DOJ Hasn't Actually Found Silk Road Founder's Bitcoin Yet 294
Techdirt has an interesting followup on the arrest and indictment of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, in connection to which the FBI seized 26,000 or so Bitcoins. From the Techdirt piece: "However, in the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, it suggested that his commissions were in the range of $80 million -- or about 600,000 Bitcoins. You might notice the disconnect between the 26,000 Bitcoins seized and the supposed 600,000 Ulbright made. It now comes out that those 26,000 Bitcoins aren't even Ulbricht's. Instead, they're actually from Silk Road's users. In other words, these were Bitcoins stored with user accounts on Silk Road. Ulbricht's actual wallet is separate from that, and was apparently encrypted, so it would appear that the FBI does not have them, nor does it have any way of getting at them just yet. And given that some courts have argued you can't be forced to give up your encryption, as it's a 5th Amendment violation, those Bitcoins could remain hidden -- though, I could see the court ordering him to pay the dollar equivalent in restitution (though still not sure that would force him to decrypt the Bitcoins)." The article also notes that the FBI's own Bitcoin wallet has been identified, leading to some snarky micropayment messages headed their direction.
Money for his defense (Score:2)
He might need some of that hoard to pay for his defense. I don't know that going cheap on this will be in his interest.
Re:Money for his defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Money for his defense (Score:5, Insightful)
But that is part of the game. You gut someones means and prosecute them so they can't defend themselves. That is the game the government plays.
Only with people dumb enough to not prepare ahead of time for this. This guy was 'new money'. He didn't know how to manage his assets, how to invest, how to setup multiple accounts, and didn't have the good sense to bond a lawyer ahead of time and give them limited power of attorney so they could coordinate his estate while he was in jail. See, this is what 'old money' does, and it means they get to hire entire bus loads of attorneys to show up at court, and the government can't do dick about it because they were bought and paid for ahead of time and are being funded out of accounts they can't seize or have access to because the money's been cleaned and separated from his personal accounts through shell corporations, etc.
Don't talk about how to play the game... this guy wasn't a player, he was a loser. He was setup from day one, by his own stupidity, to lose. If I was running a website like that, the very first thing I'd have done after getting ahead financially is separate out as much money as I could for future legal troubles, and hire accountants and lawyers so when the day came to save my sorry ass, all I'd have to do is just sit in jail and wait while Plan Bravo executed all on its own to spring me.
But, since the man was basically a walking cliche instead of a proper criminal or businessman or even passably decent nerd, I feel compelled to quote off his namesake:
"Do you hear that, Fezzik? That is the sound of ultimate suffering. My heart made that sound when the six-fingered man killed my father. The Man in Black makes it now."
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Don't talk about how to play the game... this guy wasn't a player, he was a loser. He was setup from day one, by his own stupidity, to lose. If I was running a website like that, the very first thing I'd have done after getting ahead financially is separate out as much money as I could for future legal troubles, and hire accountants and lawyers so when the day came to save my sorry ass, all I'd have to do is just sit in jail and wait while Plan Bravo executed all on its own to spring me.
So, what you're saying is that Walter White did it right in Breaking Bad when he hired Saul with a rather large retainer.
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Judging from what you're saying, you'd probably enjoy Breaking Bad. You're making a lot of incorrect assumptions about the way it handles its subject matter.
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I think you would be pleasantly surprised by breaking bad.. Let's say it like this; Walter does not like to be the screwed over by any cartels.
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So, what you're saying is that Walter White did it right in Breaking Bad when he hired Saul with a rather large retainer.
I'd have to actually turn on a TV to be able to answer that. I'm dimly aware there's some bald guy with a beard on some TV show called 'Breaking Bad' that everyone goes on about on Facebook, and that it has something to do with drugs. But beyond that, I couldn't tell you anything about the show.
You do realize that intentionally ignoring good entertainment doesn't make you some kind of hero, right? Refusing to watch live TV is just fine, lots of people don't like having commercials shoved down their throats. I'm one of those people myself, the only thing I watch live is football and Breaking Bad.
