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The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees
- pretfood 6y agoDayum. That's about as much as I earn from my fiat in a year!
- antidaily 6y ago$0.48?
- tobyhinloopen 6y agoI think he made a interest joke, yeah
- jessicauk 6y agoI wasn't interested in that (badum-cha!)
- treebornfrog 6y agoInteresting.
- gitgud 6y agoAre these Satoshi's Bitcoins?
- danaos 6y agoNo. Satoshi's coins are scattered over hundreds or thousands addresses.
- SRTP 6y agoNo. We have a rough idea of which coins belong to Satoshi, based on when and how they were mined. Satoshi's coins are continuously monitored and have never moved.
- thekyle 6y agoI always imagined that Satoshi probably lost the private keys to those early wallets.
- Jach 6y agoMaybe. But in the latest Cra1g Wr1ght drama, he claimed to the court that some early addresses people thought might have been Satoshi's belonged to him. A message surfaced afterwards which was signed with those addresses calling Cra1g a liar.
- centimeter 6y agoThe addresses used there were not Satoshi addresses, but other addresses mined around the same time.
- sukilot 6y agoWhy would Craig (falsely) claim to own not-Satoshi addresses, instead of claiming Satoshi addresses that are less likely to be used (due to exposure risk)?
- stale2002 6y agoSo the reason why Craig would do this is simple. Craig is not only a fraud, but is also an incompetent fraud.
- Jach 6y agoI think it's more correctly stated that it's not public knowledge if they were mined by Satoshi or not. One can say they were not part of the "Satoshi miner pattern" that was identified years ago, but we don't know exactly how many of the blocks mined outside that pattern were or were not Satoshi's. Hence my "might".
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoAnd I'm confident that there's people dedicating a lot of processing power to try and determine its private keys (and anyone else's private keys if they happen to stumble across it). I'm sure it's one of those tasks that'll cost a lot more than all the available energy in the universe kinda scale though.
- bouk 6y agoSEPA transfers are free :)
- lumberjack 6y agoAmounts of 50,000€ are treated differently. Previously this was the maximum amount you could transfer. Now they just convert the transfer to SWIFT or some other protocol and you get charged accordingly.
- Tenoke 6y agoTechnically yes but SEPA is not quite so ubiquitous and definitely not so quick. Even within Euope more often then not I just end up paying the fee and doing my international transfers via TransferWise anyway.
- jacquesm 6y agoI transfer quite a bit of money to our freelancers all over Europe and SEPA has served us very well, I'd definitely not use a service like TransferWise over regular banks for such payments, and that's besides the ease of integration with our accountants who can now easily match up invoices with payments from the current account.
- Tenoke 6y agoI understand it as a business but sadly banks in e.g. Bulgaria add extra fees on top of SEPA transfers which you can sometimes avoid and sometimes not.
- ravingraven 6y agoThey certainly are not. Not between countries (even if they are EU countries and both use the Euro) and not for 1 billion Euros/Dollars. Edit: A lot of people here are saying "I do not pay for it so it is free". Just because you don't pay does not mean it is free for everyone. The law just states that fees must be the same for domestic and EU transfers, not that the transfer is free and, there are countless examples of regions where there are no banks that charge nothing (especially regions where a lot of intra-EU immigrants come from).
- Ansil849 6y agoFor all of the talk about how Bitcoin is not truly anonymous, this wallet demonstrates otherwise, with the apparent 'anonymity proviso' being that you don't do too much with it, and just let the coins sit.
- minikites 6y agoI can also be anonymous if I never speak or leave my house, but that's not really how it works, is it?
- Ansil849 6y agoIn this case, it seems to be exactly how it works. Someone is opting to 'never speak or leave the house', and can afford to do so.
- Ar-Curunir 6y agoMaybe it applies to very specific "Bitcoin as store-of-value" use cases, but it definitely doesn't apply to any use case you'd actually want for electronic cash. Also, even the fact that we're discussing the existence of this transaction implies that Bitcoin is not anonymous.
- chinesempire 6y agoNo, you can't. Your house has to be registered to someone and you have to declare who lives in it, if it's yours. Anonymity is not about being a private person.
