Hacker News Reader

Comment by pushcx | Hacker News Reader

> They also highlighted a multistep process they say the defendant used to pay for the Bitcoin Fog domain name more than a decade ago.

For anyone else curious, it's described in this affidavit, page 8: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.230...

View on HN

That was interesting. At first it reads like it could have been a deep investigation. Then you realize that with the right 3 datasets, it's trivial to reveal this level of attempted obfuscation.

Mt. Gox didn't help. Liberty reserve didn't help. Bitcoin shuffling didn't help.

If it looks like a money laundering tool with a paper trail, it's eventually just a prosecution tool.

One day, Monero books will be cracked wide open and we won't even know until later.

The initial account in the chain belongs to Sterlingnov. However where is the evidence that subsequent accounts belong to him? Maybe he was selling the BTC on Bitcoin-otc or some other random place that existed back in the days, and now he is wrongly linked to the guy.

Edit: sorry, missed the evidence about using same IP for both the mtgox and LR account. Weird using the chain of transactions and then doing that kind of rookie mistake.

> and included links to a clearnet website for BITCOIN FOG (www.bitcoinfog.com), the Tor onion site (http://foggeddriztrcar2.onion), and a Twitter feed for updates on the site (www.twitter.com/#!/@Bitcoinfog)

This is how many illegal services get decloaked. They have a clearnet domain, but ironically a darknet .onion too which is what they should just have, not a clearnet domain (if what you're doing is illegal or operates in a legal grey area). I am aware it's possible to get a clearnet domain anonymously with services like NJALLA[0], but you have to take extra special care, pay with crypto, do everything over Tor, use XMPP w/OTR etc

[0] https://njal.la/

To me that process highlighted looks more to do with how to convert fake e-bucks back into real dollars via liberty reserve and less to do with any type of criminal structuring but I'm not IRS agent trying to hang a case on someone.

What purpose do you see served by opening three Mt. Gox accounts under three different names and sending bitcoin from the first, to the second, to the third before sending it out to Liberty Reserve?

I read it a few times but for me to pretend I understand why this person made three separate transactions to pay an $86 hosting bill speaks more to me of a lack of consistent revenue or source of funds.

Ocamm’s Razor doesn’t point me to malice. It’s just as easily a kid trading gift cards $20/time until he has the funds. This looks like an idea that starts small, and frankly when it was invented it wasn’t illegal at the moment of creation.

It’s the story laid out in the court case and the changing of regulations and laws that created the crime. Inception of an idea alone doesn’t lead me to believe the intent was malice; privacy, obfuscation, the lack of funds maybe.

Obfuscation can be as simple as protecting privacy.

As an example I can say the first day I stepped foot in a cryptocurrency community was on IRC about 13 years ago. I didn’t realize Freenode showed your hostmask by default and random people had IPwhois’d my netmask, asking about where I work, pulling up the address on street view…

I’ve exclusively used rented servers bouncers cloaks etc ever since. That’s the community I realized I was dealing with.

> pulling up the address on street view…

What ISPs provide this level of detail to people other than law enforcement? (And I'm pretty sure law enforcement need to follow an actual process too) Is it a US thing? Looking up my IP tells you... A different city, where presumably my ISP owns some infrastructure or office space

Reply on news.ycombinator.com