You're missing the second half of that equation though. There are many ways to watch the show without commercials and also whenever you wish, both legal and not legal. You just come off as an idiot putt
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Looking at the shows she does watch, you'd assume she doesn't finds televised fiction too stimulating.
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ou do realize that intentionally ignoring good entertainment doesn't make you some kind of hero, right?
You do realize that 'good entertainment' is an entirely subjective thing, whereas my explanation about why providing fictional examples to buttress a position about an actual, realworld event, was not.
You just come off as an idiot putting up a resistance just to
Just to what? Try and be funny and informative at the same time? Just to listen to hipsters amongst us like yourself that find the empty chattering of TV with 30% commercials dumped into your brain "entertainment" and can't understand why everybody doesn't join them so they have to mock them?
Re:Money for his defense (Score:4, Insightful)
The big mistake hipsters make is assuming anyone cares about how hipster they are. We were talking about encryption, virtual currencies, legal tactics, and as usual where people gather, the occasional pop culture reference.
Back on topic, now, please.
Re:Money for his defense (Score:4, Insightful)
And you know this how? You're either making shit up to appear smart, or a genuine idiot bragging about her actual extensive experience working for a drug cartel on a public web forum where your IP can be easily traced - on a story discussing a drug bust that ultimately resulted from the accused posting on a forum, no less.
Either way, epic fail.
Re:Money for his defense (Score:4, Informative)
Or option d: You made shit up earlier, and are now making up more shit to avoid admitting that. And the rest of your posts don't really suggest you have the capability of learning law on the fly. And even if you did, law enforcement isn't exactly famous for helping people get out of drug-related charges, or helping them research technicalities.
Friend Occam, what do you say?
Losing to a non-native speaker of your language in eloquence of expression is not exactly something to brag about, now is it?
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Isn't that exactly what "Dot Com" did?
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You'd have put money away and bonded lawyers so they could "spring you"? How exactly are these lawyers going to do that? Ulbricht is guilty as fuck and clearly knows it. The two criminal complaints are overflowing with evidence and that's not going to be all the Fed's have got. I have a hard time seeing how any lawyer is going to wriggle out from under all that stuff. Doesn't matter if you somehow managed to bond the best of the best ahead of time.
Also, you seem to have overlooked the fact that the guy was
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When I was at the Fed, we'd just print all the money we wanted. Never had any trouble getting away with it either.
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Will be interesting to see which lawyer will step up and take cases on behalf of Europeans and other countries where purchasing pot is legal and demand the return of their clients funds as no laws where broken by their clients.
Going to be a great cutting edge tech case for some lawyer to raise their profile.
There is also the potential for people who opened an account, loaded up bitcoins, but never made a transaction for illegal products (though intent might get murky) however there are/were
send your money to someone in the US for crime ... (Score:3)
If you send your money to someone in the US, paying them to commit a crime in the US, that money which is now part of a US crime is going to be seized in the US.
Some cases bring up interesting questions of jurisdiction. This case isn't one of them.
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If the affidavit is accurate, he's going to have a hard time dodging the charges. Spending all his money on defense might not be the best option.
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He'll probably just let the process play out with his public defender, aiming for the lowest legal penalty possible, and promptly leave the country for a non-extraditing locale at the first opportunity. Then he'll able to recover his funds and go about his life, more or less as he wishes. There's virtually no chance of those funds being recovered by the authorities; I'd be very surprised to learn that the BTC in question are still in the wallet in question even now. Setting up contingency plans for transfer
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You're not allowed to use gains the government claims are ill-gotten, in order to fund your defense.
Once they claim certain dollars are proceeds of illegal activity, they freeze the assets, and they will be held in trust, or held by police, until the charges are settled.
That means those bitcoins will be unavailable to use for his defense, even if they are his, and he does decrypt them.
