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Comment by Element_ | Hacker News Reader

If you had access to this wallet how would you actually convert that many bitcoins to hard currency anonymously?

Prepare crapload of wallets on different exchanges for monero cryptocurrency. Prepare same amount of crapload of wallets for bitcoin as well. Split this new wallet into those bitcoins wallets. Use them to exchange to monero on your most convenient exchanges - preferably outside US so coindesk/Coinbase is out of question here. Use monero mules to mix them with other cryptocurrencies - this is the point where you lose your FBI/NSA tail. Get them out on crapload of hard currency bank around the world. By the time somebody will finish tracking to a single person a century would've passed and you're dead. End of game.

>so coindesk/Coinbase is out of question here

coindesk is a blog, not an exchange.

Yes, he said it's out of question :D

Lol, this is one of the funniest "technically the truth" posts i've seen in a while.

every exchange is going to ask verification if you want to deal with more than $1k

There are a bunch of shady exchanges that don't.

Can you name any? I’ve seen this claim repeatedly but never been able to find one myself.

The ones secretly controlled by the FBI.

Bisq

Nice try FBI.

https://kycnot.me

So parallelize your scripts and create 1 million accounts across many platforms.

No, they wont.

https://kycnot.me

One needs to track only one such conversions, and investigate each involved party.

There is a limit here, because there are not that many cryptocurrency transactions. So each transaction chain must be small, or the number of chains must be small. Anyway, the restrictions on international investigations are probably a much larger issue than any splitting and washing that one can effectively do.

> monero

One potential problem is that $1B is so huge that you'd have to do this slowly to avoid a major crash.

Trade it for a cryptocurrency with stronger anonymity properties and then slowly launder that through a self-owned digital service that ostensibly accepts cryptocurrency payments or donations.

Just ask HSBC[1]!

[1]: relatively famous for aiding and abetting money laundering on a large scale.

ref: https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...

They went from being worth $350K to $1B. What currency could you possibly convert them to that is harder than that?

If the commodity in question was anything other than Bitcoin nobody would be saying something like that with a straight face. I think “Beanie Baby” is too strong a term for Bitcoin since they are much more “inherently” valuable ($5 of Bitcoin is much more useful than a $5 stuffed animal). Bitcoin will very likely never be worthless.

But a large chunk of Bitcoin’s 2020 wealth comes from it being a speculative instrument - as your comment indicates! I hope this dies down eventually but obviously Bitcoin is objectively high-risk. We are still in the first year of a serious recession, and significant political turbulence, and a pandemic. It’s not irrational to put that money into dollars / euros / etc.

Speculation about the (unknowable) future is how we allocate all resources in the present. A lot of people on HN seem to lump the "buy because price is rising" speculators in with the "buy because Bitcoin will become the foundation of the financial internet" speculators.

Investors who understand Bitcoin's potential do it an indispensable service. They inform the public (through price information) of that which most of the public is unable or unwilling to figure out on their own: that Bitcoin has tremendous potential to change the world and warrants serious attention, both currently for certain people as a hideable, unconfiscateable, transportable, no-third-party-risk store of wealth and in the future for everyone as a transactional currency (and as the cornerstone of the financial internet).

What can you buy with your Bitcoins? Can you pay your rent with them? Can you pay your electric bill, or internet? Can you buy gas? Can you buy groceries?

Sigh.

I'll take that as a no. So how is it "hard currency" if you can't buy the things you want with it?

The "hard" part of hard currency refers to its monetary properties - i.e. how easy it is to inflate the supply. On this metric Bitcoin is harder than anything else out there. So then we are arguing about whether it's a "currency" or not.

I personally accept is as payment, and therefore consider it a currency. Why would I want to buy things with it today when I can use ever inflating dollars for that?

Look that’s just not what “hard currency” is. “Hard currency” basically means “money which is considered a reliable store of value in major international markets.” Bitcoin simply isn’t that. No functional national government or large corporation is going to sign a large contract in Bitcoin - the very act of signing it could dramatically devalue the currency! You can’t just say Bitcoin is hard currency and devise some random measure of “hardness” out of ideological convenience.

Bitcoin is a fine technology and a fine thing to put part of your wealth into, especially if you support the tech and want to use it to buy things or invest. It’s also brand new, it’s price / USD or euro is obviously unstable, and there’s a global pandemic-depression! It’s just short-sighted (and intellectually dishonest) to say Bitcoin is low-risk and “hard currency” because it’s protected against inflation.

> Bitcoin simply isn’t that

Agree to disagree. I would say you're the one twisting the definition of "hard currency" (Wikipedia is not the source of all truth).

"Hard money" originally reffered to gold. When paper currency took over the term "hard currency" was used to distinguish between good and bad paper currencies.

I maintain that the "hard" part (which derives from gold) refers to the inability to be inflated easily. But I'm happy to concede that Bitcoin is not a currency yet in most peoples' eyes. I'm happy to switch to calling it a hard money.

> Hard currency refers to money that is issued by a nation that is seen as politically and economically stable. Hard currencies are widely accepted around the world as a form of payment for goods and services and may be preferred over the domestic currency.

BTC is inarguably NOT "widely accepted around the world as a form of payment for goods and services". I'm very sorry to break it to you.

I don’t own any Bitcoins and I never have, but if I did, I could at least buy some goods with them. Not most of those, but I have in fact seen real life stores that accept Bitcoin as currency.

I have as well, but not many. Certainly not enough to call it a "hard currency" (of which the entire point is that it's widely, almost universally, accepted).

bitrefill.com is a decent start to bridge that gap.

