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The Internet Trolls the FBI’s “Private” Bitcoin Wallet

74 points by aelaguiz 13y ago

nwh 13y ago
Notes that are only visible to people looking at a certain address on a certain website, nowhere else. I truly do not think this it at all newsworthy. "Public notes" are a construction of blockchain.info—despite the confusing name—they are most certainly not part of the actual Bitcoin blockchain.
- gigq 13y ago
  Bitcoin does have the ability to store this kind of information in the actual blockchain, but blockchain.info decided it was not worth the bloat. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7864/is-a-public-message-at-blockchain-info-embedded-in-the-actual-block-chain http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7864/is-a-public-...
  - nwh 13y ago
    That's incorrect. You can shoehorn your data in, and blockchain.info tried for a period, but removed it when it drew the ire of almost every core developer. It just wastes space and bloats the unspent outputs database.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Good to hear. Bitcoin already occupied 5-8GB last time I fired my client up, many moons ago.
      - nwh 13y ago
        13GB with indexes now. If it's an issue, just use an SPV client like MultiBit that doesn't store the blockchain at all.
dimastopel 13y ago
to ease the access: https://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX https://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5G...
RF7803081 13y ago
The real troll is that people use bitcoins
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- lnanek2 13y ago
  Hey, the price was going up like nuts until recently. If you had bought in or mined early, you'd be rich. Now that everyone sees they can be confiscated just like real currency, though, the price is half what it was. Would have been good to have a short position for this.
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    Can be confiscated? Not if the owner was paying attention. All that would be necessary is for an accomplice to have a copy of the wallet.dat file, in any form. In which case the coins could be moved out from under their noses. As someone who thinks the feds abuse their forfeiture power on a regular basis, seeing them have a hard time makes me laugh.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      How is this better than paper money? Store your paper money in a few secret locations, and have your accomplice run to those locations and take the money somewhere else when you are arrested.
      - Karunamon 13y ago
        Because if two people have a copy of the wallet file, you've got a situation which is essentially impossible with physical currency. I'd liken it to two physical credit cards with the same number, but that's a poor analogue as the feds can just ring the card company and have the account seized regardless of the physical "pointers" to that data. Bitcoin, access to the wallet file = access to the funds, at least until there's a spend. I believe that makes it rather unique.
robert_foss 13y ago
The top and bottom notes are a Bill Hicks quote, that's pretty classy as far as trolling goes.
skc 13y ago
I actually suspect the joke is on "The Internet" By now the FBI should be pretty savvy about these things.
andrewfong 13y ago
I'd personally be a lot more tolerant of trolls if I got a token amount of cash every time I was trolled.
- dmd 13y ago
  At current rates, each troll is sending $0.000012 per message. You'd have to receive more than 80 thousand troll messages to get a single dollar. Still tolerant?
  - plorg 13y ago
    Fair enough, but if I'm reading it correctly, >300 BTC (~$40,000) has been added to that wallet since the 'trolling' began - in one case 253 BTC was transferred from someone who strangely claims to support a bunch of things that are in opposition to U.S. law and FBI practices. At least I think that's what the comment says - I don't speak Portuguese.
    - lewaldman 13y ago
      " Eu sou do Brasil... Eu quero expressar minha opinião sobre a drogas... o governo prende quem vende drogas só por causa que não da lucro para o governo... então acaba com com o cigarro com as bebidas alcoólicas..." It say's: "Im from Brazil... I want to express my opinion about drugs... The government arest who sell drugs just because it don't bring any profit to the government... So end up with the cigarrets and the alcoolic beverages..." Edit: Corrected a typo
geuis 13y ago
Just want to point out this bullshit comment at the end, "the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning". The author is trying to make it sound like Silk Road dropped the price drastically. No, 260 was the high point early this year. The value has been relatively stable between $80 and $140 since then.
- oakwhiz 13y ago
  Sometimes it seems to me like people are intentionally causing fear, uncertainty, and denial about Bitcoin just to swing the price in their favor.
  - notahacker 13y ago