Re:Money for his defense (Score:5, Informative)
I believe you lack adequate information on how Bitcoin works. If he or someone he trusts and gave instructions to beforehand has access to another copy of the wallet, it's just as good as the original, and the coins may be transferred elsewhere and converted to other currencies, etc via the normal exchanges. I'll be surprised if the prosecuting authorities manage to figure out how to track that; they certainly won't be able to stop it. If by some chance they manage to gain access to the encrypted keys that protect the wallet in their possession, it almost certainly won't be of any value (to them) by then.
Re:Money for his defense (Score:5, Interesting)
That is an actual cool feature of Bitcoin - you can copy money. You can only spend it once, but you can have a backup copy of your money. Or several.
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Or, if you trust your memory, you could use a deterministic wallet generated from a memorized seed, such as a long enough passphrase. That way, no backups are necessary, and it's pretty much impossible to even determine which adresses are yours.
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Just out of curiousity: how do you keep those back-ups in sync, especially when you have some bitcoin, you backup them, spend some, and for whatever reason have to start using the backup copy which includes the already spent bitcoins.
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It's really easy to seize bitcoin.
Police just confiscates the password to the wallet (a copy of that wallet may come in handy), and has everyone else forget it. Those passwords are generally short enough to write down on a single post-it note, that can then conveniently be attached to the relevant documents.
Come time to release the seized/frozen bitcoin, they simply hand the post-it note with password to the owner.
Simple, isn't it? Even easier than seizing money that's in the banks, where you need to do stu
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Once they claim certain dollars are proceeds of illegal activity, they freeze the assets, and they will be held in trust, or held by police, until the charges are settled.
The FBI can't get their hands on this money because Bitcoin is a decentralized currency. They have nothing to "freeze" or "hold on" to. That's the whole point of Bitcoin, actually.
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You're cute. Good luck seizing encrypted material that's probably replicated to fifteen servers in fifteen countries, while the servers themselves are unknown to you. Have fun, champ.
Re:Money for his defense (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Wired he's using a public defender. [wired.com]
Remember, Ulbricht was living in a shared apartment and working out of a library. If his defense is that he's not the guy running Silk Road, it would be suspicious for a man in his situation to suddenly have an expensive defense team.
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According to Wired he's using a public defender. [wired.com]
Remember, Ulbricht was living in a shared apartment and working out of a library. If his defense is that he's not the guy running Silk Road, it would be suspicious for a man in his situation to suddenly have an expensive defense team.
Maybe he could start a Kickstarter to fund... well, not his defense, because that's not a creative work, so to speak, but a DOCUMENTARY about his defense, including people who could just check by to see if he was dead yet.
Also for a lot of things (Score:5, Interesting)
Public defenders are a good choice. I know that there's this Hollywood cliche that public defenders were C students that are worthless and don't know what they are doing but that isn't usually the case. Many of them are quite passionate about what they do, and good at it. Also they have a lot of trial experience, which is something that private attorneys often don't. Knowing the law and being good at trial are different things and public defenders get a lot of trial time. Plus they have experience with criminal law, since that's what they do. They don't spend time messing with estate planning or shit like they, they defend criminal cases.
So depending on the charge, the area you are in, etc, etc a public defender can actually be good, maybe even the best, option. They may have a better handle on the law and be better at trial than a private lawyer.
Disappearing Bitcoins (Score:5, Interesting)
This brings up an interesting thought. Since the total number of Bitcoins is fixed, and if these coins seem to now be irrecoverable, what happens to the currency when it disappears into encrypted black holes like this?
Re:Disappearing Bitcoins (Score:5, Informative)
That's easy: The value of each bitcoin in circulation increases.
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That seems obvious, but what are users going to do if all of it disappears behind these encrypted black holes?
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There's not much chance of *all* of it disappearing it that way and the currency is infinitely divisible if required. There will always be enough.
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Yeah... because we've never had problems with adding a crapton of floating point and extra decimal places to math with computers before. (rolls eyes)
Congratulations on another wonderful display of ignorance! A Grade-A+++ girlintraining post! This isn't a weather simulator where the numbers are going to be raised to the hundredth power, it's basic, linear algebra here.
