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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

This was a large consideration in me offloading the vast majority of my cryptocurrency during the peak run up. The financial and digital hacking risk I was okay with, the physical risk to my family was too much. Even if I kept it off-site and in a safe deposit box somewhere no criminal would actually know that. Decoy systems and complicated multisig setups are all vulnerable to the ball peen hammer attack.

Had I known Bitcoin would turn into what it had I would have done far more to create a pseudonymous persona when participating in the early scene vs. my well known and easily linked handle to my real identity.

It was a fun ride, but the risk just got to be too much.

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Isn't this a risk that everyone with a nice, expensive house lives with? I fail to see how it's specific to bitcoin or cryptocurrency. Neighborhoods full of mansions are bound to have lots of expensive jewelry inside. Maybe you could say the novelty and hype around bitcoin attract pests, but generally speaking the more you have to lose the more you need to spend securing what's yours.

A great many people who live in nice houses are extremely illiquid, they may even have a negative net worth, and their visible property all saddled with debt.

Also how much are you really going to get from jewelry in a typical ritzy house after fencing overheads? Maybe a few grand?

Of course, people do break into ritzy houses too... though they generally do it when no one is home. Jewellery doesn't tend to have passwords.

That's a good point, to get someone's jewelry you just need to get in their house, to get someone's bitcoin you need to get your hands on them. I suppose that makes it more dangerous, but instead of jewelry, you know someone in a really nice house is probably very valuable to someone else, ransoming them is basically the same thing.

Crypto is much easier to move around and, with some effort, convert into harder to follow cryptocurrencies.

Very few people will be their own bank.

Surely no criminal knows that you've actually sold it all?

Bitcoin is not anonymous. Should one be able to link a wallet to a real name (like, for example, phil21), they can then follow each transaction that wallet makes, and where every coin ends up.

Once you know phil21's wallet is empty, those looking to heist anything would look through which wallets the coins ended up in, and start linking identities to those wallets.

If a criminal knows to look, they see the risk no longer matches the reward. If they don't know to look, odds are they weren't involved enough to have followed phil21's coins and wallet back to a street address in the first place.

Sure, the risk isn't zero, like you're implying, but it's dramatically lower.

Why does phil21 necessarily have one wallet?

I find it doubtful that the majority of these heists follow anything like the pattern you've described. I think much more likely is just something simple along the lines of "xyz was active in Bitcoin in 2011, they're still using exchanges as of 2020 because we have a leaked email database, they probably have either nothing or a metric ton of coins, let's give it a go".

If anything I think that someone shouting loudly "I have definitely sold it all, I promise" is a sign that they probably haven't.

There are thousands of definite targets. People don't actually plan maybe crimes with coconspirators unless they want to be maybe dead.

So phil traded coin for real money. Why aren't they after that money?

Fiat money is harder to steal because you can't just transfer hundreds of thousands or millions about from mainstream banks without questions being asked.

For the most part I don't think that the GP has the story straight.

You can't really have it both ways - either Bitcoin is desirable to criminals because it's untraceable enough to get away with it etc, or it's not. I think that they're overstating the ease of finding a person's complete holdings.

Having said that, amusingly, if I had to think of the best way to force someone with a million dollars in a bank account to give me it... the first thing that comes to mind would be to hold them hostage and say to them, get KYC'd on a crypto exchange and send me the crypto. I think that the biggest barrier would be that with no prior history their bank and the exchange would throw a big fat WTF and probably lock everything down for weeks.

I'd say it's really a mix here: It's traceable enough to make Phil uncomfortable, but not every criminal will know it's traceable (especially by government agencies).

Your point is the big one though - one cannot suddenly, unexpectedly, and without a history of doing so, transfer six-figure sums without traditional financial institutions looking at said transaction fairly closely. Bitcoin doesn't have this drawback

There’s more friction involved in withdrawing money from a bank. You can do stuff like cancel transfers within a time window, something that’s not usually possible with cryptocurrency

Oh, this thought has definitely crossed my mind quite a bit. Just not much I can do about it!

So you are saying we should torture you a bit more until you say where your private key is.

I guess the lesson here is to never brag and keep the lowest possible profile.

Yeah. Don't go around wearing one of those Bitcoin tshirts.

How would the criminals know you actually offloaded it?

One tactic might be to go on a public forum and claim you offloaded it while still holding it.

I mean, the premise is more or less the same as that of keeping your money in gold bars under your bed, except without the physical labor. So yeah, seems like a bad idea.

When I was in high school, the computing teacher remarked that some people still don't believe that computers have benefited society. His answer to this was that they have nearly eliminated armed robbery, because when people were paid in cash, the payroll was an enormous target. Such heists used to be a commonplace risk, but a couple of generations have grown up without them.

Wouldn't this have been addressed by paper checks long before direct deposit came into play?

Hmm, it's years since I properly thought about this anecdote

Yes, in theory you could have done everything with checks. It didn't completely happen though, until after computerisation. In the UK, it turns out that employees had the right to receive pay in cash as late as 1986! And taking it away was controversial.So it may be that you are right that computerisation wasn't essential, but most likely the reduction in cost of banking spread it to enough people that armed robbery became less of a risk.

Gold bars that you can create a backup of in case of loss of protect at a molecular level with cryptography.

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