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$7.5B In Stolen Bitcoin from 2016 Bitfinex Hack has just been moved
- throwaway888abc 5y agoThey can gift some Teslas
- leke 5y agoOr make a donation 1GVR2qbKgT4uVUQMYVgPhQxFcKRJBVYMo4 I actually wonder what would happen to me, if I suddenly received some of that stolen bitcoin.
- ur-whale 5y ago>1GVR2qbKgT4uVUQMYVgPhQxFcKRJBVYMo4 A 1xxx addie? In 2021? Come on dude.
- SilasX 5y agoWhat’s wrong with 1-prefixed addresses?
- liorn 5y agohttps://www.ledger.com/academy/difference-between-segwit-and-native-segwit https://www.ledger.com/academy/difference-between-segwit-and...
- etaioinshrdlu 5y agoFrom https://bitcoinbriefly.com/practical-guide-bitcoin-addresses-explained/ https://bitcoinbriefly.com/practical-guide-bitcoin-addresses... : "Legacy addresses start with the digit “1”. These Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) addresses were once the standard address type up until August 2017. Many now advise against using them. Why? Legacy addresses incur the most expensive transaction fees when sending payments. They also limit the Bitcoin network's ability to scale. And their case-sensitive nature often causes unwanted errors."
- leke 5y agoCool, thanks for the tip.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- csomar 5y agoleke only trusts Bitcoin Core.
- dcolkitt 5y agoMemorize your private keys. Destroy any physical or digital copies of the keys in a “boating accident”. Tell the authorities you can’t recover the funds. Wait 25 years or so. Move to somewhere outside jurisdiction or extradition from the relevant authorities. Cash out.
- thysultan 5y agoor... sell them back to bitfinex at current market price like a BOSS!
- fuzzybear3965 5y agoOr bc1qtl0s05gxxnv9xskkyzrd7k5epwr4esqdhpcvfx :pray: :)
- myself248 5y agoThis just popped into my head: 1: Recipient. Participate in one of those pyramid scams that always shows up in @elonmusk's replies and elsewhere. 2: Sender. Send money to a bunch of people who show up in one of those scams. 3: Recipient. Your plausible explanation for the windfall that just landed in your account is that you thought the scam was real, and hey, it apparently was! This leads me to wonder: Are those scams just cover for laundering, that happens to also suck in some other gullible victims along the way?
- ConcernedCoder 5y agoMaybe someone took them up on the $400,000,000 reward offered... https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/494 https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/494
- j_walter 5y agoThat would be a lot more today...it was $400M in August last year. That 30% fee is now worth $2.3B.
- patatino 5y agoThis seems to be the best solutions for the hackers? "In order to confirm the identity of the hackers, we will request that 1 Satoshi is sent from the wallet address responsible for the hack to a wallet address specified by Bitfinex. We will work to ensure this can be done safely, thereby protecting the identities of all parties, and Bitfinex reserves the right to impose conditions on any transfers in order to verify claims and ensure a secure process." Get $2.3B, no jail
- Bluestein 5y agoAre they tryin' to send some sort of subtle signal, given the Coinbase listing today? :)
- myself248 5y agoThe timing is awfully coincidental.
- Bluestein 5y agoConsidering the whole thing was ... what? 2016? It really is.- (Maybe their are tryin' to get "some" shares ... :)
- wmf 5y agoThe all time high was also earlier today.
- jtsiskin 5y agoFor sure. Not just the same day, but nearly the exact same time as the IPO. Either sending a signal or hoping for less reporting
- Bluestein 5y agoActually, yes. Nice call on the -time- also ... re: reporting, if -anything- this will get them more attention, not less? (I'd think ...)
- nknealk 5y agoHere’s an interesting question — if you receive BTC from one of these addresses as payment for something, do you refuse it? You know it’s stolen and you might worry someone else who you might pay in the future would be able to track down that it’s stolen, so do you ask for “clean” BTC that isn’t linked to known theft? I don’t necessarily know the answer here. This is something that you can’t do with paper bills
- schmichael 5y ago> if you receive BTC from one of these addresses as payment for something, do you refuse it? You cannot refuse a BTC transaction. You could return it in a subsequent transaction, and pay the transaction fee, but I would imagine your address would be forever tainted by a number of illicit address/transaction tracking algorithms.