    There are also many commenters and bloggers that are writing bullish comments on Bitcoin because they happen to own a lot of them, believe in it's mission etc. I would argue many more since it's not even economically rational to spread FUD to depress the current market price of BTC and then buy it when its potential to appreciate in future also depends entirely on confidence since it isn't backed by any tangible assets or income streams. Sure, it would be better journalism to add the detail that Bitcoin has actually risen since "only" falling ~15-20% in response to the Silk Road seizure and explain that the 50% fall from its peak price happened in a few hours on April 10 and had nothing to to with fears over Silk Road, but I don't believe that would leave readers with any more faith in BTC as being generally stable.
  - the_watcher 13y ago
    No insight either way on this, but I did buy a (very) small amount of BTC after the initial post-Silk Road fall on the chance that the market was acting too irrationally. I've been curious about Bitcoin for a while, and now seemed like as good a time as any to buy a little bit and give myself some financial stake.
- aeturnum 13y ago
  If a currency fluctuates 300% in a year, I don't think it's out of line to note that it used to be 100% higher in value. Silk road's closer did drop the price a bit, after all.
qwerty_asdf 13y ago
If it's possible (seemingly trivial?) to determine that any given individual is possession of a bitcoin at any given time, then... uh... How is bitcoin an "anonymous" cryptocurrency? I mean, I feel kind of stupid for even asking such a question, but given the circumstances, wouldn't that be an exceptionally important detail? Based on all these second-hand accounts that I read about, sometimes written by journalists with an amateurish technical competency (which, by proxy, also renders me an amateur), it sounds like bitcoins are about as anonymous as an AOL e-mail addresses, or prepaid cellular phones. It doesn't seem like they were actually conceived an anonymous system, but rather that some people devised processes through which they could produce an effective anonymity with transactions carried this instrument. The cryptographic aspect of bitcoins seems to be geared only in favor of authenticity, and not anonymity. Were bitcoins ever conceived with true anonymity in mind? Are these revelations of identity just, due to elaborate and highly technical side-channel attacks? Am I wrong in my perception that bitcoins seem to be an object where it's only happenstance that you can craft an anonymous position? ...that they are actually only offer pseudonymity?
- DougWebb 13y ago
  Here's an analogy: every bill in your wallet has a unique serial number on it, right? Every bank account also has a unique ID number. Imagine that every wallet and cash register also has a unique ID. Now imagine that there's a shared database that gets a new entry every time a bill moves from one place to another where the entry just says "bill #X moved from location #Y to location #Z." If you're careful, and you don't let anyone know the ID of your wallet or your bank account, then it doesn't matter if someone knows the transactions that involve your bills because no one knows that they're yours. Your anonymity doesn't break down until someone can tie one of those account numbers to you: by asking your bank for the owner of the account, for example, or by confiscating your wallet and looking at its serial number. So, it's possible to be anonymous with bitcoin, but it's not easy when you want to actually buy something that has to be delivered to you or convert them to another currency.
  - qwerty_asdf 13y ago
    Hmmm... Thanks for the explanation! Just thinking that through, and from what I can gather from all my other osmosis and grokking of bitcoin (without actually participating and risking/investing real money in it), I think I get the general concept that (a certain degree of) anonymity can be had with bitcoins without a particularly sophisticated methodology. That the anonymity remains real, as long as certain behavioral protocols are maintained (not unlike the kind of behavior that must be adopted to successfully implement a password, such as don't write it down, don't type in front of video cameras, don't e-mail it, etc etc...). The whole transaction history aspect bothers me at a gut level (much in the way that exit node analysis is a deep systemic flaw of TOR), and in many ways affirms for me that anonymity is an emergent behavior and byproduct of other factors inherent to bitcoin. True anonymity doesn't seem to have been an original design goal of the system.
rarw 13y ago
I think the seizure of Silk Road absolutly had an impact on the value of BitCoins. The benefit of using BitCoins is that they provide a way to operate outside of traditional currency structures. Once BitCoins becomes something that can be seized, regulated, tracked, it becomes just like regular cash. That makes them a whole lot less valuable.
jedunnigan 13y ago
If this incident doesn't alert authorities to the traceability of Bitcoin I don't know what will....

