Hacker News Reader

Comment by croddin | Hacker News Reader

Satoshi's account on p2pfoundation.ning.com also made the first comment since he said "I am not Dorian Nakamoto." back in March. It says:

"Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently you didn't configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin."

http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topic/listForContributor...

View on HN

Why is every mention of possible disclosure of Satoshi's identity fraught with heavy overtones of "Your Life Is In Grave Danger"? We have many people who are much richer whose identities are not secret and we don't need to freak out constantly and warn them that They Are In Grave Danger. AFAIK he's not been accused of any crime either.

Is it maybe because Bitcoin enthusiasts have a large overlap with monatery cranks who tend to be conspiracy theorists?

While you're 95% right, you could also argue that irreversible hundred million dollar transactions are a feature unique to bitcoin. That could appeal to kidnappers.

So you're saying holding Bitcoin can be hazardous to our health? Whoa, I don't think that's one of the approved talking points.

If you have a few thousand dollars of gold in your house, you shouldn't worry too much.

But if you have a billion dollars of gold in your basement, you should be very, very paranoid.

Even with perfect security, you'd still be a ransom target.

If you were very paranoid would you rely exclusively on security through obscurity?

It might also occur to you to diversify out of the thing that puts you at risk. Maybe there's even some sort of establishment that can hold funds more securely. He should look into that.

"Security through obscurity" being bad only applies to cryptography, and have no bearing whatsoever to the concept of security in real life.

To answer your question, actually, yes, it's almost proven to be the most effective measurement for one's safety: don't want to get hurt? Don't let people find you: get in a forest/ mountain range and hide.

Now First Blood is an underrated movie but I'm not sure it, or anything else, supports your claims. Hiding in the mountains has been a proven way of lowering life expectancy for millennia.

This thread matches the "increases bob's chances of being a k00k" pattern from the recent thread patterns link: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/thread_patterns/

Lol missing context:

"Or he's really right and everyone else is wrong."

On HN I've seen that pattern and sometimes it was a well-respected poster, hammering on something pedantic and off-topic, derailing the thread. Point being, sometimes someone can be right, really knowledgeable and a (thread-localised) k00k.

added: then again, there's also something about HN's discussion structure (mainly lack of collapsing comments like Reddit has) that makes these derails get in the way much more than necessary. Reddit even has place for strings of puns without them significantly derailing the discussion.

Hey now, mountain air and the regular exercise of a vigorous outdoor life style increase ones life expectancy!

Oh sorry what were we talking about? I thought this was the weekly "Where you should move to/away from" thread.

> "Security through obscurity" being bad only applies to cryptography, and have no bearing whatsoever to the concept of security in real life.

Why do you believe this? The concept predates widespread use of encryption and originally applied to things like physical locks. Their "security through obscurity" approach was custom mechanisms which were easily defeated shortly after development by determined thieves. This race between security experts (in their various incarnations) and security breakers (again, in their various incarnations) has been going on since the first person tried to secure some property with something more complex than a crossbar on a door. And this race continues, even in the information age, to occur in both the physical and information realms.

That statement, read alone, sounds a bit more stronger than I intended for it to be. I agree with what you said. Although I should note that we aren't allowed to run around in top secret building to draw out the floor plan ;).

Thinking about it, I guess "security through obscurity" wasn't the correct term to use in the case. What I meant was simply that: there are completely valid reasons to keep your name and/ or location unknown, both for your safety, and otherwise convenience of life.

> But if you have a billion dollars of gold in your basement, you should be very, very paranoid.

At close to 25 tonnes, and ~1.3m³, I'd like to see the engineering behind such a heist

Kill occupants of building, move 1.3 cubic meters of gold in 30 trips with transport van. Now you have a few other problems, such as making sure that you're not going to end up in the same way. Besides surveillance cam footage recording your whereabout during part of your trip and the distance being fairly easily estimated if you do two trips in quick succession leading to a possible ID and or location of the stash.

But getting it out of there is fairly easy if you lack a conscience and have a van. If you had access to a slightly larger truck it would be easier still.

I believe all you need is several mini coopers.

