Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Though the hackers raised $140,000 in bitcoin, a form of digital currency, so far they have not cashed it in, the analysts said. That is likely because an operational error has made the transactions easy to track, including by law enforcement.

As a result, no online currency exchange will touch it, said Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec, a cybersecurity firm. “This is like knowingly taking tainted bills from a bank robbery,” he said.

Could anyone give some more details about this?

Does a trustworthy bitcoin mixer exist? Would the attackers be able to use it to launder the coins?

EDIT: Does anyone know anything about the operational error mentioned in the article?

The coins are easy to track, but that's the default for bitcoin. Mixing the coins should restore anonymity in most cases, right? And at that point it would be possible to move the coins back to an exchange, or sell them on localbitcoins.

On the other hand, have the exchanges blacklisted most of the large mixers? It seems like it should be theoretically possible to track whether coins have been mixed. Then exchanges could simply close any account that receives significant sums of tumbled coins.

Mixing $140,000 in Bitcoin would be trivial.

For example, bitmixer.io holds ~1000 BTC reserve for mixing, which is currently worth ~$2.5 million. So ~60 BTC could be safely mixed over a few days.

Decent mixers:

bitmixer.io (bitmixer2whesjgj.onion)

Bitcoin Fog (foggedddxlunnaaa.onion)

Helix (grams7enufi7jmdl.onion/helix/light)

I'm not aware that exchanges have blacklisted any mixers. There has been talk of blacklisting stolen Bitcoin, but I don't believe that's been done either.

Just a warning to anyone new to the BTC scene.

DO NOT USE BitcoinFog

Why?

Why?

I've used them for years. They've been slow a few times, but I've never lost anything.

There are persistent hater threads on Bitcoin Forum, however. And they've gotten some bad PR from some major Bitcoin thefts. Also, the Sheep Marketplace owner did screw up by mixing 96000 BTC in one go. But that still wasn't how he got pwned.

Or just convert it to an anonymous cryptocurrency, say, Monero or ZCash. No need to trust these mixers (which can take your coins and have been shown to be reversible in the past) anymore. There is also TumbleBit (https://github.com/BUSEC/TumbleBit), which looks interesting.

I don't understand. Isn't the point of bitcoin that it doesn't need a central authority?

If Bitcoin has evolved to the point where you need to have currency exchanges that act just like banks... what's the point?

The point is to not to need to convert back to fiat.

There are dealers and exchanges who abide by regulation in one or more countries, and some that don't.

It's also public record where transactions travel on the blockchain, so if it was ever noted what address the funds entered, I imagine it could prove difficult to dilute the transactions enough that the ledger wouldn't be accepted as proof. But I'm just speculating on that last bit.

only to transfer it into another currency

you can trade bitcoin to bitcoin just fine

It is more accurate to say that the point of Bitcoin is everyone has perfect information about how much money everyone has and who they transact with. The hackers are free to send the stolen money to someone else with no central authority to stop them, but an exchange is likely to reject that because they deal with fiat and therefore have to meet certain legal and ethical standards.

The hackers can still spend the money on something else provided the other party doesn't hold themselves to the same standards.

"likely to reject" -- I haven't seen any history of exchanges stopping specific withdrawals for certain coins.

Who's blacklisting these bitcoins? Is that public or is Rendition speculating?

It's bullshit. Such measures do not exist at any significant scale.

It is quite easy to launder those bitcoins for someone committed to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com