The Internet Trolls the FBI’s “Private” Bitcoin Wallet | Hacker News Reader

The Internet Trolls the FBI’s “Private” Bitcoin Wallet

techcrunch.com

74 pointsaelaguiz50 comments

Notes that are only visible to people looking at a certain address on a certain website, nowhere else. I truly do not think this it at all newsworthy.

"Public notes" are a construction of blockchain.info—despite the confusing name—they are most certainly not part of the actual Bitcoin blockchain.

Bitcoin does have the ability to store this kind of information in the actual blockchain, but blockchain.info decided it was not worth the bloat.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7864/is-a-public-...

That's incorrect. You can shoehorn your data in, and blockchain.info tried for a period, but removed it when it drew the ire of almost every core developer. It just wastes space and bloats the unspent outputs database.

Good to hear. Bitcoin already occupied 5-8GB last time I fired my client up, many moons ago.

13GB with indexes now. If it's an issue, just use an SPV client like MultiBit that doesn't store the blockchain at all.

Just want to point out this bullshit comment at the end, "the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning".

The author is trying to make it sound like Silk Road dropped the price drastically. No, 260 was the high point early this year. The value has been relatively stable between $80 and $140 since then.

Sometimes it seems to me like people are intentionally causing fear, uncertainty, and denial about Bitcoin just to swing the price in their favor.

There are also many commenters and bloggers that are writing bullish comments on Bitcoin because they happen to own a lot of them, believe in it's mission etc. I would argue many more since it's not even economically rational to spread FUD to depress the current market price of BTC and then buy it when its potential to appreciate in future also depends entirely on confidence since it isn't backed by any tangible assets or income streams.

Sure, it would be better journalism to add the detail that Bitcoin has actually risen since "only" falling ~15-20% in response to the Silk Road seizure and explain that the 50% fall from its peak price happened in a few hours on April 10 and had nothing to to with fears over Silk Road, but I don't believe that would leave readers with any more faith in BTC as being generally stable.

No insight either way on this, but I did buy a (very) small amount of BTC after the initial post-Silk Road fall on the chance that the market was acting too irrationally. I've been curious about Bitcoin for a while, and now seemed like as good a time as any to buy a little bit and give myself some financial stake.

If a currency fluctuates 300% in a year, I don't think it's out of line to note that it used to be 100% higher in value. Silk road's closer did drop the price a bit, after all.

It's also worthwhile to note, as long as this thread is engaged, that the value at 260 was a "spike" -- the only people who bought bitcoins at that price were speculators who couldn't bear the thought that the spaceship might fly away even higher without them on-board, and other I'd guess clueless users who didn't notice that what they were paying $260 for today could have been had for a maximum of $100 only two weeks prior to that date, with Bitcoin having never experienced such high valuations on any public market in the history of time leading up to that point.

No, the author isnt. This is the full quote: "The price after the Silk Road seizure has remained fairly constant but the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning."

It is a horrible worded statement as it doesnt specify the time frame within which the price fell from 260 to 130, but they clearly state it has been stable since the SR seizure

Because Techcrunch is full of hack writing, as we all have complained about since around 2010-2011 or maybe earlier.

It has to be said: geuis appears to have deliberately doctored that quote to provoke argument. The first half of the sentence directly contradicts the claim about the second.

I didn't read the last paragraph that way and you're taking only part of it:

>The price after the Silk Road seizure has remained fairly constant but the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning.

I thought it was pretty clear that the SR seizure didn't have an affect but it was mentioning that it is down from a high earlier in the year.

I think that your read is a "rather bullish" interpretation of the charts, too. You can see pretty clearly that it did fall, http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg10ztgSzm1g10zm2g2..., or another way, the last few days have seen above average volatility and a large spike in trading volume following the news.

Now, had you said that only today's spot price, one week after the news, looks basically unmoved by the event from the trades before October, I would have simply agreed with you. But you can't read that chart and tell me there was "no effect."