Some of the greatest financial scams of our time were based on rounding and floating point errors.
Really? Name one that didn't just collect tiny pieces at a time but actually used floating point errors. Besides that, since the ledger is public and the protocol (and Bitcoin is technically a protocol, not a piece of software, if you even know what that means) standardized, then it would b
Re:Disappearing Bitcoins (Score:4, Interesting)
You've never seen code at a financial institute, have you?
Yes, there have been scams based on rounding decimals. No, these were not due to rounding errors or any other kind of technical error with floating point calculations, but due to the fact that currencies display a limited amount of decimal places whereas some calculations may produce more decimal places. Instead of rounding off and dropping the difference, the scam was to round off and transfer any positive difference to the thief's account. The problem is fixed nowadays by rounding off to the advantage of the customer at a relatively minor loss to the banks; there simply isn't any positive difference to transfer.
FYI, I've worked some 12 years at various banks and had to deal with these rounding issues. These fixes were put in place decades before I started my carreer.
The "greatest financial scams of our time" are based on social engineering, not technical engineering.
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it mainly means that the bitcoin you hold in your account may suddenly jump in value by a factor 10 if the world decides to move the decimal point one more position. Now how's that for a return on investment?!
Yes, that is the kind of return on investment that holders of the Zimbabwean dollar [wikipedia.org] often enjoyed. That's why Zimbabweans are all so rich. ;^)
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So it's a deflationary pressure, then? That is, if I have 10 Bitcoins today and do absolutely nothing with them, will they be worth more tomorrow (because they now represent a larger proportion of the overall population)?
Deflation is, in economics, generally considered A Very Bad Thing. I believe that's why Bitcoin was designed to have an inflationary pressure built right in (the mining process should continually increase the pool, making every Bitcoin worth slightly less over time).
Re:Disappearing Bitcoins (Score:5, Interesting)
Deflation just makes the idea of investing seem absurd. That may be no way to run a country, but it's a perfectly fine way to run a sub-currency. Collectables behave exactly like bitcoins, and they haven't destroyed the economy yet.
Re:Disappearing Bitcoins (Score:5, Interesting)
Economists regard price deflation as bad: That's when costs for businesses and debtors go up, without a corresponding increase in revenue. Businesses fail left and right under this situation.
Bitcoins, not now, but in the future, will have the property of monetary deflation, which is good: Prices go down uniformly and predictably.
The key thing to keep in mind is that, if the future effects are predictable, that'll be reflected in the price now, minus interest for the price of time.
(Monetary inflation may be predictable in many cases, but it's still damaging because it's not uniform: It benefits banks and the politically well connected with new money, letting them bid up prices, effectively stealing wealth from savings and those on fixed incomes.)
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Some economists think so, yes. Some think the exact opposite. As usual, there's too many variables in economics to isolate the effects of either inflation or deflation, so everyone can rest assured their pet theories can never be proven wrong.
T
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It only adds to the strong delationary pressure on this currency by more and more people starting to use it (and less and less new coins coming into existence as mining slows down, which is intentional). So demand increases much faster than supply (it seems bitcoin is actually gaining traction here and there), pushing up the value of bitcoin.
This obviously means it's getting more and more interesting to buy and hold them (use as investment rather than currency), making this effect stronger. Such large chunk
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Only if people know that the bitcoins are irrevocably lost.
Re:Disappearing Bitcoins (Score:4, Insightful)
People do not have to know it is irrevocably lost, people do not even have to know that any of this happened. This is the most basic concept in economics.
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The deflation occurred when DPR took the coins out of circulation by putting them in his private stash. As soon as someone starts dumping those coins then BTC value will drop. Removing the risk of this happening may increase confidence in the value of the currency a little but not catastrophically. 600000 BTC is about 5% of the total amount of BTC at this time. [coinmarketcap.com] Now someone schooled in econometrics can probably calculate the effects of this looming event.