- chrisa 5y agoThat's an interesting angle to cash out... just start sending to 1,000s of addresses - who's to say which addresses are owned by the criminals, and which are owned by other people? They'd get less than cashing it all out themselves obviously, but it would take forever to unravel what actually happened (if possible ever)
- danielrpa 5y agoYou could use also do that to embarrass/blackmail politicians or other prominent people. Imagine the threat "You either do what I want or I'll send you 1 million dollars" :)
- PaulAJ 5y agoThey are probably waiting for the Statute of Limitations to expire. For wire fraud that is 10 years.
- frombody 5y agoI believe in Hong Kong it's 12 years for criminal charges and 6 years for civil charges.
- gowld 5y agoFencing stolen property is a fresh crime with a new countdown.
- gscott 5y agoIt would be easy to use satellites to find the person with hundreds of Tesla's in their front yard.
- spinny 5y agopeople in crypto buy lambos
- backtoyoujim 5y agoyou can buy a telsa with btc
- atat7024 5y agoOr a lambo
- backtoyoujim 5y agonot with converting it to fiat. and we both know I did not mean _that_ Fiat.
- dheera 5y ago
- raziel2701 5y agoIs that money trapped in the system? The moment they sell to USD that account is now linked to a real person no?
- chrisa 5y agoIt's more difficult, but not impossible I think: On the Bitcoin side you can "wash" it by mixing it with other coins, or deposit/withdraw it through multiple exchanges. Then on the output side, you can get rid of it through shell companies or through less reputable sites, or into countries that won't extradite criminals. So - it's definitely harder than normal, but I think you could find a way.
- wyck 5y agoIts pretty easy to from a tech perspective to tumble and swap coins or use a combination of both. Not only that but you can swap into different blockchains which have fully anonymous layers. So tracing a path is completely impossible. But there is one significant problem, tumbling and swapping 7.5 Billion is hard to do without creating huge market waves and that will be noticed. So you would spread it over 3-4 years and use a variety of swap/tumblers and it can be done. Eventually you have to cash it out and some off ramps might raise some flags.
- sekai 5y agoIt's possible to swap into monero without using any KYC exchange, but that requires liquidity. So it could take years.
- whimsicalism 5y ago> swap into monero without using any KYC exchange How? Links on this being done?
- csomar 5y agoAtomic swaps were possible way before Uniswap and the DeFi craze. Liquidity is another issue for 7.5bn though.
- jcims 5y agoWill be interesting to see what effect this has on the price, might extend into all of the risk conversations around Satoshi's stockpile.
- ajkdhcb2 5y agoFunds like this can be frozen when 51% of mining pools start censoring transactions. Pools are now beginning to do this. I expect there will be a lot of BTC like this that starts to realise they need to be trying to dump it / escape into monero as quickly as they can
- tromp 5y agoThere's a difference between pools not accepting txs in their mempool, and pools refusing to build on other miners' blocks that contain them. Pools are beginning to do the former (which doesn't cost them), not the latter (which would cost them dearly). Only if a majority of hashpower does the latter will censoring be effective (and then no longer cost them again).
- fireland 5y agoA hashpower majority is not needed. For the latter, if a single digit percentage of the hashpower decides to enforce the ban, other miners in the network have an economic incentive to join the ban as well. The reasoning is explained here https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2020/11/12/how-could-regulators-successfully-introduce-bitcoin-censorship-and-other-dystopias/ https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2020/11/12/how-could-regu... In short, if a miner chooses to include banned transactions in its block, it means that block cannot be built off of by fully regulatory compliant miners. Fully compliant miners will be still building off the previous block in the chain. If fully compliant miners win the hash race and mine the next 2 blocks, the original miner's block will not be part of the longest chain, and they will lose all their block reward.
- TearsInTheRain 5y agoWho gets to determine which addresses are "poisoned"? China? The US? I have to imagine the ideologues in the bitcoin community will fight back against that. Also, not being censorable is a big part of bitcoin's value prop so this type of regulation would likely crash the price as well.
- dbg31415 5y agoThe fact that all these transactions are public is what makes Bitcoin so creepy to me.
