Dark Web Drug Vendor Pleads Guilty After Feds Traced His Bitcoin Transactions
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
All in all, this is just another case where authorities have proven once
more that Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency isn't really anonymous
as it was advertised for the past decade.
pretty much everyone in cryptocurrency, whether they thought a little harder about it or not
There are some currencies that attempt at providing anonymity or at least deniability but those also haven’t been tested yet either against capable forensic adversaries.
Look at the difference between Bitcoin and say Monero when it comes to anonymity.
My point isn’t about something being easy or hard but rather if the anonymity comes from the design of Bitcoin or is it circumstantial to how you use it and it’s essentially only the latter.
The network was never designed to be anonymous and there isn’t any way to “hide” transactions or to deny your association with a wallet or an address if they trace the IP to you or you end up holding the private key it’s game over and nothing Bitcoin does impacts on the difficulty of this task.
All his other mistakes put together were not enough for the feds to hang him since there is plausible deniability:
The "writing style analysis" may seem advanced but in practice is laughable in terms of false positives.
Being in a possession of a bitcoin address that received payments from a drug trafficker isn't enough evidence to convict. But of course allowing the feds to go through his laptop where he had the trafficking signing keys and other credentials can not be explained away :-0
And is facing a life sentence.
Dont travel to such countries. Never ever period.
Crossing a border is a big decision, no matter how cheap the tickets are. I dont get people who keep doing this, its not like those are split second decisions.
Why in your right mind would you do this without carefully considering what the effects of you being in that country might be. I had female friends talking about going to holiday in Dubai, another friend with a Turkish passport visited his family in the south east recently.
Think for a moment for gods sake.
Go to Colorado and buy some edibles, you're fine. Carry some over the border into Kansas, and not only are you breaking Kansas law, but if caught they may hand you over to the Feds and penalties may be severe. (Crossing a state border makes it a Federal issue.)
More specifically, and more commonly, if you have or will break local laws in a country, be careful of visiting there.
In some locations, that means don't be gay, or don't be a women out of a specific outfit, etc.
.. but it's also possible to become an accidental tourist in someone else's civil war. Or, in the case of this guy, forget that committing crimes internationally can make you wanted in the US.
How does it work outside the US? Is there no parole or do they typically allow you to leave the country?
Edit: said bail instead of parole
If you have a life sentence you're not eligible.
You get a 1-dimensional perspective every time something local goes wrong and is masqueraded as international news. Its like if a civil rights violation from one US city on any given day was elevated to the world stage. It would sound like much more of a nightmare than anything going on in the UAE.
Most females I've talked to absolutely love Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Even people that have moved there.
The best analogy to the experience is Disney World. Lots of thrills, and adult sexual behavior is stifled, except for minor infractions instead of simply thrown out of the park you'll be thrown in a horrible prison.
The fact of the matter is that you're not one of the slaves. That side of things won't be your experience.
You hope you don't get sexually assaulted and judicially victim blamed, and thats the same anywhere.
#notevenmost
https://newsone.com/409392/brit-jailed-in-dubai-for-4-years-...
Wouldn't the proper thing to take away is, "don't become a drug kingpin"?
While generally I agree with you, some are trivial. Especially where the EU has gone to great effort to make them trivial to cross. Or where they are fractal and run through houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau
Even the easiest border crossing can carry significant risks depending on the context.
This is as much “tracing” as it would take to look up a license plate. Add to that a lack of full disk encryption and international travel...
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I have FileVault turned on in OSX. But I noticed that, since the latest version, if I open my laptop within some interval, it doesn't even make me type my password again.
And sometimes I've even opened my laptop many hours later and it inexplicably bypasses the login. Just seems so precarious.
I read how the FBI(?) faked a scene (a fight?) near the Silk Road creator so that they could nab his laptop while it was open. Well, I chuckle at how unnecessary that would be for my laptop: just walk up and open it. The piece of shit probably won't even make you log in.
Similar to those folks who work in a corporate environment who complete a document that they know will be jettisoned into a corporate black hole but checks off a requirement.
There are a million other things he could have sold online that wouldn't have resulted in 20 years in jail. Whether you agree with the illegal status of drugs or not, if someone choose to subvert the law, you can't expect law enforcement not to prosecute.
Sure, that's fine.
But it also obfuscates the more important point: I can expect (and I do expect) that a reasonable, mature society stop this idiotic practice in the first place.
Refusing to learn from the failures of drug prohibition throughout history is one thing, but continuing a current and clearly failed experiment for an entire century is flabbergasting and childish.
Who will be the last person who's life is ruined for no reason? Will it be this dude? Or someone in the same position tomorrow?
I can't have sympathy for someone who was selling opioids to addicts, exacerbating a terrible epidemic.
"Destroying a person's life"
The feds didn't do that, his own actions did that.
That's a philosophical question about how much people own their own lives versus how much you should be able to dictate their lives for your own selfish sense of peace of mind. We're not going to change anyone's minds on that in HN comments.
> The feds didn't do that, his own actions did that.
The "feds" did do that, in response to his actions, because people like you manadte via votes that they do that.
Forget this guy for a second.
The real question here is: will this act (or generally, all of the actions taken by the state pursuant to enforcing prohibition) help anyone? Will it reduce death, disease, crime, misery, addiction?
It seems like you just value revenge and compliance over a functioning civil society.
If you can't point to a tangible reduction in death, disease, misery, or addiction from these sorts of state actions, then I just don't see that you have a point to make at all.
I got 4 downvotes for this. It's sad that just 4 people can ruin one of the last places to have a good conversation on the internet. Perhaps a reconsideration of how the karma system works is in order, in order to save meaningful dialog. Off the top of my head, I would suggest any downvote also removes a karma point from the down voter. Instead of risking karma for taking a considerate but unpopular position, people willing to quell thought and ideas should be risking their own karma. I believe suppressing ideas and thought is far worse than presenting an unpopular idea and therefore should be at a much higher cost.