4 ms·

Bear in mind that the connection between these addresses is tenuous at best. There's very little to suggest that the same person owns all of these transactions.

by nwh 13y ago

Bear in mind that the connection between these addresses is tenuous at best. There's very little to suggest that the same person owns all of these transactions. The paths are fairly convoluted, it could be a normal user or a mixer or an internal wallet. You'd never know by design. As I've mentioned before, this sort of thing is usually correct in that same way a broken clock is.

tibbon 13y ago
Agreed- it is very hard to tell who is holding the currency due to tumbling and all. But if it all does condense down to one wallet, or a set of transactions that is suddenly happening on this one service... then it does smell funny. If it should turn out that the owner of the account is someone affiliated with MTGox, then I can only imagine that shit will hit the fan.
sillysaurus3 13y ago
I hope you'd agree with "Jed McCaleb once controlled the donation address 1EuMa4dhfCK8ikgQ4emB7geSBgWK2cEdBG." While it's unclear precisely how that donation address is related to all of this, I assume that people traced money flowing out of it and into an Mt. Gox cold storage wallet, thus establishing that the person who controlled the donation address was involved with the people who control the cold storage addresses. If so, then it's hard to see how to disagree with "If the Bitstamp address 1PAzo was funded with coins deposited by Jed McCaleb or one of his associates, and simultaneously two Mt. Gox cold storage wallets were depleted, and the chain of withdraws eventually lead from the cold storage wallets to 1PAzo, then it's extremely likely that Jed or an Mt. Gox owner is trading Mt. Gox cold storage coins on Bitstamp." It sounds like you're worried that a chain of transfers doesn't prove ownership. For example, someone could randomly send all their bitcoin to someone else for no reason. But in practice, the only reason to give large amounts of BTC to someone else is either because you're buying something from them, repaying a debt, or you're cooperating with them. Regardless of which of those it turns out to be, the Mt. Gox cold storage wallets are the property of the Mt. Gox customers. Using them to buy something or repay a debt would be fraud. Transferring them to an associate with the intent of laundering them via Bitstamp would also be illegal, of course. I can't think of any other explanations for why the BTC would change ownership except perhaps that they were stolen yet again. But theft can be ruled out if the identity of the Bitstamp account turns out to be a cohort of Mt. Gox. (You mentioned that it could be a mixer, but that can be ruled out in this case because it'd make no sense for Mt. Gox to launder bitcoins and then deposit them into a bistamp account that has someone's real-world identity attached to it. Also, when bitcoins are being mixed using a mixer, it transfers the coins in a pretty distinctive way that indicates a mixer is being used, such as by randomizing the BTC amounts rather than always transferring e.g. 150BTC or 50BTC or some other nice-for-humans value. I assume that if a mixer is being used here, it'd be possible to show that the transfers are behaving in a way consistent with a particular bitcoin mixer implementation.) Since there are no plausible explanations about how the bitcoins might change ownership, why would it be unreasonable to proceed with the assumption that the ownership hasn't changed, unless proven otherwise?
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Shouldn't there be dozens/hundreds/thousands of addresses flowing into the Mt. Gox cold storage? Or did these do it too directly? edited to fix account/address mistake.
  - nwh 13y ago
    Address, not account. Completely different levels of abstraction.
- nwh 13y ago
  Bear in mind that this is the same sort of analysis that attributed large amounts of the initially mined coins to "Satoshi", when they were in fact core developer Gregory Maxwell's. There's a lot of room for error, especially when the email in question has an address in between with no attributable person behind it.
  - sillysaurus3 13y ago
    That's fine though, because at that point our theory has been proven wrong. So I propose we take the best guess that fits the available evidence and act accordingly. In this case, that action has already been taken: to notify Bitstamp that if the person trading those coins is an associate of Mt. Gox, then there's a high probability that illegal trades are occurring on their servers. This would let them take an action like freezing the account until they can provide an explanation about where the coins came from. (We're slowly turning into Paypal...) analysis that attributed large amounts of the initially mined coins to "Satoshi", when they were in fact core developer Gregory Maxwell's You just reminded me of something cool (but totally offtopic): https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/ https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-f... Someone recently came up with a previously-unknown technique for mapping out Satoshi's fortune.
    - nwh 13y ago
      You forget that this is a community that threatens violence over this sort of bullshit.
Andrew_Quentin 13y ago
http://pastebin.com/uahBR4HC http://pastebin.com/uahBR4HC

by nwh 13y ago

tibbon 13y ago

Agreed- it is very hard to tell who is holding the currency due to tumbling and all. But if it all does condense down to one wallet, or a set of transactions that is suddenly happening on this one service... then it does smell funny. If it should turn out that the owner of the account is someone affiliated with MTGox, then I can only imagine that shit will hit the fan.