I understand that reference.

Procuring a "slightly larger truck" should be trivial given the value of the heist.

> getting it out of there is fairly easy if you lack a conscience and have a van

new favorite HN quote

Someone stole 6 million pounds of maple syrup from Canada's strategic reserves. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-02/the-great-ca...

I'm sure moving a couple cubic meters of gold isn't a problem if you're motivated.

The Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, no less.

15 minutes frittered reading up on that one. Seems the guys set up in the same warehouse so they could have trucks coming and going for a year or so and set up a Maple Syrup dealers in a neighbouring state to ship it to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/business/arrests-made-in-m...

25 tonnes is not much... Five people can load it on two trucks in a few hours even without using any machinery.

Does this same danger also apply to bitcoin exchanges?

Are they heavily guarded?

Just wondering...

Ask Mt. Gox... Typically an exchange will keep most of its BTC in actual bank vaults. Similar to how you'd store a large amount of gold.

They claim they do but there's never been any 3rd party auditing or verification of this that I know of. In the gold business every reliable business has auditing and insurance while so far Bitcoin businesses are run like a regular startup with open offices. Who's cleaning the offices after hours with access to the workstations or servers, who are the hired developers and are they smuggling wallet stealing software inside to transfer to themselves while on a flight to Brazil, who is writing their custom wallet and is it robust, how do we know they didn't copy every address to themselves. Lot's of security questions I've never seen addressed by any of the big exchanges. There was a payment processor startup that posted their office to bitcointalk.org which was floor to ceiling open glass windows with laptops facing the outside. How many binoculars are trained on those laptops across the street to get logins.

Some friends of mine trade large amounts of Bitcoin on a regular basis and there's never been much of a delay withdrawing. I doubt they are going to a bank to physically take out printed keys everyday for every transaction over $10,000 or phoning 5 people to combine keys. I bet the backups are kept in a safe deposit box, the cold wallet is likely an offline system anybody can walk up to with some kind of feeble authentication judging by past Bitcoin exchange incompetence.

Many of the smaller exchanges are using Blockchain.info wallets as their hot wallet too but won't admit it.

>There's never been any 3rd party auditing or verification of this that I know of.

I think that's intended to be a feature and not a bug. With Bitcoin 'third party verification' means other people no longer use a service after you've generously sacrificed your money to demonstrate their incompetence or malice.

Not at all, you can freely walk into most exchange offices. Theoretically an armed robbery of exchanges and payment processors would be the perfect crime. Commit private address to memory or tattoo it on yourself in code, after the robbery forcing them to transfer to your public address and waiting out confirmations turn yourself in to the police and do the 5 yrs. Walk out with millions worth of bitcoins on your arm. (Penalty here is 5yrs, unsure anywhere else). Blockchain.info would prob nickname that address "Hans Grueber"

They'd keep you in indefinitely for contempt of court for not handing over what you'd stolen.

Claim the exchange operator hired you to rob their own business and they have the private key :P

IANAL, but in the US, the 5th amendment still protects combination locks, and as far as I can tell, passwords.

Prosecutors can be as intimidating as they wish, the government is free to use their magical NSA powers to recover the bitcoin. They can't compel someone to incriminate themselves. giving the wallet address to the prosecutor is effectively admitting to a crime, perhaps just conspiracy, but nonetheless that's self incrimination.

Go for memorization over tattooing.

They can compel you to enter the passphrase to decrypt your computer so long as there is sufficient evidence that you are capable of doing so.

What they can't do is say "only the person who committed this crime knows the password" and then force you to enter the password (since doing so would be self incrimination). It's when it's already known that you could enter the password that you can be compelled to.

I'm not familiar with the American legal system. Ignoring bitcoin entirely, if you rob a bank and hide the money do you get to keep the money after your release from jail?

"In Chadwick v. Janecka (3d Cir. 2002), a U.S. court of appeals held that H. Beatty Chadwick could be held indefinitely under federal law, for his failure to produce US$ 2.5 million as state court ordered in a civil trial. Chadwick had been imprisoned for nine years at that time and continued to be held in prison until 2009, when a state court set him free after 14 years, making his imprisonment the longest on a contempt charge to date."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_court#United_States

Plausible deniability. You are only the low ranking front. You don't know the passphrase needed to hand over.

