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A fun aside: this person obviously created a bunch of new Bitcoin accounts to hide their activity. It makes you think that if you were able to surreptitiously
by xrd 7mo ago
A fun aside: this person obviously created a bunch of new Bitcoin accounts to hide their activity.
It makes you think that if you were able to surreptitiously add malicious side channel software into a popular npm package that you wouldn't just need to hunt for crypto wallets with balances.
You could also probably find a market for crypto wallets with small balances or zero balances. The history and date of creation would be the value to some.
This openai employee should have gone on the dark web to buy older addresses to cloak their activity.
It's sad to say that almost all crypto use cases point to fraud. I'm excited about crypto and there is some fascinating research around anonymous transactions (like zcash). But, that real utility is always overshadowed by the actions of charlatans or worse.
- 0x3f 7mo agoI don't really understand. You can create wallets at will. What would be the value of one that someone else happened to create?
- xrd 7mo agoIf it has a small transaction history it obscure the owners intentions. An address created right before a wager is obviously for one purpose.
- 0x3f 7mo agoRight but if you have the forethought to go buy such a wallet, you could just make one yourself in advance and create a transaction history. Although I would argue that even this doesn't have much value. It's not a big problem that people know "there exists an insider at OpenAI". There are plenty of employees there that shield you from being discovered. In fact it would be so difficult to find this person among them, assuming the most basic opsec, that I'm highly skeptical they actually fired anyone. I would sooner assume this is just an announcement designed to discourage the behavior, since no specifics are provided.
- xrd 7mo agoYou are giving a lot of credit to this criminal. I really doubt they thought about this long in advance of the crime. Are you suggesting they got hired at openai so they could make calculated wagers at Kalshi? This was more likely a crime made impulsively.
- 0x3f 7mo agoFirst of all I'm not sure what they did is criminal. And it would have been Polymarket. Nonetheless, you can just be a pre-existing OpenAI employee. As long as you take basic precautions, they (as in, OpenAI), are not going to be able to find out it was you.
- TZubiri 7mo agoAged accounts, shell companies, it's a market
- 0x3f 7mo agoNot in this context it's not. Companies can't create Polymarket accounts. Polymarket accounts are just email addresses or alternatively crypto wallets. And there's no purpose I can imagine to aging them.
- TZubiri 7mo agoI'm confused, why would companies be unable to create Polymarket accounts. By talking about aged accounts and shell companies, I meant that there's black markets for aged accounts from social media platforms, and there's markets for shell companies (and to some extent warmed up emails). In both cases the age of the company gives it some value, as anyone doing due diligence on the accounts will weigh the age of the account as a positive signal. Age of an account is a costly signal and significantly slows down Sybil attacks. Spammers pay some cost for aged accounts (even if it's just waiting and holding the inventory) and for defenders it works as a PoW system, they don't need to ignore the age signal, it works just fine.
- 0x3f 7mo agoThere's just no distinction between accounts like that, 'accounts' are just crypto wallets. There's no system that would ever care about the 'age' of your account here. There's no DD. If you have a wallet, you can participate. The 'spam' prevention measure is the same as for any crypto thing: tx costs.
- dontknowbtc 7mo ago> created a bunch of new Bitcoin accounts to hide their activity tell me you don’t understand crypto without telling me you don’t understand crypto.
- ruined 7mo agoyou can't "change the password" on a wallet, so a "used" wallet is highly unattractive. anything you put in it could be taken by the original keyholder who sold it to you.
- asah 7mo agojust move it to a new wallet
- JasonADrury 7mo agoOh but you can. You can swap out the seed and generate any new addresses using that. Yes, the old addresses will be compromised. That's fine. The point is that nobody can tell that you aren't actually using the same keys to generate new addresses anymore.
- pclmulqdq 7mo agoThis is no different on the outside from making a new account.
- JasonADrury 7mo agoObviously it is, how do you think tools like chainalytics work? Nobody is inspecting an individual address, that's ridiculous.
- MarceliusK 7mo agoWhat investigators often look for isn't just wallet age, but funding patterns, timing, and linkages between wallets