sillysaurus3 13y ago

I hope you'd agree with "Jed McCaleb once controlled the donation address 1EuMa4dhfCK8ikgQ4emB7geSBgWK2cEdBG." While it's unclear precisely how that donation address is related to all of this, I assume that people traced money flowing out of it and into an Mt. Gox cold storage wallet, thus establishing that the person who controlled the donation address was involved with the people who control the cold storage addresses. If so, then it's hard to see how to disagree with "If the Bitstamp address 1PAzo was funded with coins deposited by Jed McCaleb or one of his associates, and simultaneously two Mt. Gox cold storage wallets were depleted, and the chain of withdraws eventually lead from the cold storage wallets to 1PAzo, then it's extremely likely that Jed or an Mt. Gox owner is trading Mt. Gox cold storage coins on Bitstamp." It sounds like you're worried that a chain of transfers doesn't prove ownership. For example, someone could randomly send all their bitcoin to someone else for no reason. But in practice, the only reason to give large amounts of BTC to someone else is either because you're buying something from them, repaying a debt, or you're cooperating with them. Regardless of which of those it turns out to be, the Mt. Gox cold storage wallets are the property of the Mt. Gox customers. Using them to buy something or repay a debt would be fraud. Transferring them to an associate with the intent of laundering them via Bitstamp would also be illegal, of course. I can't think of any other explanations for why the BTC would change ownership except perhaps that they were stolen yet again. But theft can be ruled out if the identity of the Bitstamp account turns out to be a cohort of Mt. Gox. (You mentioned that it could be a mixer, but that can be ruled out in this case because it'd make no sense for Mt. Gox to launder bitcoins and then deposit them into a bistamp account that has someone's real-world identity attached to it. Also, when bitcoins are being mixed using a mixer, it transfers the coins in a pretty distinctive way that indicates a mixer is being used, such as by randomizing the BTC amounts rather than always transferring e.g. 150BTC or 50BTC or some other nice-for-humans value. I assume that if a mixer is being used here, it'd be possible to show that the transfers are behaving in a way consistent with a particular bitcoin mixer implementation.) Since there are no plausible explanations about how the bitcoins might change ownership, why would it be unreasonable to proceed with the assumption that the ownership hasn't changed, unless proven otherwise?

maxerickson 13y ago
Shouldn't there be dozens/hundreds/thousands of addresses flowing into the Mt. Gox cold storage? Or did these do it too directly? edited to fix account/address mistake.
- nwh 13y ago
  Address, not account. Completely different levels of abstraction.
nwh 13y ago
Bear in mind that this is the same sort of analysis that attributed large amounts of the initially mined coins to "Satoshi", when they were in fact core developer Gregory Maxwell's. There's a lot of room for error, especially when the email in question has an address in between with no attributable person behind it.
- sillysaurus3 13y ago
  That's fine though, because at that point our theory has been proven wrong. So I propose we take the best guess that fits the available evidence and act accordingly. In this case, that action has already been taken: to notify Bitstamp that if the person trading those coins is an associate of Mt. Gox, then there's a high probability that illegal trades are occurring on their servers. This would let them take an action like freezing the account until they can provide an explanation about where the coins came from. (We're slowly turning into Paypal...) analysis that attributed large amounts of the initially mined coins to "Satoshi", when they were in fact core developer Gregory Maxwell's You just reminded me of something cool (but totally offtopic): https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/ https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-f... Someone recently came up with a previously-unknown technique for mapping out Satoshi's fortune.
  - nwh 13y ago
    You forget that this is a community that threatens violence over this sort of bullshit.

Andrew_Quentin 13y ago

http://pastebin.com/uahBR4HC http://pastebin.com/uahBR4HC