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Can somebody explain to me how the FBI could seize his bitcoins without knowing his password? My passwords for such things are long, written nowhere, and I ente
by TwoBit 13y ago
Can somebody explain to me how the FBI could seize his bitcoins without knowing his password? My passwords for such things are long, written nowhere, and I enter them on oddball platforms and applications (e.g. not Windows). Is that not enough?
- sillysaurus2 13y agoIt's suspected that computer forensics managed to recover the private key of an unencrypted wallet from his disk. The sequence of events would be: He previously used an unencrypted wallet. Then he encrypted it and deleted his old wallet.dat. Then he forgot to zero out his "deleted files" area of his filesystem, so the old wallet.dat was recoverable via forensics.
- raverbashing 13y agoSo obvious, yet, easy to forget This is a big gaping hole in using GPG for example It either prints the content (if it's a text file this is ok), or you have to save it to be useful. And then you erase it and think it's enough.
- nwh 13y agoPossible he didn't have have a password on his wallet, just his laptop, which was unlocked when they arrested him.
- TwoBit 13y agoI can't imagine DPR would be that stupid.
- nwh 13y ago• He posted a question on StackOverflow with his real name and the silk road address. • His first post on Bitcointalk was him introducing the silk road and then again about a job opportunity with his real email address. • He ordered fake IDs on his own market to his house with his DPR identity and his real face. You can't get any stupider.
- pudquick 13y agoThey probably have his wallet file, but it's encrypted and he hasn't given them the password. So in theory it's "seized" ... if they can brute force / guess the password. But in practice, with access to a computer, DPR could probably transfer the contents from the address to a new wallet.
- TwoBit 13y agoDidn't the article specifically state that the FBI transferred coins from his wallet to their own?
- pacificmint 13y agoYes. According to the paper they not only transferred the money, and they did it in 445 chunks of 324 bitcoins each (and one chunk with the remainder). 324 spells FBI on a phone keypad.
- Xcelerate 13y agoDoes no one think that with that much money in his wallet, he wouldn't have simply memorized the private key in addition to storing it somewhere? The keys aren't really that long or hard to memorize and I would certainly remember mine if I had any significant amount of money tied to it.
- lazyjones 13y agoSCNR: http://xkcd.com/538/ http://xkcd.com/538/