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So far, it didn't happen. Bitcoin value is almost exactly where it was before his arrest (though it did move quite a bit in the days immediately following).
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It is not fixed. When these Bitcoins are lost forever, they can be mined again. The amount is only fixed, when there is no loss of existing BTC. Or the other way round: the amount of existing BTC is fixed, not of mining BTC. So if there is a loss, there is a chance to mine again.
The FBI doesn't need his money though (Score:2, Insightful)
They'll get along fine with him in prison, and by the time he gets out, the Bitcoins will be a dead fantasy.
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As compensation for cracking the crypto, NSA will want at least 50%.
Lost forever? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
Now what consequence would this be for the bitcoin as a currency, when a significant chunk of its coins are taken our of the equation? It's about 5% of the current total number of almost 12 million bitcoin in existence (and 3% of the theoretical maximum of 21 mln). And bitcoin can not be recreated or added to, like a regular currency.
Another thing of note, is that apparently a single bitcoin user managed to amass 5% of the total number of that currency in existence. Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash. Smaller quantities have that potential already.
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Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash.
So what? The power to temporarily depress the value of goods or services is something a lot of people possess. But they don't use it because they aren't dumb and don't want to lose a lot of money.
Re:Lost forever? (Score:4, Informative)
Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
No, he has the bitcoin equivalent of 600,000; Not 600,000 actual coins. The coins themselves are divisible.. so he has a crapton of fractions of coins, adding up to a total of 600,000.
Now what consequence would this be for the bitcoin as a currency, when a significant chunk of its coins are taken our of the equation? It's about 5% of the current total number of almost 12 million bitcoin in existence (and 3% of the theoretical maximum of 21 mln)
Umm, bad news: As of this submission, there were 11,800,375 [blockexplorer.com] coins created so far. The "theoretical maximum" is 21 million coins, yes, but you forgot each coin is divisible by https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#21_million_coins_isn.27t_enough.3B_doesn.27t_scale [slashdot.org]
">100,000,000. So in actuality, there are 2,099,999,997,690,000 units of currency that can be traded without modification to the current protocol. What most people don't understand about bitcoin is that even if a few coins here and there fall out of circulation, or even more than a few, so long as there are a sufficient number of atomic currency units available for trade, the system will function perfectly. Trading in bitcoins is more like trading in company stock than in actual currency -- they can be divided, aggregated, etc., etc. A bitcoin is, at the protocol level, just a token for a massive transactional log called the 'block chain'. It doesn't matter how many bitcoins are generated, or how many fall out of circulation, as long as enough remain in circulation to cover the transactions since the last block in the chain was created.
Another thing of note, is that apparently a single bitcoin user managed to amass 5% of the total number of that currency in existence. Those numbers potentially give that person massive market power: dumping them all on the market in one go would cause the value of bitcoin to crash. Smaller quantities have that potential already.
That person is now no longer a person, but a government. Just a minor footnote. Now, all that said, here's the thing about bitcoins... should we ever run out of them for whatever reason, we can always 'reset the clock' as it were -- start a new seed, a new block zero, and start building a new block chain from there. This isn't like IPv4 address space exhaustion; We just plug in a new seed and viola, Bitcoin Mark II.
Eeeh... all that said, I don't trade in bitcoins and I think the entire business is silly but if we're going to talk turkey, we should at least be accurate in our assessments.
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We just plug in a new seed and viola, Bitcoin Mark II.
Or Bitcoin mark XXVII... [altcoins.com]
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Now imagine that this Ulbright ends up in jail, or dies, the keys to this encrypted wallet are lost, and with it these 600,000 bitcoin are lost. I think this is a pretty realistic scenario.
No, he has the bitcoin equivalent of 600,000; Not 600,000 actual coins. The coins themselves are divisible.. so he has a crapton of fractions of coins, adding up to a total of 600,000.
That still doesn't make it any less than the 5% of current total coins (or fractions of coins) around.
