anti-privacy. The public ledger of every single transaction throughout history coupled with everyone knowing exactly how much funds you have in your wallet is kind of absurd from a consumer standpoint.
- BubRoss 7y agoGood luck with that. After the coins are moved to various other addresses, then what? What if part of an address' balance is from a small transaction from one of these addresses?
- intpbro 7y agoOuch
- rdiddly 7y agoThat's okay because asset forfeiture is about denying the convicted party access to the fruits of their crimes, and not about the incredibly conflict-of-interest-riddled idea that the state should be able to plunder those assets and profit from it... riiiight??
- bowmessage 7y agoHow is access denied if the private keys remain unchanged?
- malux85 7y agoBecause he's lost the keys - without the private keys, how will anyone access the funds?
- ur-whale 7y agoWhile they'd heard it mentioned before, Criminal Assets Bureau discovers what "Bitcoin is unconfiscatable" actually means.