- vageli 6y ago> Your house has to be registered to someone and you have to declare who lives in it, if it's yours. I don't think this is true in every jurisdiction. You can certainly have a property registered under a corporate entity, and there are jurisdictions in the US that allow for anonymous corporate ownership. Further, I'm not aware of any requirement where you must declare who is residing in a property. I've had family members from abroad reside in my house for over a year without informing any authorities, for example.
- bronzeage 6y agoTaking an educated guess here, that the miner of the block which moved that transaction must be related to the owner of that wallet. Nobody would otherwise accept such a low fee for a big transaction. Find the miner, you find the wallet owner.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoOh, I didn't know transaction value was known to transaction block-miners; that seems like a flaw. Assuming there's a bidding system, wouldn't transaction cost tend to zero? (Seems I need to review bitcoin transaction mining. Suggestions for a good resource on that?)
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago> Oh, I didn't know transaction value was known to transaction block-miners; that seems like a flaw. Transaction value is known to everyone, which is one of the whole primary points of Bitcoin.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoYes, I knew that the transaction value (and source, sink) was known after processing it and putting it in the blockchain, just not that it was known by the miner processing the transaction before putting it on the blockchain - I assumed when "mining" a transaction that somehow the details would be hidden. Them being visible seems to raise interesting attacks, such as an individual being doxed and then unable to have their transaction verified/accepted. A sibling comment suggests Monero have addressed this. Edit: If 51% agree not to process any transactions for accounts holding >$1M worth of Btc can they steal financial value? Like a stock buyback but you pay zero to the holder and get the stock anyway.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago> Them being visible seems to raise interesting attacks, such as an individual being doxed and then unable to have their transaction verified/accepted. You have some fundamental misunderstandings in how bitcoin and bitcoin mining work. I'd suggest reading up on one of the links a sibling comment posted.
- jpkoning 6y agoIf we both join the bitcoin network, we can exchange $1B for $0.48. If we both join set up accounts at a regular bank like RBC, we can exchange $1B for free. The point I'm making is that fees are not bitcoin's strong point. Any financial network can undercut it. What is unique about bitcoin is that not everyone can get an account at RBC, but anyone can join the more expensive bitcoin network.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoWhat's the cost if I'm with HSBC in Hong-Kong and you're with Chase in USA, say?
- vmception 6y ago$50 if both using the same currency. $50 + a few basis point spread if using a different currency, but you don't know exactly what that spread will be from the sending bank and what the spread will be at the receiving bank, so you can lose anywhere from .001% to 4% with major currencies.
- greenshackle2 6y agoI imagine there are also fees involved to turn $1B worth of bitcoins to local currency.
- vmception 6y agoThere are, there is also a parallel global economy that allows for obtaining goods, services and investing in private equity or other assets directly using bitcoin, so those conversion fees are not an issue for the bitcoin owner. To counter the easiest rebuttal, there probably are only about $1bn worth of things to buy using bitcoin any given day, most of which are other new digital assets that would not be a great investment and would otherwise struggle to obtain any purchases. But for reference, in today's market you could expect to be able to negotiate a 1-2% spread in converting $1Bn in bitcoin to US Dollars. It would have to be multiple orders throughout the day as an OTC dealer will quote on price for $100m and a different price for $1bn. Block orders in the bitcoin OTC market often has more daily volume than the lit market on exchanges. Similar to other commodities markets.
- stevespang 6y agoDrug cartel or proxy controlled by an exchange.
- knudsen80 6y agoHow many times would you double check the address before hitting send? I would think to minimize risk, would slice this up into a few transactions...
- Drip33 6y agoProbably just twice. Bitcoin addresses are check summed so it's nearly impossible to fat finger a mistake.
- pjc50 6y agoAnd yet it happens - as does putting the value in the "fee" box!
- Drip33 6y agoI've never heard of someone successfully and unintentionally fat fingering a Bitcoin address typo to a valid Bitcoin address nobody owns. Fee box is a different thing, the recent $2.5m ETH headline you saw was not an accident but an attack/blackmail. Bitcoin core itself prevents you from using too high of a fee without an express override in the config.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 6y agoSource on the $2.5m fee being related to attack/blackmail? I just looked it up but I couldn't find anything saying as much... only that sparkpool kept it aside in case the owner comes forward?