If you divide each by a million, it means he has 600,000,000,000 millionth of bitcoin. THat is still 5% of the "millionth bitcoin" around
And, as has been shown many times before so not going to repeat it, the mere fact that there is a limited number of bitcoin is an issue, making the value of a single bitcoin (or whatever small fraction - that's irrelevant) increase in value all the time. Maybe you use a wh
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should we ever run out of them for whatever reason, we can always 'reset the clock' as it were -- start a new seed, a new block zero, and start building a new block chain from there.
The new currency would only have any real value if people recognized it though, and since lots of people have a big incentive not to recognize it (it would devalue their Bitcoins) that seems unlikely to happen.
At the moment Bitcoin isn't very useful for the ordinary consumer because its value fluctuates too much. It's fine if you are mining or in some business where you can accept BTC and then spend it on other services. Well, these days even mining is a waste of time and energy unless you were one of the l
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Eeeh... all that said, I don't trade in bitcoins and I think the entire business is silly but if we're going to talk turkey, we should at least be accurate in our assessments.
Not sure that bitcoins are any less real than a lot of the rest of the crap that people trade in the markets.
Minor details! (Score:5, Interesting)
in the criminal complaint against Ulbricht, it suggested that his commissions were in the range of $80 million -- or about 600,000 Bitcoins.
Yes, and given how badly he managed his assets, I doubt even a fraction of this will be recovered. He was not a very good businessman, his servers weren't very well secured... in fact the only thing in the "had lots of" category with this guy was ego. I mean really... "Dread Pirate Roberts"? And have you seen some of the things he wrote on this website of his? "I'll take as much of your money as I want because this is my ship. If you don't like it, fuck off." -- It's actually included in the criminal indictment against him, along with a laundry list of, shall we say, personality shortcomings of his leading to other elements of the criminal underground coming by to explain all meanings of the word "respect" to him, and then him blowing tons and tons of money either paying these people off, or trying (pathetically) to put hits out on them.
If there's one charge I could add to the indictment, it would be criminal stupidity.
It now comes out that those 26,000 Bitcoins aren't even Ulbricht's. Instead, they're actually from Silk Road's users. In other words, these were Bitcoins stored with user accounts on Silk Road.
Technically, they were for purchases pending. Silk road worked by letting you transfer coins into a silk road proxy account. It ran every submission through its "tumbler" to randomize which coins were actually used for which transactions. So what was seized was basically the day's take out of the register, as it were.
Ulbricht's actual wallet is separate from that, and was apparently encrypted, so it would appear that...
That he'll be charged as a terrorist and sequested in a room somewhere to be beaten with a metal pipe or waterboarded until he gives up the password. Has anyone heard from him lately?
And given that some courts have argued you can't be forced to give up your encryption, as it's a 5th Amendment violation...
We'll just create a new court especially to prosecute terrorists like him extrajudicially. Oh wait... we already did.
The article also notes that the FBI's own Bitcoin wallet has been identified, leading to some snarky micropayment messages headed their direction.
Taunting the police has historically worked out quite well for criminals. Dude, you aren't anonymous. You basically just signed your own search warrant.
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to be beaten with a metal pipe
A $5 wrench [xkcd.com], you wannabe.
or waterboarded until he gives up the password.
At Gitmo, natch.
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That he'll be charged as a terrorist and sequested in a room somewhere to be beaten with a metal pipe or waterboarded until he gives up the password. Has anyone heard from him lately?
Ulbricht appeared in court on Friday, and after a request from his legal team has a bail hearing scheduled for October 9th [bbc.co.uk].
Not a nice guy. (Score:2)
From The Tellegraph ...
By chance one of those agents, posing as a major drug smuggler, was contacted by Dread Pirate Roberts, who asked him to torture and execute someone who had stolen Bitcoins from the site.
The agent sent fake pictures of a man being tortured, and of a dead body, and was paid $80,000.
