I can count maybe 5 people in the crypto space that would have that much BTC, but none of them would be dumb enough to put it all in one wallet. Most likely some large institutional investor decided to re-key their cold storage wallet.
BTC-e was the longest running bitcoin exchange and the single most reliable. I had more money than I'd like to admit stolen from me. Their statement was only people who participate in tax evasion use btc-e.
At some point, someone will want to do something in the real world with this money, and the government can step in there.
Because no one is able to stop them.
Likely what makes the US special in this instance is that they did it first, and as long as other countries aren't going to make a stink about it (i.e. the US backs up its claims to some degree or the other countries don't want to question them), then it will get away with it.
Rule of law is for people. Countries operate on a mixture of laws, norms, and consensus building. If every country but one decided to raid that one country, and they had the power (as in economic and military power) to do so, what's to stop them? Not a law, which they my nature can just rewrite.
A foreign power can have any law it wants, and no other foreign power has to respect it. You can try to sue them, but sovereign immunity, and foreign sovereign immunity, stops almost all of these attempts. The exceptions generally are human rights abuses (by the same state doing the suing...) and commercial transactions.
In this case, the USG stole from money launderers in a foreign country. So not only can people in the US not sue the USG over it (sovereign immunity), people in the Ukraine can't sue the USG over it (foreign sovereign immunity). The thieves would have the best claim, but it doesn't work out well when you claim your illegal business was stolen from. And since it's a foreign power, if the US balks, it would be covered under international law, and guess who enforces international law?
It may take some time and effort to get the property back, but there is a process.
(note: IANAL)
Real justification: Extraterritoriality is a thing you get to do when you're an empire.
Trivial amount of money laundering
BTC-e
The only company within US jurisdiction that BTC-E did business with is a company called "tradehill". The amounts of money moved were small, ranging between $12.60 and $17,000. Less than $100,000 was moved overall and all of it was moved in early 2012.
The US doesn't care about tracking down the $12.60 that you laundered on 24 January 2012 like it says in the indictment. The US is just using that as an excuse to impose it's money laundering laws outside of it's jurisdiction. The indictment is a pretext for extraterritoriality. Extraterritoriality is a thing you get to do when you're an empire.
Just seems silly to try and cast the US as an "empire" here when all you're really saying is "the US is a very powerful nation".
This is exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction, which is not the same thing as (though also not unrelated to) extraterritoriality.
And everyone gets to do it, it has nothing to do with being an empire (actual extraterritoriality beyond what is normal for, e.g., diplomats might, but this isn't that.)
It looks like the man behind it was arrested while holidaying in Greece - a US ally.
BTC-e was a cover to help criminals steal from Bitcoin exchanges and safely dilute the funds.
It sucks that you lost your money, but it was wrapped up with billions of dollars of dirty money, and it's probably tough for investigators to distinguish the two.
It was not. Coins going in and out of btc-e were labeled making laundering through btc-e difficult at best.
>BTC-e was a cover to help criminals steal from Bitcoin exchanges and safely dilute the funds.
BTC-e was around longer than those exchanges.
The thing about BTC-e is every time bitcoin crashed btc-e would chug along just fine without going down. All other exchanges would become unresponsive. This made, at that time, btc-e the only "safe" program trading bitcoin platform. (Of course, in hindsight, with the us gov coming in and stealing all that money, safe is a bit of an over statement.)
BTC-e was perhaps "safe" in that it seemed to be operated competently from a technical standpoint, and it didn't appear to attempt to scam its users (both of which may not be true of Mt. Gox), but it didn't really need to worry about costs due to the absurd amount of profit they were making from their laundering hustle.
It wasn't that they merely turned a blind eye to the laundering. Vinnik personally assisted in the laundering, presumably by working with some of the exchange hackers.
>BTC-e was around longer than those exchanges.
I should've said "a cover to help criminals launder illicitly gained cryptocurrency". There were plenty of reasons to launder cryptocurrency before any large exchanges existed. He didn't help just with exchange hacks. But when exchange hacks started happening, business was certainly booming for him, since that was the easiest way to steal a lot of cryptocurrency at once.
The US government may have inadvertently stolen your money, and other people's, but they did it to reappropriate billions of dollars money stolen from citizens around the world, including American citizens. Vinnik helped intentionally steal money from ordinary people who used Mt. Gox and other exchanges, and pocketed a lot of it for himself. Hopefully some of the money the US government seized will be returned to their rightful owners one day, but who knows.
So the US stole money that was stolen and... might give it back?