To clarify, I was only responding to geuis' interpretation of what the article said, not whether the article was correct or not. I honestly have no idea if the article is correct or not, but I also think that geuis was misrepresenting what the article said as written.

EDIT: I think you meant to respond to notahacker and not to me.

I did read his reply and that's where I heard "rather bullish" to quote, but I meant to respond to you; sorry just being pedantic, I realize you were just trying to respond, but I just thought it should be clear: the market moved, even if it bounced back rather quickly. There was in fact a ton of activity and big motion at the time of the announcement.

Definitely not moving from 260 to 130 as one might infer, but certainly a lot more movement than the rest of the week (or month?) prior.

In fact, bitcoin was only priced at $260 for a few hours in April 2013. Even then, the price was mostly between $80 and $140.

And it was only above $150 for six days.

If we limit ourselves to when things got stable in Mid-May, we see that the price has indeed drifted down from ~90 to ~70 then back up to 140, then bounced around between 120 and 140 over a period of weeks[1].

"Relatively stable" is not the same thing as "stable". That's ~40% variance, perhaps more (glanced, didn't do the math.) While not as bad as 260-130, it still ain't pretty.

[1] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg180ztgCzm1g10zm2g...

If it's possible (seemingly trivial?) to determine that any given individual is possession of a bitcoin at any given time, then... uh...

How is bitcoin an "anonymous" cryptocurrency?

I mean, I feel kind of stupid for even asking such a question, but given the circumstances, wouldn't that be an exceptionally important detail?

Based on all these second-hand accounts that I read about, sometimes written by journalists with an amateurish technical competency (which, by proxy, also renders me an amateur), it sounds like bitcoins are about as anonymous as an AOL e-mail addresses, or prepaid cellular phones.

It doesn't seem like they were actually conceived an anonymous system, but rather that some people devised processes through which they could produce an effective anonymity with transactions carried this instrument.

The cryptographic aspect of bitcoins seems to be geared only in favor of authenticity, and not anonymity. Were bitcoins ever conceived with true anonymity in mind? Are these revelations of identity just, due to elaborate and highly technical side-channel attacks?

Am I wrong in my perception that bitcoins seem to be an object where it's only happenstance that you can craft an anonymous position? ...that they are actually only offer pseudonymity?

Here's an analogy: every bill in your wallet has a unique serial number on it, right? Every bank account also has a unique ID number. Imagine that every wallet and cash register also has a unique ID. Now imagine that there's a shared database that gets a new entry every time a bill moves from one place to another where the entry just says "bill #X moved from location #Y to location #Z."

If you're careful, and you don't let anyone know the ID of your wallet or your bank account, then it doesn't matter if someone knows the transactions that involve your bills because no one knows that they're yours. Your anonymity doesn't break down until someone can tie one of those account numbers to you: by asking your bank for the owner of the account, for example, or by confiscating your wallet and looking at its serial number.

So, it's possible to be anonymous with bitcoin, but it's not easy when you want to actually buy something that has to be delivered to you or convert them to another currency.

Hmmm... Thanks for the explanation!

Just thinking that through, and from what I can gather from all my other osmosis and grokking of bitcoin (without actually participating and risking/investing real money in it), I think I get the general concept that (a certain degree of) anonymity can be had with bitcoins without a particularly sophisticated methodology. That the anonymity remains real, as long as certain behavioral protocols are maintained (not unlike the kind of behavior that must be adopted to successfully implement a password, such as don't write it down, don't type in front of video cameras, don't e-mail it, etc etc...).

The whole transaction history aspect bothers me at a gut level (much in the way that exit node analysis is a deep systemic flaw of TOR), and in many ways affirms for me that anonymity is an emergent behavior and byproduct of other factors inherent to bitcoin. True anonymity doesn't seem to have been an original design goal of the system.

The transaction history aspect is necessary though. Going back to my analogy, imagine that your bills were just a bill-sized piece of transparent plastic with a serial number on it and absolutely no other distinguishing marks; not even a special type of plastic or ink. If someone handed you one, how would you know it's authentic and has any value at all?