- Drip33 6y agoLooks still unconfirmed https://decrypt.co/32145/hackers-blackmail-exchange-with-5-million-of-ethereum-fees-report https://decrypt.co/32145/hackers-blackmail-exchange-with-5-m... >In short, the researchers claim that the hackers have gained access to an exchange’s funds. They are able to send money to certain whitelisted accounts that are marked as reliable in the exchange’s database to—but not to their own. So, they are sending the funds with excessively high transaction fees to sap the exchange’s accounts, and they’re demanding a ransom if it’s going to stop.
- ipython 6y agoUnpopular opinion: why do we care so much about making it cheaper for rich people to move money around? Do we think somehow that will “trickle down” to us mere mortals and put western union and their ilk out of business?
- whb07 6y agobecause the poor people can't move $10 around without paying $3 for it. Have you ever tried moving small amounts of money in poor countries ?
- joosters 6y agoHave you not heard of M-Pesa? Very popular mobile phone-based money transfer service, low fees (far less than $3 or the 30% you claim), you can even pay companies directly with it
- whb07 6y agoYes I've heard of it. So bitcoin is this but better. I agree with you.
- joosters 6y agoFaster than bitcoin, cheaper than bitcoin, easier to use than bitcoin, more reliable than bitcoin, far more widely accepted than bitcoin. Hmm...
- Ar-Curunir 6y agolol even the main people behind Bitcoin Core development have abandoned the idea of Bitcoin serving as means of day-to-day small transactions.
- whb07 6y agoWhy would it be the responsibility of one layer to deal with another layer?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agohttps://decrypt.co/31956/an-ethereum-user-lost-5-2-million-in-two-massive-mistakes https://decrypt.co/31956/an-ethereum-user-lost-5-2-million-i... And if you fat-fingered the transaction, you could have transferred $0.48 for $1B in fees with no way to reverse that.
- ShorsHammer 6y agoThere's a 1 in 4 billion chance of fat fingering it. https://learnmeabitcoin.com/guide/checksum https://learnmeabitcoin.com/guide/checksum The thing to be really aware about is insidious malware that detects valid bitcoin addresses being copied and modifies them in place, sometimes even to the point of including the same first/last alphanumerics to a certain degree. You'd hopefully be using a bootable linux distro and multisig for transferring such amounts.
- pjc50 6y agoDoesn't stop you from making a UI error and entering the wrong value in the wrong box.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoSaid UI could protect the user from it though, by not accepting a 'fee' value more than 10% over the current average (for example).
- ShorsHammer 6y agoI'd suggest double checking it in such instances and not doing it drunk at 2am like a wall street trader.
- gruez 6y ago1. that's ethereum, not bitcoin. bitcoin core specifically has checks to prevent transactions with unusually high transactions fees from being broadcast https://bitcoin-rpc.github.io/en/doc/0.16.0/rpc/rawtransactions/sendrawtransaction/ https://bitcoin-rpc.github.io/en/doc/0.16.0/rpc/rawtransacti... (see the allowhighfees parameter) 2. In all likelihood this is someone manually crafting a transaction. It's not going to happen to your typical user (eg. your granny). A better analogy to this situation would be someone's trading bot going awry and losing thousands/millions on the market.
- sammycdubs 6y agoI don't want to sound like a narc, but it seems like a really good idea to have some degree of oversight and safeguards on financial transactions of that magnitude.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI agree, and banks + the government do just that; large transactions, or 'pattern' transactions flag up in fraud and money laundering departments and are investigated. But, bitcoin is free of oversight or centralized control, which was the exact point of the system.
- alexmingoia 6y agoI had my life savings (all funds in my bank account) frozen, without notice, without explanation, and without recourse for 3 weeks. They literally couldn’t tell me why my account was frozen besides “social security has flagged the account.” This was at one of the largest banks in US. I never committed any crime or suspected of one, or had any weird transactions. When I protested at the branch asking how I’m supposed to pay rent they said “sorry”. After almost 3 weeks they unfroze it without explanation and offered to pay the bounced check fee for my rent. Yeah I’d rather have bitcoin. Bitcoin removes the need for banks altogether. I don’t want the banks and government in control of my money.
- enumjorge 6y agoI’d argue that with Bitcoin being volatile enough to have double percentage point swings in a single day, that you’re not in full control of your money with Bitcoin either.
- Sargos 6y agoMost people will use stablecoins such as Dai or USDC. Bitcoin is just an example here.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kchoudhu 6y agoPretty sure the fund I work for moved several billion dollars for free on Friday...and will do the same thing again this Friday, the Friday after that, and the Friday after that. Cryptocurrency's obsession with fees is baffling. Fees are not why moving money is hard.
