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Crypto really is a golden age of opportunity for hackers. When else in history could you rob a bank anonymously from your mom's basement for $570M. Cashing it o

by eloff 4y ago

Crypto really is a golden age of opportunity for hackers. When else in history could you rob a bank anonymously from your mom's basement for $570M. Cashing it out without getting caught is a little on the tricky side, but not impossible, especially if you live in, or cash it out in an untouchable jurisdiction like Russia.

masterof0 4y ago
Cashing it out all at once , yeah, other wise is not too bad, you could use online casinos, coin mixers, fake businesses, NFTs, etc...
nostrademons 4y ago
It's even better if in the future crypto becomes legitimate. Then you just have a pile of ill-gotten gains that you can use as ordinary money. Huge fortunes have been built this way, notably Gould and Kennedy.
- lampshades 4y ago
  The Godfather movies showed this method of legitimatization well.
  - yellsatclouds 4y ago
- pen2l 4y ago
  Reading Satoshi's writings and comments I often got the impression that his intentions were pure. But it is and should be painfully obvious that the only things crypto has principally enabled or made efficient are sophisticated scam work/ransomware, background sex work, and drug trade. To really top it off: it was all at the expense of a small country's carbon footprint. So I keep having this thought that if Satoshi really is worth his salt, he would transfer his existing funds (of about 50 billion USD) to an assortment of charities because such an action would be quite the statement in declaring that the crypto experiment has been an abject failure and it's time to stop wasting our time and move on. Better he make this impactful statement, better him the person who started it all be behind the action to finish it, than to have to continue in this painful and agonizing path we are on.
  - GLGirty 4y ago
    If Satoshi is cryptohacker turned drug lord Paul LeRoux, you can wait a while for that.
    - pen2l 4y ago
      Which he obviously isn't; Le Roux was nothing more than a crime boss, thought to be more technically adept than what a sober look at things would suggest (E4M's source code was stolen from his earlier employer).
      - sireat 4y ago
        Why do you say obviously? I am really curious why Le Roux has been ruled out even by the author of the book about him "The Mastermind" by Evan Ratliff - quite a good read. Le Roux seemed like a good candidate to be Satoshi - a Windows C++ programmer with serious crypto knowledge(most other crypto oldschoolers were on Linux/BSD), as the book states he liked adopt other persona on forums, he obviously had a strong anti-government bent, so far that is not much but more importantly he was dealing with his real life crime empire and had baskets of money laying around the house. it is hard to imagine Satoshi not spending some money once BTC got over $1 - unless he was really really not worried about money. Of course he could have just lost the keys... There has to be some crucial detail which book does not mention why Le Roux is ruled out so conclusively. I'd be curious if any code similarity analysis has been done on old LeRoux codebases and original Bitcoin code.
        pen2l 4y ago
        Satoshi and Le Roux both coded C++ but the code they wrote is very different, stylistically and otherwise (tabs vs. spaces, commenting style, approach to things like RNG). Linguistics tics are different in writings. Satoshi has an academic streak to him, he's probably some unknown dude in Germany. La Roux sometimes made grammar/spelling mistakes, Satoshi was pretty much always perfect. It's also strange that Le Roux, being a criminal kingpin with lots of operations, never implemented BTC use in any of his enterprises... why did he choose not to? When the Dorian saga happened, Satoshi posted on p2pfoundation to clear up that Dorian wasn't him with his original account, I think Le Roux was in prison at that time. He's still in prison, he's been cooperating with the US government. US is definitely not letting him go anywhere for the shit he's done, everything from drug cartel work, helping Iranian and North Korean governments acquire weapons, etc. One more delicious detail: Le Roux in a letter to SDNY judge wrote that he wants to invent ways to mine BTC efficiently. Really it comes down to the fact that Le Roux was involved with a whole bunch of stuff, and when you have this much surface area to scan you'd think you could come upon with just one strong piece of evidence... but there is nil, he's just another criminal warlord, luckily now in the custody of the US government: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-20-03410/pdf/USCOURTS-ca2-20-03410-0.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-20-03410/pd...
adbachman 4y ago
> untouchable jurisdiction like Russia When the international organization can point directly to you as now holding $100M+ worth of crypto tokens and you're in a "jurisdiction like Russia," then the international organization isn't who you should be worried about.
- nurettin 4y ago
  In soviet russia, government worries about you.
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    In Hacker News, we don't do memes.
farisjarrah 4y ago
Its also a golden age for people who understand code and smart contracts and are willing to take advantage of others without breaking any laws. A few of the major "hacks" lately have simply been taking advantage of errors in how smart contracts were coded.
- zht 4y ago
  I think it is a bit naive to think that exploiting a smart contract is perfectly legal

by eloff 4y ago

masterof0 4y ago

Cashing it out all at once , yeah, other wise is not too bad, you could use online casinos, coin mixers, fake businesses, NFTs, etc...