Apparently encouraged, Dread Pirate Roberts then asked another drug dealer to kill a Silk Road user in Canada called "FriendlyChemist" who was threatening to release details about the site.
He wrote: "I would like to put a bounty on his head if it's not too much trouble for you. Necessities like this do happen from time to time for a person in my position. I wouldn't mind if he was executed."
He then said $150,000 seemed too much, adding: "Don't want to be a pain here but the price seems high. Not long ago I had a clean hit done for $80,000. Are the prices you quoted the best you can do? I would like this done asap ... it doesn't have to be clean."
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I don't think the government would want to recover them - if they were to sieze them, what would they do then? They can't spend or sell the coins, because doing so would be giving an implicit endorsement to bitcoin as a valid currency.
A Possible Cause of Deflation (Score:2)
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Could seizure by authorities unable to crack encryption have some even slight deflationary effects on Bitcoins?
There is likely not enough trade in bitcoins or economic activity, for much deflation to occur. It was only some small portion of the total bitcoins available that are taken out of circulation by the seizure.
It is not as if the guy was offering all those BTCs on the open market previously; coins that are being hoarded, don't really cause deflation when they vanish.
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Good point. I didn't realize hoarding was so bad in BTC. Your comment sent me off on a tangent to this article [theatlantic.com] and it appears you're quite correct on that account. Even so, my question was intended as mostly hypothetical (hence the "some even slight"). It seems that if there's only a slight amount in circulation, the deflationary effects of any of the circulating currency being removed from the market (via seizure by authorities unable to crack the encryption) would have an amplified effect.
Authorities do
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I don't think you understand deflation.
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There's a far greater chance that I don't understand Bitcoin. I have in mind a scenario where the authorities seize fairly large quantities of the currency and permanently remove it from circulation on account of their inability to crack the encryption. Permanently removing any currency, from greenbacks to gold, would have a deflationary effect since it would decrease the monetary supply relative to the supply of available goods and services. Put differently, the relative scarcity of the currency would mean
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Negative, both are the same thing. And it's called deflation.
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Removal of coins from circulation would act to cause potentially extreme deflation. Investing in bitcoins is a high-risk move, but the win if it pays off could be a gain of a thousand percent a year - providing the government doesn't actually try a major clampdown.
interesting end for my travel on the silk road (Score:3, Funny)
I got my package I ordered in mail today :-) at my mailbox etc drop box
I had made a small hash order and then saw news of the shut down, where I live there is 2 unsecured hotspots a library, and a coffee shop I can reach with my beam antenna which I used those for silk road purchases.
I gave up thinking I wouldn't get my order since the site shut down 3 days after my order.
But the funny thing is I got home opened the blank package inside was my hash and a small funny message printed and cut out saying "so long and thanks for all the fish..."
Hehe, there is another "silk road" type site that went up but is more of a classifieds Craigslist type setup I saw advertised on the "hackBB" tor forum which is still up.
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Re:interesting end for my travel on the silk road (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it... you go through all that trouble to purchase in a manner you feel is anon on silk road, but then you post about it on slashdot using your registered account?
Given the nature of the internet, it can easily be argued that he's lying his ass off. Even if he isn't, 'small hash order' indicates he's a user, not a dealer, thus *on average* incredibly unlikely to be a worthy target for the 3+ agencies you'd need to coordinate with in order to track him down.
Off the top of my head - you'd need to get a warrant to get slashdot to disclose Cito's account and IP address information. Then you'd need to figure out WHERE in the world he is(presumably the USA). You have to hope that he was using home or at least work for his slashdot postings rather than using the same anonymous internet cafe. Once you've figured out where he is, you have to contact the appropriate state police agency to coordinate with, along with the postmaster general(assuming USPS was used as opposed to UPS/Fedex).
On Average it's just not worth it. They want dealers, not users.
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Anddd you didn't post this anonymously.
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Anddd you didn't post this anonymously.
Because posting anonymously on /. protects privacy (from 3-letter US agencies).