The court case is starting in a little over a week, so Alexander Vinnik (the one accused of the MtGox hack, who was a technician working at btc-e) has yet to be found guilty or innocent.
>On 25 July 2017, suspected BTC-e operator Alexander Vinnik was arrested at the behest of the United States Justice Department while vacationing with his family in Greece.[8][9] Wanted for money laundering by both France and Russia, in addition to the US[10]. Vinnik agreed to be returned to Russia, where he was charged only with fraud.[11] In October 2017 the extradition request by Russia was approved by one Greek court, but the request by the United States was approved by another.[12] The decision to extradite Vinnik to the United States was upheld by the Greek Supreme Court on December 13, 2017.[11] However, in July 2018 Greece agreed to extradite Vinnik to France instead,[13] giving precendence to the European warrant.[citation needed]A final ruling is scheduled for September 19,[14] though Vinnik's lawyer claims that "the decision on Vinnik's extradition to Russia has been made".[15]
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTC-e
It's good that he didn't end up going to the US. The US, while legitimate in many ways, has a history of corrupt court practices. If it's in the government's interest to keep the 2 billion, which it is, they will do everything they can to throw him under the bus.
Russia may have a bias, I'm uncertain. I'm not sure how happy Russia was about btc-e. BTC-e may have been in the Ukraine, but Russia implicitly requires neighboring countries to follow Russian law. Did BTC-e break Russian law? I have no idea. But because he is not being extradited to Russia, we'll probably never find out what Russia thinks.
I don’t know how can anyone with straight face compare US court system to Russia’s and not conclude that US is orders of magnitude more fair and less corrupt. Are you being serious right now? Russian court system is literally proxy for Putin’s decisions.
EDIT: disregard that, i somehow assumed extradition to russia was a sure thing already
it may surprise you that france is not a province of russia
What I seem to remember is that they plastered their logo on a website and the servers just launched another frontend under a different url
I saw that they imposed fines
I didn't see that they actually seized any
Some quote about bitcoin enthusiasts rediscovering the reason for regulations in the financial markets one loss at a time.
If btc-e were part of a well-regulated financial system, they would have gone through a liquidation process and creditors would have been paid some % on the $ what they were owed.
This is what happened with BCCI when it was raided and shutdown for massive money laundering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Credit_and_Commerce_In...
>Just a month later, BCCI's liquidators (Deloitte, PWC) pleaded guilty to all criminal charges pending against the bank in the United States (both those lodged by the federal government and by Morgenthau), clearing the way for BCCI's formal liquidation that fall. BCCI paid $10 million in fines and forfeited all $550 million of its American assets – at the time, the largest single criminal forfeiture ever obtained by federal prosecutors. The money was used to repay losses to First American and Independence and to make restitution to BCCI's depositors.
If you want an anonymous currency check out something like Zcash or monero. They use some fancier crypto to obscure transaction inputs and outputs, which gets you a bit farther towards being anonymous.
Bitcoin has and always will be a way to cut down transaction costs, cutting out the middle man ie cutting out the banks. To do that, everyone has to be able to audit every transaction and verify authenticity of a transaction. In this way bitcoin is anti anonymous, always has and always will be.
Unfortunately, Bitcoin (BTC) is not anonymous, as you pointed out. It never was; and with tax laws requiring copious transaction information, it is particularly easily traceable.
That's the idea behind Monero & Co., which tries to mix things up a bit (literally). The anonymity is still not perfect, especially against state-level actors.
But it can be used anonymously and probably in some industries is still used anonymously. A counterparty that is willing to swap anonymously acquired and sent altcoins for Bitcoin can provide a privacy conscious individual with anonymous Bitcoins.
If using proxy-chains, Tor, or a real person in another country to broadcast your trade isn't your cup-of-tea because you don't trust them, there is still another less practical way. If you secretly give someone your Bitcoin private key (for example: written on a small piece of paper), you can give or trade those Bitcoins to someone without the network knowing about the transaction.
>so most likely it is the same entity, or a transaction partner.
Conceivably, the transaction could be broadcasted from an important individual's hacked phone or computer without a trace. This is where being innocent until proven guilty becomes important.
Not if amounts are tracked, rather than addresses. "oh look, this gal X just lost 5.3876BTC and gained 3.76549ALTCOIN, and this other dude Y just gained 5.3876BTC and lost 3.76549ALTCOIN. Geeze, I wonder if they traded."
And with the proper graph theory tools, much more complex interactions could be tracked.
It's still not immune to tracing, obviously, but it's a much harder problem than just looking for symmetric transactions.