nostrademons 4y ago

It's even better if in the future crypto becomes legitimate. Then you just have a pile of ill-gotten gains that you can use as ordinary money. Huge fortunes have been built this way, notably Gould and Kennedy.

lampshades 4y ago
The Godfather movies showed this method of legitimatization well.
- yellsatclouds 4y ago
pen2l 4y ago
Reading Satoshi's writings and comments I often got the impression that his intentions were pure. But it is and should be painfully obvious that the only things crypto has principally enabled or made efficient are sophisticated scam work/ransomware, background sex work, and drug trade. To really top it off: it was all at the expense of a small country's carbon footprint. So I keep having this thought that if Satoshi really is worth his salt, he would transfer his existing funds (of about 50 billion USD) to an assortment of charities because such an action would be quite the statement in declaring that the crypto experiment has been an abject failure and it's time to stop wasting our time and move on. Better he make this impactful statement, better him the person who started it all be behind the action to finish it, than to have to continue in this painful and agonizing path we are on.
- GLGirty 4y ago
  If Satoshi is cryptohacker turned drug lord Paul LeRoux, you can wait a while for that.
  - pen2l 4y ago
    Which he obviously isn't; Le Roux was nothing more than a crime boss, thought to be more technically adept than what a sober look at things would suggest (E4M's source code was stolen from his earlier employer).
    - sireat 4y ago
      Why do you say obviously? I am really curious why Le Roux has been ruled out even by the author of the book about him "The Mastermind" by Evan Ratliff - quite a good read. Le Roux seemed like a good candidate to be Satoshi - a Windows C++ programmer with serious crypto knowledge(most other crypto oldschoolers were on Linux/BSD), as the book states he liked adopt other persona on forums, he obviously had a strong anti-government bent, so far that is not much but more importantly he was dealing with his real life crime empire and had baskets of money laying around the house. it is hard to imagine Satoshi not spending some money once BTC got over $1 - unless he was really really not worried about money. Of course he could have just lost the keys... There has to be some crucial detail which book does not mention why Le Roux is ruled out so conclusively. I'd be curious if any code similarity analysis has been done on old LeRoux codebases and original Bitcoin code.
      - pen2l 4y ago
        Satoshi and Le Roux both coded C++ but the code they wrote is very different, stylistically and otherwise (tabs vs. spaces, commenting style, approach to things like RNG). Linguistics tics are different in writings. Satoshi has an academic streak to him, he's probably some unknown dude in Germany. La Roux sometimes made grammar/spelling mistakes, Satoshi was pretty much always perfect. It's also strange that Le Roux, being a criminal kingpin with lots of operations, never implemented BTC use in any of his enterprises... why did he choose not to? When the Dorian saga happened, Satoshi posted on p2pfoundation to clear up that Dorian wasn't him with his original account, I think Le Roux was in prison at that time. He's still in prison, he's been cooperating with the US government. US is definitely not letting him go anywhere for the shit he's done, everything from drug cartel work, helping Iranian and North Korean governments acquire weapons, etc. One more delicious detail: Le Roux in a letter to SDNY judge wrote that he wants to invent ways to mine BTC efficiently. Really it comes down to the fact that Le Roux was involved with a whole bunch of stuff, and when you have this much surface area to scan you'd think you could come upon with just one strong piece of evidence... but there is nil, he's just another criminal warlord, luckily now in the custody of the US government: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-20-03410/pdf/USCOURTS-ca2-20-03410-0.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-20-03410/pd...

adbachman 4y ago

> untouchable jurisdiction like Russia When the international organization can point directly to you as now holding $100M+ worth of crypto tokens and you're in a "jurisdiction like Russia," then the international organization isn't who you should be worried about.

nurettin 4y ago
In soviet russia, government worries about you.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  In Hacker News, we don't do memes.

farisjarrah 4y ago

Its also a golden age for people who understand code and smart contracts and are willing to take advantage of others without breaking any laws. A few of the major "hacks" lately have simply been taking advantage of errors in how smart contracts were coded.

zht 4y ago
I think it is a bit naive to think that exploiting a smart contract is perfectly legal