For Bitcoin, the answer is that you can look up the history of that serial number and verify that it's part of the blockchain, and you know that the blockchain is cryptographically secure and vetted by thousands of bitcoin miners expending a tremendous amount of computing power to make sure every serial id in the chain is valid. That just can't happen without a fully public transaction history going all the way back to the first bitcoin block.

...necessary for bitcoin, but problematic from the anonymity perspective.

The idea gnawing that the back of my mind is that, with the bitcoin equivalent of carrier-level traffic analysis, where a truly VAST swath of transaction/bitcoin history is known purely by way of the bitcoins themselves, "someone/anyone" might know much more than we would ordinarily expect them to, given our commoner's understanding of the total network state (in non-real-time) as an ordinary, layman participant at the ground level. Worse still, is the idea that such large-scale network awareness would then enable "parallel evidence construction" or bizarre trading strategies for market manipulation, denying any understanding to participants that such problems even exist.

This is not just a problem for criminals, but also from a large-scale trading perspective, when approaching a global population of participants where many, many entry-level players have serious disadvantages, compared to higher-order traders. Instinctively, to me at least, the barrier to manipulating bitcoin value feels drastically lower than traditional currencies. Maybe these sorts of baked-in fundamentals play a role?

Or, you could just use cash which doesn't have a wallet ID to be careful about.

You can also use letters instead of TLS

True, but to exchange cash you need to either physically hand it over or have it delivered.

If you exchange in person, then the other person will see you, and that person or a third party can capture an image of you which can be matched against a database of facial images. Identity blown, unless you're very careful to hide your face.

If you exchange by delivery, by whatever method, your package can be tracked to either endpoint. Even if you use a courier, that courier knows the endpoints and can be coerced into revealing them, and also might be able to identify you or capture an identifying image of you. Again, it's very easy to lose your anonymity.

It's all a matter of degree: the more likely it is that your transactions can be used as evidence against you (whether they're actually illegal or they're just being used as an intimidating force against you) the more you need to care about your anonymity. For most of us, most of the time, so long as we don't get creepy advertising that specifically references things we've looked at or purchased recently we don't really care about it.

to ease the access: https://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5G...

The top and bottom notes are a Bill Hicks quote, that's pretty classy as far as trolling goes.

I'd personally be a lot more tolerant of trolls if I got a token amount of cash every time I was trolled.

At current rates, each troll is sending $0.000012 per message. You'd have to receive more than 80 thousand troll messages to get a single dollar.

Still tolerant?

Fair enough, but if I'm reading it correctly, >300 BTC (~$40,000) has been added to that wallet since the 'trolling' began - in one case 253 BTC was transferred from someone who strangely claims to support a bunch of things that are in opposition to U.S. law and FBI practices. At least I think that's what the comment says - I don't speak Portuguese.

" Eu sou do Brasil... Eu quero expressar minha opinião sobre a drogas... o governo prende quem vende drogas só por causa que não da lucro para o governo... então acaba com com o cigarro com as bebidas alcoólicas..."

It say's: "Im from Brazil... I want to express my opinion about drugs... The government arest who sell drugs just because it don't bring any profit to the government... So end up with the cigarrets and the alcoolic beverages..."

Edit: Corrected a typo

I think the seizure of Silk Road absolutly had an impact on the value of BitCoins. The benefit of using BitCoins is that they provide a way to operate outside of traditional currency structures. Once BitCoins becomes something that can be seized, regulated, tracked, it becomes just like regular cash. That makes them a whole lot less valuable.

I actually suspect the joke is on "The Internet"

By now the FBI should be pretty savvy about these things.

If this incident doesn't alert authorities to the traceability of Bitcoin I don't know what will....

The real troll is that people use bitcoins

Hey, the price was going up like nuts until recently. If you had bought in or mined early, you'd be rich. Now that everyone sees they can be confiscated just like real currency, though, the price is half what it was. Would have been good to have a short position for this.

Can be confiscated? Not if the owner was paying attention. All that would be necessary is for an accomplice to have a copy of the wallet.dat file, in any form. In which case the coins could be moved out from under their noses.

