Sean Spicer Tweeted a Bitcoin Address – Not His Password | Hacker News Reader

Sean Spicer Tweeted a Bitcoin Address – Not His Password

patribotics.blog

125 pointslkurtz17 comments

I just read this and thought ... didn't that transaction take place after the infamous tweet? Couldn't anyone have done it? Quick google and sure enough: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/no-sean-spicer-didnt-make-some...

Why are so many so desperate to believe this immense hydra of a conspiracy theory?

I read an interesting article pointing out that fake news originating on the left spiked dramatically after Trump's election.

In general, it seems that those who feel out of power and out of control are more willing to latch onto nonsense and conspiracies.

Edit: sources, since this is attracting mindless downvotes

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/06/liberal-fake-n...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39592010

I'm not sure why you're getting down votes, gas-lighting has been a discussion topic since a year ago.

If Putin is behind mass propaganda, the Kremlin's gas-lighting approach explicitly involves supporting extremist groups across the political spectrum in order to disrupt opposition forces. One would expect more left-leaning propaganda, because planting propaganda serves to fracture the movement from within, demonize it in the eyes of the extreme opponents, and undermine the legitimacy of the communication medium. Go read Dugin's playbook, or the numerous English translations/analysis.

Example: Why was Jill Stein photographed sitting at the same table as Flynn and Putin? Because it delegitimized the native Russia Green Party, and builds a narrative that drives a wedge between the Green and Democrat progressive groups.

Not saying you or the article you linked are wrong, but are the two timestamps the same time zone? (Are they both GMT?) It seems like an obvious thing to check but I don't see the time zone mentioned anywhere, and there do exist pairs of time zones where the ostensibly later bitcoin transaction could have actually come before the tweet.

Hi, author of the Medium article here. The block containing the transaction was mined at 4:57pm EST (21:57 GMT) on 1/26:

https://blockexplorer.com/block/000000000000000001b12145b9ba...

https://blockchain.info/tx/143a764d3fa405f428e1d0e5b9d01b88e...

This tweet showing the screenshot is clearly earlier:

https://twitter.com/evanoconnell/status/824614832691355648

Would it be implausible that the user that took the tweet's screenshot was in a timezone 12+ hours behind the timezone used in bitsig? Am I watching too much House of Cards?

Very implausible. Largest plausible timezone difference would be like 8 hours (US west coast to GMT), which wouldn't be enough to explain this. The actual timezone difference seems to be a mere 5 hours.

I think it started right around the same time as "ratings" outweighed "truth" on the metrics media companies cared about...

Bitcoin addresses are 30-ish characters, start with a 1 and end with a checksum. This is clearly not a bitcoin address, but someone putting what Sean Spicer tweeted as the comment on their Bitcoin transaction a number of hours after everyone and their dog had mocked him for apparently posting his password to Twitter and had seen and spread the Tweet in question. (Also, the Bitcoin community has a long history of exactly this kind of prank, so people probably should know better by know.)

It is pretty amazing how fast tech can go from tiny niche proto-community to mainstream awareness if not yet mainstream usage.

Now this is way more interesting... add this to the fact that I really doubt he's so dumb to accidentally tweet this twice. I just don't know how that could happen. Something very fishy could be going on here...

Perhaps this is the beginning of the trail of breadcrumbs that the reddit sleuths will follow to the administration's smoking gun.

There's no way they could get it wrong.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/reddit-apologizes-o...

Semi-Related interesting idea: Bitcoin to add transparency & trace-ability for campaign finance reform.

I like that it's under the category "impeachment".

At least the agenda isn't being kept implicit.

He probably writes his tweets in a word processor and copies and pastes them into Twitter before sending the tweet.

This appears to be a confirmation code. I don't think it has to be for a bitcoin account. It could be for anything personal or government related. Perhaps they require him to reset his government passwords at a regular interval.

He's probably pasting what he thinks is the tweet he just wrote into Twitter and hitting send before realizing he pasted the confirmation code he copied and pasted earlier. It's most likely timed out and harmless by the time he sends it.

heh heh, how to take deniable (yet confirmable) bribes in the 21st century

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