Great idea to have your bank balance on a ledger that's publicly available. Another home run from the crypto lads.
Just knowing he's CEO of a crypto company means he probably has a lot of crypto.
Yes it is tied to you, when you spend it.
Or
> there is a pretty small set of people who can access the information.
Which one is it?
What makes crypto unique in this setting is that it's easy for the kidnappers to receive ransom in a way that's very hard to trace back to them after the fact.
The story of, say, someone successfully kidnapping Bezos in a lightning operation and trying to take a good bite of his wealth is quite different than the same if you kidnapped Satoshi while he has access to his keys. It's not even in the tracing, but how much you can take away successfully, and how fast.
The extremely wealthy like Bezos have contingency plans and systems for this situation.
I’m assuming it wouldn’t be Bezos himself doing it. You would contact his employees and tell them to get you the crypto if they want him back.
Yes. That's the point, the ideal target is one that doesn't have contingency plans, not someone who has crypto.
I don't see how. Unless you're talking about a people who owns a significant percentage of a publicly-traded company, but that's most certainly not "any company owner". Probably less than 1% of the population.
This information is legally required to be available to prevent money laundering, fraud, other financial crimes, etc.
[0] https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/12199449/Foobar-O%C3%...
Ultimate Beneficiar Ownership information can be only accessed by authorities.
e.g. ‘ Toyota Baltic Aktsiaselts (10234087)’ lists 1 senior manager under ‘Beneficial owners’… which is clearly nonsense.
He probably doesn’t even own 50% of the intermediary company registered in Estonia… let alone 100%.
Edit: And ‘SIA Toyota Material Handling Baltic Eesti filiaal (11629379)’ doesn’t list anyone at all in that section.
So it is an example of the information in at least one section being completely unreliable, with not even an attempt of an ‘owned by non-eu parent company’ disclaimer explaining why it’s fine to list a random senior manager as something that he’s clearly not…
Turns out that in a functioning society, it’s not a big deal if someone knows how much money you made last year. Thieves and kidnappers are not lurking around every corner after all.
Money and nudity are still the great taboos for Americans. These national obsessions must be closely guarded or some kind of calamity will consume the sinners who exposed their bodies and bank accounts.
When you're at the bottom in a country that has decent safety nets for you isn't as bad as the US. And once you've done one crime, the rest get easier to justify, I would assume.
"Average" people may not share their wealth in general (in part because they may not want friends and family to know they have a lot of money) but it's no secret that the CEO or SVP of a Fortune 500 company has a ton of money.
Just another example of where crypto thinking they are hip/trendy for breaking the norms. Some lessons of bucking the traditional methods are gonna hurt more than others.
This is actually less true than you assume (barring Monero). Crypto, and Bitcoin especially, is less (less, though not yet completely) of a Wild West due to Western nations enforcing KYC laws. Through this, addresses can be traced back to real people. Further chain analysis (Chainalysis is the name I'm most familiar with) allows investigators to follow the money through an immutible chain stretching back to 2008.
In short, Bitcoin is not private. It is arguably one of the least private ways to transact, considering the Blockchain will show the history of every wallet, and where every Sat started and ended. Unless you take enormous precautions, it can be traced back to you.
Whether the feds can get to you is another story, but one as old as time.