As someone who thinks the feds abuse their forfeiture power on a regular basis, seeing them have a hard time makes me laugh.

How is this better than paper money? Store your paper money in a few secret locations, and have your accomplice run to those locations and take the money somewhere else when you are arrested.

Because if two people have a copy of the wallet file, you've got a situation which is essentially impossible with physical currency.

I'd liken it to two physical credit cards with the same number, but that's a poor analogue as the feds can just ring the card company and have the account seized regardless of the physical "pointers" to that data.

Bitcoin, access to the wallet file = access to the funds, at least until there's a spend. I believe that makes it rather unique.

I'm not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal but they've published a steady stream of articles on asset forfeiture abuse. That is from someone in government, or even a local law enforcement agency, deciding you've committed a crime and taking nearly all of your assets before any trial.

One statistic points to $500 million forfeited in 2010. That was a doubling since 2002, and something that did not even exist roughly 40 years ago.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...

There are many different US government agencies that can seize your assets, without trial, for a large number of reasons. This is not limited to you drugs or organized crime, but rather someone's belief that your money came from something that was illegal. In a case going to the Supreme Court next week, what they are being charged with may not even be illegal. The WSJ appropriately titles the article "How Prosecutors Rig Trials by Freezing Assets."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732411040457863...

Unfortunately bitcoin is not the solution. Because, if you attempt to use it to prevent asset forfeiture now your breaking money laundering laws. So now you can end up in jail even if you never did anything wrong in the first place.

Additionally, a judge could put you in prison indefinitely until you disclose and transfer your bitcoins. Unless you are facing the death penalty, and have a whole lot of bitcoins, you probably don't have much leverage.

Finally, the public paper trail of bitcoins will make it hard to "hide" them. I'm going to guess some of these regulators are split between liking and hating them. I would imagine that they are already piecing together the puzzle based on subpoenaed data and what is better sent to them from US compliant exchanges.

What is the solution? Making people aware that they are not free. That anyone in the state, local, or federal government has the ability to seize all of their assets at anytime. Making sure they understand that if this happens, they better have friends who will graciously front them hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars or else they will be seeing a public defender.

>Because, if you attempt to use it to prevent asset forfeiture now your breaking money laundering laws.

That would require intent to be proven.

(Not impossible or unfalsifiable, but it's another hurdle)

>Additionally, a judge could put you in prison indefinitely until you disclose and transfer your bitcoins.

If a third party spends those coins because they have the wallet file, the other copy of the wallet file becomes worthless and is no longer in your control to do anything with.

>Finally, the public paper trail of bitcoins will make it hard to "hide" them.

Not really. Between tumbling services, and the fact that it's stupidly easy to create a wallet out of thin air, at that point you've broken the ownership chain. (If wallet 123, known to belong to me, sends coins to wallet 456, you can't prove whether wallet 456 is under my control unless you happen upon the file in my possession).

> Now that everyone sees they can be confiscated just like real currency, though, the price is half what it was

The price briefly for a few days hit almost twice the current price seven months ago. Since then, it has also been worth almost half the current price.

Right now, BTC is trading at its 25 day moving average.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg180ztgSzm1g10zm2g...

Though about a year ago the price was at $11, and prior to that it was stable at $4 for quite some time.

Yes, indeed. It's seen some spectacular moves, but it's not a very solid narrative that the SilkRoad shutdown has harmed BTC substantially.

The fact it is averaging $130 up from $11 is an indicator of it's wild success. Adding it's stability in the face of SR being shut down which is also pretty amazing.

All these people who keep trying to say BTC is a failure keep getting proven wrong.

> Now that everyone sees they can be confiscated just like real currency, though, the price is half what it was

This event didn't cause the price to be halved. It actually didn't effect the price at all. The article makes a strange mention of some $230 number, which might have been the price like a year ago, but it's been pretty constant around 110-120 for a while now.

EDIT: Sorry, this was supposed to be a response to lnanek2, mis-clicked.

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