Watch a £60m Bitcoin Heist in Real Time

newstatesman.com

23 pointsbarce4 comments

Assuming the current bitcoin tulip mania keeps going for a while, can't the thief just launder small amounts over a long period of time?

Right now, a small army is attempting to track the thief, but how many will still be doing so in a week, a month, a year? Obviously there is a risk that in a year bitcoins will be worthless, but at current value, couldn't the thief be cashing out $1,000 a day (a single bitcoin) without being traced?

Given that he has stolen $30M, getting $1000/day would really suck for him. At some point he will get greedy and desperate and make a mistake, and hopefully they catch him.

We really don't know, if enough effort is put here, in terms of expertise and cpu power, I think that it will be very hard for him to cash out somehow. Especially if other exchangers support this kind of witch-hunt. You could write a program to trace the addresses 24/7 and do the math. It's kinda complicated, with mixers, but with kind of sum... It's not easy to hide/cash out without getting noticed.

Fascinating stuff. I hope the administrator, if not involved, manages to somehow identify the thief.

I wonder if such a huge heist level can be tracked down by the NSA's infrastructure.

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