The simplest system, though, is probably just to spend some BTC renting time on a mining rig. It doesn't have to be profitable, just break even. Newly mined bitcoins have no official history to show who paid for the mining.
"And with the proper graph theory tools, much more complex interactions could be tracked."
> The simplest system, though, is probably just to spend some BTC renting time on a mining rig. It doesn't have to be profitable, just break even. Newly mined bitcoins have no official history to show who paid for the mining.
That is a good idea.
So you've said, and I already agreed that it isn't impossible. But do you have any real-world examples where someone followed reasonable OPSEC (fixed denominations, mixers, randomized timing) and still had their transactions successfully traced via these "proper graph theory tools"?
Typically that would be either the academic researcher attempting to prove that their investigation technique works, or the prosecutor looking to use the results of such an investigation as evidence in a trial.
> When we deal with opsec, we have to consider what is possible...
Anything is possible. Even ideal encryption algorithms—other than one-time pads—have some non-zero probability of being broken within a reasonable timeframe by a brute-force search, but that doesn't make them useless. As long as it's not cost-effective to trace the transfer, that's enough. It doesn't need to be mathematically impossible.
> or the prosecutor looking to use the results of such an investigation as evidence in a trial
I'm inclined to believe in the possibility of parallel constructions being used to cover up the best sources of intel.
> Anything is possible.[...] As long as it's not cost-effective to trace the transfer, that's enough. It doesn't need to be mathematically impossible.
And here, I think it is probably cost-effective to come up with that technology, because it would allow tracing people and transactions that might otherwise be impenetrable. And, if that were the case, I don't have a hard time imagining that it would be of utmost importance to keep such technology under wraps.
But again, at this point it seems like we're comparing pessimism to optimism.
So am I, to a point, but even if they prefer not to disclose their actual methods (and are willing to commit perjury) they can't exactly hide the results. And others wouldn't have any incentive to keep their successes hidden.
> ...I think it is probably cost-effective to come up with that technology...
This isn't a matter of "technology" where some R&D spending up front is likely to lead to a method of cheaply tracing funds. If such a method existed then the system would indeed be broken; it would be akin to finding a critical weakness in an encryption scheme. Barring design flaws, however, the idea is to make all the transactions look the same so that even using your best graph theory tools you can't narrow down the possibilities enough to reasonably investigate all of them. That's what I meant by "not cost-effective": When there are 50 transfers that fit the parameters then you can investigate them all, but if there are 50,000 plausible trails to investigate then that effort would only be worthwhile in very high-profile cases.
Yes, I think that is the fundamental problem with depending on 'mixers' against state-level actors. We both agreed earlier that the tech is theoretically possible. It seems like we're disagreeing about whether someone exists who is motivated enough to build the tech, and whether that person is also motivated to keep their tech under wraps.
> they can't exactly hide the results
It's a known method that US law enforcement has done in the past. Parallel construction is absolutely a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
> the idea is to make all the transactions look the same so that even using your best graph theory tools you can't narrow down the possibilities enough to reasonably investigate all of them
I just don't get the impression that it's successful. There's a lot of 'metadata' that could be used to narrow the candidates down: geography, time, transaction amount, method of accessing the exchange (API / browser / desktop app ), age of wallets - I don't know which is specifically relevant here, but there's a lot of similar information which could be used to narrow the possibilities down, and most of it could probably involve 'fuzzy logic'. I just don't think that a threat model which includes state-level actors should ignore the possibility that transactions could be traced through mixers.
By the way, I'm really enjoying this discussion. Thanks for playing. :)
With PirateChain it is, but true anonymity brings with it other technical challenges.
If most people report their PirateChain transactions, amount in, amount out, then the problem is that unreported transactions would stick out and would probably be associable with wallets. Am I getting this wrong?
I know it's necessary to report transactions which establish the cost basis for capital gains, but doesn't mandate report of all transactions.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/040515/are-t...
If you bought a Bitcoin when it was $5000 and you spend 0.2 Bitcoin today (now they're ~$10000 a piece) you would need to report $1000 of capital gains.
You could argue that would make your 0.2 Bitcoin / $2000 purchase cost more, because you have to add the tax. On the other hand, if you sell those Bitcoin later, you would have to pay those capital gains tax anyway.
The story does become a bit more complex when you factor in long-term vs short-term capital gains tax.
> The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of individual trades, the "tape", is made public, but without telling who the parties were.
> As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner.
Recently there are newer cryptocurrencies like Monero and ZCash that focus specifically on anonymity/privacy.
