Comment by rootsudo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rootsudo | Hacker News Reader

I disagree, with the stock market manipulation.

The idea isn't to be anonymous per se, it is to blend in with the crowd. You join a few communities, you can easily, easily pull the Casino Royale short position/puts.

Say that production is halted, that you discovered faulty accounting, immediate recall, etc. Tesla would've plummeted.

And that's if you want to blend in with the crowd of volume and people holding puts, which, are not that expensive, especially if you push out a few weeks.

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With bitcoin, it is not anonymous. You will have a pain to cashout 100k+ of bitcoin. The address is now literally blacklisted, the coins will be forever tracked, exchanges blocked and whenever there's movement, ironically, twitter threads will appear similar, if not akin to bitmex margin calls.

Any localbitcoin dealer worth their salt, would flag it because even if it's in escrow, it is most likely that small amount would blacklist their own account, especially since most traders are cheap and will send from exchange>localbitcoin escrow.

I think for most people the stock market manipulation would stand out enough to warrant deeper investigation.

- If you never trade in options or short sell, but the first trade you do is a massive windfall, that will stand out.

- To earn a decent amount, you need a lot of exposure to the particular stock. If you're not exposed somewhere else, and only to tesla to maximize this particular great trade, again that stands out.

- The above may narrow the scope, so when investigators look at you particularly, does your personal background include technical capabilities that others in the narrowed group would not have.

I suspect your correct in the sense, that if you had lots of assets, regularly trade in markets, and can be prepared ahead of the hack that you might be able to pull off market manipulating. But if you stumble into this huge hack as the author sort of points out, and were trying to pull this off before someone else discovers the bug or exploit and are unprepared, for many it doesn't seem likely they'd be able to manipulate the markets without standing out.

There's a variety of well known ways to launder bitcoin. Most popular ones being

- You could use a tumbler.

- You could use an exchange without KYC. Not all exchanges are US based.

- You could use websites such as morphtoken (preferably over a VPN, TOR, or i2p proxy) convert to any blockchain (perhaps Dash to create anonymized transactions) then convert back to BTC.

And a few more...

Playing the stock market is a huge risk as the SEC can probably filter down most participants who would've benefitted. It's far riskier.

To earn money by fake news, you need to bet against the crowd that will act on the fake news, and you need to make the bets prior to the fake news. The crowd will lose some money on the act, if you properly blend in with them, you won't earn anything.

And if you want to blend in with trades made by some insider community, then any posts you make there to trigger that crowd (and the timing of these posts) will be useful evidence to separate you from the crowd. I mean, it's just as with the investigation of pump-and-dump schemes with the added benefit that after warrants to sieze and review computers you can also get some evidence of the hack.

> The idea isn't to be anonymous per se, it is to blend in with the crowd. You join a few communities, you can easily, easily pull the Casino Royale short position/puts.

This significantly underestimates effectiveness of market surveillance tools.

Even so, I think that there's enough random idiots making random trades on the market that you could get away with it. You could anonymously post something that sounds vaguely credible on reddit's WSB board and use that as your justification if the SEC asks. If you do a good job, you've just convinced 100 people to be your patsies (and made them a handsome sum in the meantime)

That is predicated on dumb money not trading in patterns that are visible to market surveillance. We know for it not to be the case.

First of all, market surveillance is going to score trades based on profitability and on the expected value of outcomes. If the actor in question does not have a habit of trading options in certain patterns, he will be sticking out of the sea of other bets, significantly reducing the number of actors he can hide in. This will flag money movement. This will flag strange account funding. This will flag strange volume. This will flag strange time the order was placed in compared to the usual trades of this individual.

> If you do a good job, you've just convinced 100 people to be your patsies (and made them a handsome sum in the meantime)

This will probably not increase but decrease randomness.

The trick of avoiding being picked up on a market surveillance is not to hide among others who do what one does rather it is to hide a specific action one performs among a pattern of one's typical actions. That is why a hacker who does not normally trade options will most likely get nailed should he win based on a hack.

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