You can pay rent with it if your landlord accepts it. I'm a landlord and accept it.

Are you declaring that in your taxes? And tax authorities are cool with it? What exchange rate do you apply, giving the volatility? In which country?

Yes, declare it on taxes. AUD exchange rate. Australia.

How many landlords who accept it do you think there are? I would guess somewhere below 1%.

you can buy stuff at Target, Ebay, and Amazon, just to name 3. You can get groceries at Target, so yes. You can probably find gas cards, too.

What can you buy with gold bullion? Is gold worthless?

Who said anything about worthless? Gold bullion is not a hard currency. Nobody buys gold in order to spend it.

I would say wash it thru Monero and then mix it, from there if I were the illicit type I would try to do offline exchanges with gold bugs who are also crypto enthusiast to get it into hard assets. 1 Billion in gold is actually only about a half a semi-load full, it would take some time but assuming you fractured it into a bunch of different monero wallets, you have time on your side. If one get's compromised you take what you have and run. Because it would be safe to assume at that point that there are tools monitoring the chain by state level actors that none of us are privy to. If you are going to live that life paranoia is key.

Private auction. You wouldn't be anonymous to your broker, but no one else needs to know who you are.

Sucks for the buyer to get such tainted coins!

someone who buys millions in crypto in a private auction at a fraction of its price knows what they are getting

Very very very very very slowly using a series of off-shore bank accounts.

The simplest is probably to make a deal with criminals that have an existing money laundering network. The trick would be avoiding having said criminals simply kidnapping you and forcing you to reveal the keys.

Low volume ways would be to use the bitcoin to purchase drugs or other illegal goods by the kilo and sell the drugs the usual way.

It's unlikely that the person needs to full billion immediately. Five or ten million a year could be enough for many people and at that kind of level exchanging for monero could work.

There is also the option of sending small amounts to thousands of real people's bitcoin wallets (and lots more to wallets you control) and letting those people deal with the FBI first.

Buy a Trump Tower apartment for a grossly inflated price, and offer to pay in bitcoin. If you act quickly, the deal will get done before there's risk of prosecution.

A crowd sourced cash out. I would never expect to get the full 1 billion dollars, so I'm basically going to offer the bitcoin at half price to whoever wants it, payment being in monero. I'd possibly set the price lower if demand is low, but adjust depending on how demand and monero value fluctuations go. I think people would buy the coins, especially if there's decent publicity and marketing. Frame it as free money for whoever wants it, and I would walk away happy with anything more than $100 million and my anonymity.

Congrats, your advertisement now looks like every scam ever on the internet.

Ever wonder why there are so many of these scams? Even with very low conversion efficiency, it works over time with acceptable safety guarantees for the sell side. See scalped tickets, low cost bus travel & gift cards.

- take out a loan (or borrow) money

- slowly buy bitcoins on exchanges over several years

- destroy the wallet with 1B publicly ( I assume here it is possible. I heard of possibility to transfer to reserved/impossible wallets )

- wait a bit for the exchange rate to go up

- sell your previously bought bitcoins

- pay back the loan

Edit: OK, maybe $1B is too small for this scheme to work. But if the wallet would contain say 50% of all bitcoins this would be a possibility.

Buy a container load of heroin, place it with the local kingpin.

If you're going for the full amount at once, it doesn't even require an on-network transaction. Just send a thumb drive with the wallet on it.

But then the recipient doesn’t know if the original owner has made a copy of the key.

That won't matter anymore after they transfer it to a wallet they control, like they did today. Will it?

There can be options, the OpenDime[0] is one that’s intriguing. The owner seeds the entropy before it can be used and the only way to get the private key is to physically (and visibly) alter it.

[0] https://opendime.com/

I wonder how difficult it would be to extract the key from the device. Probably not very.

I also like how they say "no trust", but in reality, you have to trust them (and their entire supply chain).

Edit: from their FAQ: "Can I re-seal after breaking the seal? No. A permanent change is made inside the flash memory of the processor." Oof. Big oof.

It would be interesting and probably a big deal to test this out, I don’t think I have the chops for it but hope to read about it if you (or anyone else) gives it a shot!

I don't either (although I certainly wish I did). I hope someone does too, though.

Yes, but to put the money on the OpenDime device requires an on-network transaction.

That requires a lot of trust. What if the sender or recipient gets compromised? Gonna be a murdery dispute to save $12.

Money laundering which people are describing various ways of doing

You couldn't. An easy guess is that every bitcoin mixer is compromised. You could maybe withdraw $100 at a time from bitcoin ATMs, until KYC/AML forces ATM operators to maintain a coin/address blacklist.

>An easy guess is that every bitcoin mixer is compromised

there are trustless mixer networks[1]. The bigger problem is that you're going to run out of liquidity. You preferably want to exchange 1B of "dirty" bitcoin for 1B of "clean" bitcoin, not tumble the 1B of bitcoin and get back the same dirty coins.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin

exchanging to Monaro solves this problem.

With $1B you could start your own mixers and hire people to run them. Or even start your own exchange.

Anyone you'd hire would be risking breaking the law in the U.S. or some other country, plus you'd have no legal protection if they decided to screw you over.

monero

bisq

Negotiate with the Russian Government to cash out in return for anonymity, citizenship and them taking an 80% commission.

What could possibly go wrong trying to negotiate with <any country>'s intelligence/ops departement while being a very disappearable private person!

Are you claiming that snowden is the owner of these coins????

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