- dylkil 6y agoWhats worse is Bitcoin's security depends on high fees, but you have articles like this celebrating low fees. Satoshi intended for bitcoin to scale to hundreds of millions of transactions, all paying sub cent fees. All those fees would add up to millions of dollars per day. The fees are what secure the chain when the block reward runs out. Around 2014/2015 some devs who worked with blockstream started campaigning to keep the block size limit at 1mb. They succeeded and now bitcoin can only process an average of 350k transactions per day. In order to provide the same financial incentive to miners when the block reward gets too small to matter, the minimum fee on the network will need to be $25 per transaction. But ye, horray, this whale got to send big cash for a "low fee"
- johnpaulkiser 6y agoThat isn't even slightly true. This debate has been settled a long long time ago. Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Increasing the block size decreases the number of people that run full nodes. It's obvious to anyone who works on Bitcoin that a linear increase to blocksize can never scale, while maintaining an open and decentralized environment.
- dlubarov 6y ago> Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Another method is to use cryptographic proofs to demonstrate the validity of a blockchain state. A lot of newer projects are taking this approach, such as the project I work on, Mir Protocol. Granted, it doesn't seem like a realistic option for Bitcoin. The community doesn't seem very open to major protocol changes, and even if it were, cryptographic proofs for Bitcoin might be prohibitively expensive since the protocol wasn't designed with that in mind.
- iblaine 6y agoIs it also true that he/she would have paid $480M to move $1B in BTC if it were moved $1 at a time?
- newguy1234 6y agoBitcoin isn't good for small transactions obviously. That's why there are other cryptos invented that have next to zero transaction fees.
- mordae 6y agoJoint NATO fund to pay ransomware fees.
- btmoney06 6y agoHow much did they pay in exchange fees and "slippage" to convert that to dollars? And how long did it take to do that?
- DenisM 6y agoI have to wonder how long until organized crime starts tracking down and shaking down large wallet holders. The profit is clearly there.
- tomlagier 6y agoI'm a Bitcoin skeptic, and much of my skepticism is around the practicality of use for day-to-day transactions. Seeing low fees is very encouraging to me - the last I had checked, fees were in the several to many dollars range. Now if they can hammer out the volatility, figure out a simple UX, encourage adoption at most places of business, and increase trust in exchanges for USD conversions, I'm on board.
- louwrentius 6y agoAnd then, what kind of important benefit does it bring us that the USD or any other currency can't give us?
- louwrentius 6y agoWhy does this mean anything. The average electronic transaction in shops and online in The Netherlands is a fraction of the cost of that. Maybe it's different for higher amounts of money, but it doesn't matter. Bitcoin is a solution to a problem nobody has figured out yet.
- bravoetch 6y agoThe meaning is that for 48 cents, anyone may participate in a global transaction network that cannot freeze or restrict your transactions. Banks have a habit of monitoring and interfering with transactions because they are heavily regulated.
- zelly 6y agoThis is reckless and compromises the security of the Bitcoin network. A single transaction worth a billion dollars starts to create incentive for miners to 51% attack and reorg the chain.
- MarioKartBowser 6y agoPeople still care for and peddle this nonsense?
- adsrginio 6y agoI find this a ridiculous thing to brag about. The only way Bitcoin will have low fees is if it fails. Since the network does not scale, if the network sees any substantial load the transaction fees will spike. We have already seen this happen back in 2017 at the peak of the bubble. High fees are, in fact, part of the security model. The reward for "mining" a block will eventually dry up, so "miners" will be funded more and more by fees. Unless people are paying billions of dollars a year in fees, the financial incentive for "miners" will be too small to protect from bad actors. Bitcoin can only have low fees if it both remains unpopular and dies before the block rewards dry up. Recommending Bitcoin because of its low fees is trying to sell it by predicting its failure.
- pcurve 6y agoso does this mean, someone paid cash or some asset worth $1billion in exchange for the bitcoins? Or is it just simply moving from one account to another owned by same person?
- kim0 6y agoA transparent ledger is an invitation for mobs to threaten and torture people! Identifying and threatening BTC owners is not that difficult. If we're serious about protecting financial privacy, use something like Monero instead!