No Sean Spicer Didn’t Make Some Secret Bitcoin Transaction | Hacker News Reader

No Sean Spicer Didn’t Make Some Secret Bitcoin Transaction

medium.com

60 pointsaltoz17 comments

Thank you for the educational write up! Bitcoin literacy is sorely lacking among journalists, and yet they often forget to contact experts such as yourself...

Well, Patribotics is the blog of a conspiracy theorist who thinks everything is part of a vast Trump-Russia conspiracy, so in this case I think it's more simply the result of not wanting to look for details that'd debunk the claims: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/08/is-conspira...

TIL! I just saw "Laurelai is an independent journalist"

Oh, I was under the assumption it was a pin or a similar tool that needed to be confirmed from his verifiable twitter acct before the funds were transferred to a previously agreed upon bitcoin wallet.

But that's a stretch.

Louise Mensch seems to have gotten lucky on one story and it's gone to her head. Her twitter feed is just full of nonsense.

There's a comma missing after "No" in the title, and it's driving me insane.

You can contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer. They can update the title if a correction is needed.

Corrected

not what I see.

What time zones are these things in?

Bitsig.io and Blockchain.info appear to show everything in UTC. This Gizmodo tweet, screenshotting Spicer, will show up in whatever timezone you set Twitter to https://twitter.com/Gizmodo/status/824635801657114624 - you can easily verify it's several hours earlier.

It looks like a wi-fi password.

I harbor a strong intuition that Sean Spicer lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, required to even consider trying to bitcoin.

>'the private key can be determined from the brain wallet string, which is Sean Spicer’s tweet"

So the string was a brainwallet seed? Then he was tweeting about bitcoin afterall. On the other hand, literally any tweet could be made into a brainwallet seed. So, in principle, all tweets are about bitcoin.

The bitcoin transaction happened hours after the tweet.

Right, I saw that was claimed. I didn't check timezones, etc but assume that is correct. Still, the interesting point remains that any tweet can be turned into a bitcoin-related topic.

As far as I understand it, the purpose of bitsig.io is to put any arbitrary text into the blockchain. This makes the statement trivially true, akin to saying that any tweet can be turned into an architecture-related topic by spray-painting it onto the side of a building.

Bitsig.io doesn't put arbitrary text into the blockchain. Given a string, if a Bitcoin address exists with sha256(string) as its private key, bitsig.io will publish the string, address, and first time the address was used. It also has tools for facilitating transactions to such addresses (which should never be used to store money). Hence stuff like this[0] from before bitsig.io existed.

0. https://bitsig.io/?addr=1AJ3vE2NNYW2Jzv3fLwyjKF1LYbZ65Ez64

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