>But if you have a billion dollars of gold in your basement, you should be very, very paranoid.

If i had so many bitcoins as Satoshi Nakamoto i would certainly not store them in my basement. I'd split my private key using n:m scheme and store them in secure deposit boxes in banks.

That doesn't matter much if they can grab you and apply crowbar.

If I'd have a billion dollars of worth gold in my Basement I'd be impressed if somebody managed to steal it. Since 1bn USD in gold would weigh 22603KG...

> Why is every mention of possible disclosure of Satoshi's identity fraught with heavy overtones of "Your Life Is In Grave Danger"? We have many people who are much richer whose identities are not secret and we don't need to freak out constantly and warn them that They Are In Grave Danger.

I think they probably know already. At least if the body guards are anything to go by.

> AFAIK he's not been accused of any crime either.

I imagine the IRS really would like to audit him if he's an American citizen, however.

Presumably the Bitcoins were not worth anything when he mined them and he won't owe any capital gains until he sells them.

Quite true.

Keep in mind, the IRS can audit you out of what amounts to mere curiosity. Having your net worth go up by half a billion or whatever is the sort of thing that might raise some flags and cause someone to want to verify that you haven't realized any of those capital gains, gifted any of them to someone else off the record, or some other thing.

On the bright side, Satoshi Nakamoto should be able to afford a good tax attorney. He'd be a bit nutty not to have one already, honestly.

The euphemism known as an IRS audit would interfere in his life if an exchange into or out of USD took place. Anyone can attribute value to anything. That doesn't make it valuable. Taxation here would require provable gains or losses, as with USD. The transactions of people exchanging only in [bitcoins, metal, coffee beans, rocks, fancy/worthless paper], not in USD, do not imply that any taxable "gains" or "losses" occurred. If it implied this, there would equally be a lot of losses claimed.

It might be covered under bartering.

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

If Satoshi can't configure Tor correctly how is Joe Blow supposed to figure it out?

If the Tor leak thing is true, this could add to the evidence for the common speculation that Satoshi is a collective pseudonym.

how so?

I think the implication he is trying to make is this:

If it was a collective of people it is(might be) more likely that one of them is incompetent(and didn't configure TOR properly) where-as if it was a single competent/careful individual there's a smaller chance of a TOR mis-configuration and resulting IP-address leak.

I don't think it lends much credence to the 'multiple entities' theory at all personally, but that's the best I could come up with. Feel free to correct.

thanks - makes sense

or Dread Pirate Roberts

Whoa. Now of course the question becomes is the warning genuine, or is it an attempt to cause Satoshi to do something hasty?

Satoshi's behavior is the opposite of hasty.

Exactly why there would have to be an outside message, motivating him to action in a way that would accidentally identify himself?

I don't really buy the theory, but that isn't really a counter argument...

So could someone explain how an IP address would leak when using an email account? I suppose potentially in the SMTP header, but this would assume he was using a email server running on his own personal ip, right?

So is the guess here (assuming this is even true) that he had an email server running at home, leaked the ip, and then was attacked when someone found it?

Many SMTP servers include the IP address of the sender in the headers (usually the Received header). Just look around, you'll be surprised.

Using webmail would defeat that, though, right?

Not if the webmail implementation passes-on your IP, which it should if you believe Spam is a bigger issue than email sender privacy.

Basically, if a webmail service doesn't pass along your IP, there would be no way for recipient networks to ever block a flood of unwanted email because they could never blacklist, say, yahoo.com.

I read something about this lately... maybe from Paul Buchheit?

Depends on the webmail. Some do, some don't. Easy enough to test for yourself beforehand though.

x-originating-ip?

No. The first hop in the SMTP via headers will usually have your DSL router IP.

Only if your DSL router hosts an SMTP relay. You're confusing traceroute with email.

Many (most?) SMTP servers will include the client IP in message headers. IIRC it's even required by ope of the RFCs.

