Hacker News Reader

Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

They can certainly cash it out using a number of bitcoin to currency services. So the hacker has done the equivalent of stealing $1mil out of a bank, except a bank is very easy to trace while stealing BTC means the thief is home free.

  https://www.bitcoin.de/en?cr=1
  https://www.bitstamp.net/
  https://btc-e.com/
  https://www.bitfinex.com/
  https://localbitcoins.com/

View on HN

BitCoins are difficult to anonymize. If you take your stolen coins directly to an exchange, the exchange would be able to identify you if law enforcement asked.

Well, you could use a site like this: https://localbitcoins.com/ but then again doing hundreds of these cash transactions in person seems like it would be stressful.

Seems to me that the most useful point of the LocalBitcoins service is to find traders willing to exchange via postal service. Face-to-face interaction seems like a bad move, especially since the money you're sending could be tracked to a "theft" and the service or trader might decide to snoop on you. And again, as the criminal complaint against Nod showed, using USPS is only safe if you act with sufficient randomness and change profiles. Otherwise they may detect a large pattern you generate.

It's also safer because it seems the government isn't likely to setup a major investigation for the case of BTC "theft".

(I say "theft" because it is possible, but unlikely, that the owner of the wallet transferred the money to someone intentionally, to pay them or something.)

They may very well hang onto them for a while, and in the event the price goes up even more in the coming months, they may make out with quite a bit more than $1M.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com