74 points by aelaguiz 13y ago

nwh 13y ago

Notes that are only visible to people looking at a certain address on a certain website, nowhere else. I truly do not think this it at all newsworthy. "Public notes" are a construction of blockchain.info—despite the confusing name—they are most certainly not part of the actual Bitcoin blockchain.

gigq 13y ago
Bitcoin does have the ability to store this kind of information in the actual blockchain, but blockchain.info decided it was not worth the bloat. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7864/is-a-public-message-at-blockchain-info-embedded-in-the-actual-block-chain http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7864/is-a-public-...
- nwh 13y ago
  That's incorrect. You can shoehorn your data in, and blockchain.info tried for a period, but removed it when it drew the ire of almost every core developer. It just wastes space and bloats the unspent outputs database.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Good to hear. Bitcoin already occupied 5-8GB last time I fired my client up, many moons ago.
    - nwh 13y ago
      13GB with indexes now. If it's an issue, just use an SPV client like MultiBit that doesn't store the blockchain at all.

dimastopel 13y ago

to ease the access: https://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX https://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5G...

RF7803081 13y ago

The real troll is that people use bitcoins

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lnanek2 13y ago
Hey, the price was going up like nuts until recently. If you had bought in or mined early, you'd be rich. Now that everyone sees they can be confiscated just like real currency, though, the price is half what it was. Would have been good to have a short position for this.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  Can be confiscated? Not if the owner was paying attention. All that would be necessary is for an accomplice to have a copy of the wallet.dat file, in any form. In which case the coins could be moved out from under their noses. As someone who thinks the feds abuse their forfeiture power on a regular basis, seeing them have a hard time makes me laugh.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    How is this better than paper money? Store your paper money in a few secret locations, and have your accomplice run to those locations and take the money somewhere else when you are arrested.
    - Karunamon 13y ago
      Because if two people have a copy of the wallet file, you've got a situation which is essentially impossible with physical currency. I'd liken it to two physical credit cards with the same number, but that's a poor analogue as the feds can just ring the card company and have the account seized regardless of the physical "pointers" to that data. Bitcoin, access to the wallet file = access to the funds, at least until there's a spend. I believe that makes it rather unique.

robert_foss 13y ago

The top and bottom notes are a Bill Hicks quote, that's pretty classy as far as trolling goes.

skc 13y ago

I actually suspect the joke is on "The Internet" By now the FBI should be pretty savvy about these things.

andrewfong 13y ago

I'd personally be a lot more tolerant of trolls if I got a token amount of cash every time I was trolled.

dmd 13y ago
At current rates, each troll is sending $0.000012 per message. You'd have to receive more than 80 thousand troll messages to get a single dollar. Still tolerant?
- plorg 13y ago
  Fair enough, but if I'm reading it correctly, >300 BTC (~$40,000) has been added to that wallet since the 'trolling' began - in one case 253 BTC was transferred from someone who strangely claims to support a bunch of things that are in opposition to U.S. law and FBI practices. At least I think that's what the comment says - I don't speak Portuguese.
  - lewaldman 13y ago
    " Eu sou do Brasil... Eu quero expressar minha opinião sobre a drogas... o governo prende quem vende drogas só por causa que não da lucro para o governo... então acaba com com o cigarro com as bebidas alcoólicas..." It say's: "Im from Brazil... I want to express my opinion about drugs... The government arest who sell drugs just because it don't bring any profit to the government... So end up with the cigarrets and the alcoolic beverages..." Edit: Corrected a typo

geuis 13y ago

Just want to point out this bullshit comment at the end, "the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning". The author is trying to make it sound like Silk Road dropped the price drastically. No, 260 was the high point early this year. The value has been relatively stable between $80 and $140 since then.