There’s the IP record of the user hitting the server that processes their request (it might be your own box if you’re storing the whole chain yourself but most people use thin clients). Then there’s the list of inputs (cryptonote based currencies like monero use ring signatures which provide obfuscation but not binary privacy). Then there’s the list of outputs, which may be able to be linked to inputs revealing the transaction graph (zcash helps solve this with their circuit proving technology, but it’s limited in temporal scope by the fact that there’s a transition between transparent and hidden addresses). Then there’s the amounts of a given transaction (modern cryptocurrencies use range proofs to conceal the amounts but older currencies don’t).
To recap, there’s access information like IP, transaction information that can be used to reassemble the transaction graph, and balance information which, again, can be used to reassemble the transaction graph. The broad point is that if you can assemble the transaction graph, any additional information, like a list of known addresses, will severely deprecate the privacy of the entire system.
There are potentially ways around this, but they all involve breaking transaction linkability, which is fraught with peril for a variety of reasons (such that no currency has actually achieved this in a meaningful way so far).
There's also zero knowledge proof contracts on Ethereum that provide privacy, like the mixer tornado.cash
Now, there true anonymous cryptocurrency but bitcoin isn’t one of them.
Having a public transaction record makes it possible, even easy to identify and track behaviors of anyone.
Everyone you give money to knows exactly where all of that money has been and presumably who you are.
You can make it more anonymous by doing some things, but then it's just ordinary money laundering, but honestly, more difficult.
Or in other words, what makes that sentence more true than sentences replacing the word Bitcoin with the words phone/email/pigeon carrier/etc?
Genuine question, not rhetorical - I don't really follow bitcoin.
Bitcoin can be used with novel targets (receiving addresses) for each uniquely received transaction: i.e. instead of having one bank account with all your transactions, each transaction is in its own anonymous bank account. By doing this, outsiders cannot know that two transactions are owned by the same person without that owner otherwise revealing the association via co-mingling funds or revealing ownership off-network (ex. sending to exchange that does KYC+AML).
Also, I can't imagine it's very convenient to manage a large number of separate keys.
You can have one secret master key and then derive many keys from that [1]. Without the master key you cannot tell that they are linked. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_derivation_function
A computer can do that for you.
...what is a "system administrator" anyway, and why is my computer telling me to ask them for help?
Today Monero or maybe ZCash is leading the privacy department and they do offer the anonymity you're after (with some weaknesses of course).
it's when you connect the transaction to some bank (like, when you transfer from the wallet on your computer to Coinbase where they have your tax ID number, then withdraw to your real-world bank) that it can be so easily traced.
but if you just keep some btc in a wallet and do business out of that it's effectively cash. even if you bought bitcoins on Coinbase then transferred to your local wallet, once it leaves Coinbase the wallet ID itself doesn't have anything tying it to the laptop in your friend's basement in Brazil. from there who knows where it goes, I just bought pizza with it officer idk what the guy who sold me the pizza spent it on
a transaction ledger itself isn't inherently identifiable. otherwise we would know who just transferred $1B+ in this article and not have a bunch of comments wondering who it is lol
The person "Paying" the other person could have backed up the private key and simply recovered it at a later date to send to another wallet.
Bitcoin is not gold, so don't think of it like gold.
The recipient would be wise to immediately spend the coins to an address only they know, unless they have absolute trust in the giver.
As they say: not your keys, not your bitcoin...
The entire history of every transaction between every wallet is visible. This means if someone knows your wallet ID (i.e. you bought something from them and shipped it) they know exactly how much bitcoin you have in that wallet.
Some people try to be anonymous on it, but as some of the drug dealers on Wall Street Market found out, that's pretty hard to do. Law enforcement was able to track down some of them by tracing their bitcoin transactions.
Monero, and to a lesser extent, Zcash are coins that were designed to be anonymous (Although Zcash has opt-in privacy, whereas Monero is default)
It's not anonymous anymore. Transactions are being tracked to the ip addresses they originated from. This tracking has been going on since 2014[0]
From the article:
>But there is no top-down coordination of the Bitcoin network, and its flow is far from perfect. The Koshys noticed that sometimes a computer sent out information about only one transaction, meaning that the person at that IP address was the owner of that Bitcoin address. And sometimes a surge of transactions came from a single IP address—probably when the user was upgrading his or her Bitcoin client software. Those transactions held the key to a whole backlog of their Bitcoin addresses. Like unraveling a ball of string, once the Koshys isolated some of the addresses, others followed. >
>Ultimately, they were able to map IP addresses to more than 1000 Bitcoin addresses; they published their findings in the proceedings of an obscure cryptography conference. ....
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/why-criminals-cant-h...
How could you possibly know?