- vmception 5y agoThe liquid sidechain doesnt have public transactions, uses confidential transactions. It has been running for years. There is a decent amount of bitcoin and assets issued on bitcoin over there A bunch of exchanges and VCs are the validators, so it sacrifices some security but not in practice There are hundreds of billions in crypto assets traded on validator networks
- afrcnc 5y agoTransactions only amount to $740mil, though: https://twitter.com/search?q=bitfinex%20hack%20from%3Awhale_alert https://twitter.com/search?q=bitfinex%20hack%20from%3Awhale_...
- arithmomachist 5y agoI wonder if this is connected to the Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border.
- DSingularity 5y agoWhy would you think it is ?
- qeternity 5y ago“Stolen” This is Bitfinex we’re talking about. It’s a company run by criminals.
- arcticbull 5y agoFun little reminder that when Bitfinex was "hacked" they took a 36% haircut, if memory serves, from all account holders, in all assets -- not just Bitcoin. [1] Except for one account. Coinbase. [2] They then issued tokens to all the accounts they skimmed, valued at $1 each redeemable for shares in Bitfinex. They effectively converted a $72 million dollar theft (at the time) into a $72 million dollar valuation for Bitfinex. One of their executives, Giancarlo, was recorded telling token holders the best way to get their money back was to sell their shares to other people before they realized. [3] > “The fastest way to get paid back, is to convert debt to shares and then sell your shares to another shareholder”. These people run Tether. This is the true magic of cryptocurrency. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitfinex-hacked-hongkong-idUSKCN10I06H https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitfinex-hacked-hongkong-... [2] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and-bitfinex/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and-bitfinex/ [3] https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-never-repaid-their-tokens-bitfinex-started-a-ponzi-scheme-86a9291add29 https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-never-repaid-their-t...
- plebianRube 5y agoSeems to me the root problem is when people decide to use Bitcoin outside of it's original intended use, and centralize it.
- arcticbull 5y agoWell, that's because it's completely inadequate for it's intended use (due to its 2-3 tx/sec cap) forcing people into L2.
- rabf 5y agoThe loss became tradable on their exchange, the swap for equity was optional, their was also a token for for representing the return of the stolen funds that was trading as well. Eventually the tokens representing the losses were trading for an equal value to the loss so if you were a little patient you were reimbursed. Alternatively if you took the gamble to buy the debt tokens at below dollar parity you made a nice return. Meanwhile MtGox users are still waiting for legal proceedings to conclude and get their money back.
- Ceezy 5y agoWell it was stolen not lost...
- arcticbull 5y agoNot your keys, not your coins. The keys own the coins - you're ancillary. The keys just found a new home. Sounds legit to me.
- pontifier 5y agoSeems about right... Crypto is awesome until it is terrible.
- kjrose 5y agoYou see. This is what bitcoin so fascinating... it is absolutely impossible to hide a transaction. So imagine the field day the irs would have with this if everyone used it. They basically would be able to send bills to owners of wallets. And anyone ever caught working with an undesirable would be able to have their funds more or less locked up. So now, we all watch as billions of stolen money moves and we know the moment it gets converted to anything real, the owners will be caught. However in the future I could easily see a government watch money that some undesired element has move and no one will want it because the moment they get it they are connected to an undesirable and their wallet becomes tainted.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoI think this seems to be main reason crypto wasn't shut down by government when it was relatively easy to do ( now there are real players entering the fray ). There is already a small cottage industry based on selling insights from BTC nodes to FinCEN and banks ( but I do not know whether they are buying ).
- barbazoo 5y ago> the moment it gets converted to anything real, the owners will be caught Is that how it works? Won't there be, say banking institutions that simply won't keep a record of who converted the bitcoin to money similar to how VPN providers are claiming to not log user's IP addresses?
- enkid 5y agoI'm pretty sure there's no bank in the world that would be willing to make a transaction in the billions and not keep a record of it.
- beached_whale 5y agothat's about 750,000 times what banks have to track. I think anything over $10k must be tracked or groups of transactions that are linked that are at/over that.
- stiltzkin 5y agoWaiting these are moved to Monero using Atomic Swaps.
- devops000 5y agoThe same day of Coinbase IPO
- HNfriend234 5y agoMaybe figured that coinbase IPO would dominate crypto news for the day and any reporting on this would be drowned out, possibly?