oakwhiz 13y ago
Sometimes it seems to me like people are intentionally causing fear, uncertainty, and denial about Bitcoin just to swing the price in their favor.
- notahacker 13y ago
  There are also many commenters and bloggers that are writing bullish comments on Bitcoin because they happen to own a lot of them, believe in it's mission etc. I would argue many more since it's not even economically rational to spread FUD to depress the current market price of BTC and then buy it when its potential to appreciate in future also depends entirely on confidence since it isn't backed by any tangible assets or income streams. Sure, it would be better journalism to add the detail that Bitcoin has actually risen since "only" falling ~15-20% in response to the Silk Road seizure and explain that the 50% fall from its peak price happened in a few hours on April 10 and had nothing to to with fears over Silk Road, but I don't believe that would leave readers with any more faith in BTC as being generally stable.
- the_watcher 13y ago
  No insight either way on this, but I did buy a (very) small amount of BTC after the initial post-Silk Road fall on the chance that the market was acting too irrationally. I've been curious about Bitcoin for a while, and now seemed like as good a time as any to buy a little bit and give myself some financial stake.
aeturnum 13y ago
If a currency fluctuates 300% in a year, I don't think it's out of line to note that it used to be 100% higher in value. Silk road's closer did drop the price a bit, after all.

qwerty_asdf 13y ago

If it's possible (seemingly trivial?) to determine that any given individual is possession of a bitcoin at any given time, then... uh... How is bitcoin an "anonymous" cryptocurrency? I mean, I feel kind of stupid for even asking such a question, but given the circumstances, wouldn't that be an exceptionally important detail? Based on all these second-hand accounts that I read about, sometimes written by journalists with an amateurish technical competency (which, by proxy, also renders me an amateur), it sounds like bitcoins are about as anonymous as an AOL e-mail addresses, or prepaid cellular phones. It doesn't seem like they were actually conceived an anonymous system, but rather that some people devised processes through which they could produce an effective anonymity with transactions carried this instrument. The cryptographic aspect of bitcoins seems to be geared only in favor of authenticity, and not anonymity. Were bitcoins ever conceived with true anonymity in mind? Are these revelations of identity just, due to elaborate and highly technical side-channel attacks? Am I wrong in my perception that bitcoins seem to be an object where it's only happenstance that you can craft an anonymous position? ...that they are actually only offer pseudonymity?

DougWebb 13y ago
Here's an analogy: every bill in your wallet has a unique serial number on it, right? Every bank account also has a unique ID number. Imagine that every wallet and cash register also has a unique ID. Now imagine that there's a shared database that gets a new entry every time a bill moves from one place to another where the entry just says "bill #X moved from location #Y to location #Z." If you're careful, and you don't let anyone know the ID of your wallet or your bank account, then it doesn't matter if someone knows the transactions that involve your bills because no one knows that they're yours. Your anonymity doesn't break down until someone can tie one of those account numbers to you: by asking your bank for the owner of the account, for example, or by confiscating your wallet and looking at its serial number. So, it's possible to be anonymous with bitcoin, but it's not easy when you want to actually buy something that has to be delivered to you or convert them to another currency.
- qwerty_asdf 13y ago
  Hmmm... Thanks for the explanation! Just thinking that through, and from what I can gather from all my other osmosis and grokking of bitcoin (without actually participating and risking/investing real money in it), I think I get the general concept that (a certain degree of) anonymity can be had with bitcoins without a particularly sophisticated methodology. That the anonymity remains real, as long as certain behavioral protocols are maintained (not unlike the kind of behavior that must be adopted to successfully implement a password, such as don't write it down, don't type in front of video cameras, don't e-mail it, etc etc...). The whole transaction history aspect bothers me at a gut level (much in the way that exit node analysis is a deep systemic flaw of TOR), and in many ways affirms for me that anonymity is an emergent behavior and byproduct of other factors inherent to bitcoin. True anonymity doesn't seem to have been an original design goal of the system.

rarw 13y ago

I think the seizure of Silk Road absolutly had an impact on the value of BitCoins. The benefit of using BitCoins is that they provide a way to operate outside of traditional currency structures. Once BitCoins becomes something that can be seized, regulated, tracked, it becomes just like regular cash. That makes them a whole lot less valuable.

jedunnigan 13y ago

If this incident doesn't alert authorities to the traceability of Bitcoin I don't know what will....