There was a line in that long post on here the other day about Gmail, encryption, and the spam fight that mentioned how what's-his-name explicitly ignored the RFC by scrubbing the IP address out of Gamil headers, so I think you do recall correctly...

Many (most) people connecting to an SMTP server will be doing so from behind nat. Finding out the users "real" ip address is 10.x.x.x isn't so exciting.

Actually you will usually find BOTH the private IP address behind the NAT and the public IP address of the router in the headers. Check out a few mails you've received from a few different sources, see for yourself.

I just picked the two latest I got (and redacted them) as an example.

The first one sent through GMail (SMTP I guess, not webmail) :

  Return-Path: <xyz@gmail.com>
  Received: from [192.168.1.18] (123-123-123-123...bbox.fr. [123.123.123.123])
          by mx.google.com with ESMTPSA id ...
          for <multiple recipients>
          (version=TLSv1 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA bits=128/128);

and another one, through OVH this time :

  Received: from unknown (HELO ?192.168.0.23?) (xyz@abc.fr@123.123.123.123)
    by ns0.ovh.net with SMTP;

Both "123.123.123.123" were the public IP address from their DSL connections. In both cases as you can see, I could know both IP addresses.

Good point. Looks like google doesn't add these headers if you're using their web interface and apparently the majority of people I email with don't leak this either, however once I started looking there's a surprising amount of emails in my inbox that do. I'm now trying to remember if I deliberately disabled this when I set up our new mail server or not...

gmail, for instance, includes the client IP address in mail headers.

I learned this myself recently from an article here on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2083798

Haven't checked it myself, just reported there by a former gmail engineer in the context of their anti-spammer efforts.

This has been standard practice since the dawn of SMTP.

Gmail has NEVER included the IP in headers (you can easily check this yourself). Hotmail/Outlook on the other hand ...

Depends on how you access Gmail. Webmail doesn't include your IP in the headers. SMTP does.

Ah ok. I've only ever used webmail, it makes sense SMTP would include the IP.

This is not completly true. When using Gmail together with Google Apps, Gmail will include the sender's IP in the X-Originating-IP header.

You're wrong. Most SMTP requires IP in the header, gmail does not. This causes contempt between certain groups, as while it's a boon for personal privacy, it often hinders investigations.

Here's a video with Mike Hearn giving a talk about spam. At the end and middle are mentions about gmail's lack of IP from sent emails, the end specifically from a network admin expressing his grievances about Google's efforts being a hindrance to law enforcement.

https://ripe64.ripe.net/archives/video/25/

It is , however, standard practice for most SMTP providers to do this.

Interesting. The link I posted above must not be the one I read a few days ago on HN (or somewhere else?), cause it was actually posted several years ago on HN. Let me find what I read recently...

Aha, it was on reddit, and is here: https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780....

Ah, and you're right, I misremembered what it said about that, indeed it says gmail does not do that. okay!

Obviously it _could_ if it wanted to, and other webmail might. But gmail does not, okay!

It says "used your email account", so maybe it's the log gmail (and others?) keeps of logins to the account that is visable for a few days back?

As others have already written, many webmail providers send the user's IP address in the SMTP header. GMX ("satoshin@gmx.com") definitely sends the user's IP address in the header (Source: GMX user myself).

Please excuse my ignorance here, but how does one track a persons location by their IP? Any time I have tried to look up an IP, I get a really vague result. ie "Somewhere in this city". Is it possible to get very specific results?

You might find it interesting: http://compnetworking.about.com/od/traceipaddresses/f/ip_loc...

IP locations are kept in databases that have many limitations. Some examples of the limitations I found here in France:

- at best your ISP links your IP with the DSLAM location or simply the city for the most lazy. Sometimes there are mistakes: one of my friend living in the north of France has his IP "geolocated" in the south of France...

- lots of big corporations only give the address of their headquarters

- IP location from 3G/4G network is completely wrong 90% of the time

It would be difficult to track a person with just their IP address, but used in conjunction with other information it could be useful. E.g. if you worked out the ISP someone was using, and then used some social engineering on the ISP's customer service rep to get a name or address.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com