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Comment by bowmessage | Hacker News Reader

No doubt there are other copies of those codes, but now Collins has plausible deniability :)

Seems to be a little bit of doubt though:

> Much of what he has told the Garda has been supported by a range of witnesses, including those who cleared his house, his landlord and others who helped him break up his bitcoin fortune into 12 accounts. Garda believe he has genuinely lost the codes for the accounts

But if they are in on the reward, they might just help corroborate his story in order to get a piece. Who knows?

they've corroborated that he owned a fishing rod which was disposed of.

even assuming the codes were stored there he could have 10 other copies of the same in other places and how would anybody know. they could be encoded in a simple way to make them unrecognisable and unusable to anybody but him.

No way would he be stupid enough to have these only on a single sheet of paper. Surely he considered the possibility of a fire, for example. And just because witnesses seem to think something only shows that he did the right thing with respect to them too. I might leave as much as $300 with a sheet of paper, but not $50M+.

There's no intelligence test required to become a criminal.

He sells weed so he's a criminal?

If they know the wallet address, any movements will be a giant neon sign screaming "hey, arrest me again!"

Fairly easy to pull off without any chance of getting caught. Get a tails VM and use some Chinese exchanger to change those coins to monero, veeeery slowly spend the monero.

Odds are you wouldn't be risking any significant punishment either.

Or use coinjoin

Also possible, but more difficult and significantly slower.

I mean, that would make for an interesting legal case. I feel that you could try and argue though that some Bitcoin 0-day was used to move the funds and retain your deniability...

Even the officers hope this happens one day (! good luck to them, if the tech existed the coins would be immediately worthless...)

"... officers said they were hopeful advances in technology would one day enable them to access the bitcoin so it could be sold."

Doubling down on perjury as a legal tactic is unwise.

I think it would only be interesting in that folks who think crypto is magically law-proof would discover that no, it's not. Not at all.

>Doubling down on perjury as a legal tactic is unwise.

This is Ireland we're talking about. Not the US.

Poor timing I guess.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/perjury-to-be-made-...

The obvious solution would just be to not say anything at all. For perjury to be on the cards here there'd have to be some next level stupidity involved.

Although, claiming that someone else could've done something isn't necessarily untruthful even if you did that thing yourself.

Are defendants even sworn in in Ireland? If not, a successful perjury prosecution seems rather unlikely https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/bill/2018/112/eng/v...

I really can't imagine why the guy running away with the bitcoin would ever be compelled to testify under oath.

> This is Ireland we're talking about. Not the US.

Perjury being a crime predates the US.

As it so happens, I am Australian.

Ok, if this guy was in Australia why would he ever be compelled to testify under oath about this?

The scenario given was that the defendant would argue that the coins moved due to a vulnerability in bitcoin. That's a positive statement, not a refusal to answer.

Yes, and when would a defendant be making statements under oath?

In the "interesting legal case" that the original scenario envisaged.

testify vs argue

I don't think anything in the original comment suggested that they'd be under oath, that's something you came up with.

Not really perjury... no lying... just an argument that the burden of proof isn’t on you just because you’re the last known holder of the keys and some $ moved around.

It is simpler than that. You can exchange equally valued wallets with someone from another jurisdiction and then just say truthfully that it wasn't you. A good program will make a couple of thousand small feeless transactions that miners may possibly include over many many blocks and poof. Money becomes too spread out to trace effectively.

The schemes that a smart person can come up with, given a few days, are numerous.

The schemes that the many smart people in the legal profession have seen through, collectively hundreds of thousands of times over centuries, are several orders of magnitudes more numerous.

A good lawyer would be doing everything short of bodily tackling you before you compounded your problems by adding subversive accounting to perjury to criminal profits.

The law is like the Simpsons. It goes on for so long that nothing is left unexamined. The odds that you will think of something that they haven't are slim.

While I have the utmost respect for the profession of law (except for the fact that it produces politicians whom I abhor), I don't think they've had quite enough time to think through every eventuality in tech yet. I'm not even sure if crypto currency ownership through key control is encoded in modern laws (as it should be for all digital assets).

If you have interesting precedents though, please enlighten me. Accounting forensics are always interesting for finance people like me, and the blockchain ledger just makes it easier and yet more complicated.

The law is always catching up, but folks regularly overestimate the scope of what it has already seen. It's an engine for conducting analogous reasoning, and while technology is ever changing, people are fairly limited in scope.

Take the key control problem. The separation of ownership and control crops up in a number of places: corporations, trusts, real property, intellectual property, probably a bunch of other places I have no idea about. It's likely that one or more of these would map sufficiently cleanly that a judge would make a binding order.

I don't have access to law reports to do a quick look for relevant cases. If you thought STEM paywalls were bad ...

Hmm. I don't agree with you on the fact that almost everything will have some easy to map analogous precedent / law clause. But I do appreciate the fact that I know literally nothing about law and that any fantastical suggestions I make would be ignorant at best, like you point out.

The flip argument is that new cases arise constantly and that the law is always encountering totally novel circumstances. But by and large, most things have been done, or some echo has been. It's just that the novel stuff gets more press.

That's a very dangerous thing to do (as soon as the deal is one, one party can easily move the content of both wallets to a key only they control).

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