Re: "[x] Post Anonymously" -- use sparingly (Score:3, Funny)
Indictment (Score:2)
Let's get serious here. These guys still operate with tiny pieces of paper hidden on a human messenger. This is slower than TCP-IP over pigeons:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 [ietf.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers [wikipedia.org]
As far as getting a serious indictment on those people through monitoring their Internet activities, well it isn't really worthed trying unless you can keep the costs of trying quite low.
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If he has secured his private keys, then nobody can touch his Bitcoins. Not the NSA, FBI, CIA...
If he has the key in some obvious place, well, he is toast. But if it has been this long, I'd guess he secured is stuff.
Re:Power of attorney transfer them from his wallet (Score:4, Interesting)
If he has secured his private keys, then nobody can touch his Bitcoins. Not the NSA, FBI, CIA...
I've heard people say that the NSA can decrypt various things that are thought to be impossible (in reasonable time). Even if that were true, I doubt they are going show their hand and remove all doubt over something as trivial as this, so i think you are correct.
While he still has access to his bitcoins, they can argue that they should be allowed to force him to give up his keys. If he no longer has access to his bitcoins then they can't, so there is an advantage to him putting them somewhere where he can't get them. He'd need to find someone he can trust though...
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"I've heard people say that..."
I just read "I haven't been paying attention, and or don't understand, but I'm going to type anyway". We have been talking about it for months now, and we can draw a box around what is feasible.
They don't need the money, they just need to take it out of his ability to use. And the transaction history would be more valuable than the dollars. So there is little point trying, except as an academic exercise to explore plausibility.
If they could break it, we wouldn't have this stor
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They don't need the money, they just need to take it out of his ability to use.
This is one of the problems with BitCoin. Coins will be lost over time, as people forget their passwords or die or are otherwise prevented from accessing their wallets. There is no way to get them back or replace them.
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because they went into his house and tapped his keyboard?
I seriously have hard time believing that he was using keepass or give-nsa-pass for his passwords...
Re: Power of attorney transfer them from his walle (Score:5, Funny)
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which does not mean, that he unlocked any keystores on that notebook.
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it suggested that his commissions were in the range of $80 million -- or about 600,000 Bitcoins. You might notice the disconnect between the 26,000 Bitcoins seized and the supposed 600,000 Ulbright made.
Wouldn't the vast majority of his commissions have already been spent or at least laundered long ago? Why does everyone expect him to have left all of his income in his wallet?
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You think all the roofies and heroin bought on silk road were consumed by the buyer?
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It's attempted murder, and both parties can be charged, if one party wasn't an agent. It doesn't matter if the person was harmed or not.
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... why not make Ulbricht pay for his prosecution, assuming it's successful. After all, criminal prosecution is a burden on us all. We should be able to extract monetary damages from the guilty.
Criminal prosecution is the choice of the prosecutor, not damage caused by the criminal; as such, it is the prosecutor's responsibility to pay for it. When you harm someone, deliberately or otherwise, and force them to go to court rather than voluntarily making amends, you cause even more damage which must be made whole. The same does not apply to retaliatory punishments, however justified.
If you're upset that punishment is occurring at the taxpayer's expense, I suggest you stop treating it as a function of
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He intended to have someone killed.
Do you understand what "restitution" is? It is compensation for actual harm. If he intended to kill someone, but didn't actually harm anyone, then no restitution is needed.
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Do you understand what "restitution" is? It is compensation for actual harm. If he intended to kill someone, but didn't actually harm anyone, then no restitution is needed.
He paid someone $80,000 for the torture and murder of a federal witness. The government tends to frown on that sort of thing. But I supposed to you that's a "victimless crime," because the person he paid was an undercover agent and nobody was actually tortured or murdered.
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Read the story.
$3.6 million was the money in transit between buyers and sellers. SR offered a mixing system for payments between buyers and sellers to make tracing who bought from who more difficult. It was the money in the mixer when they seized the server.
$80 million is the estimate of the guy's personal fortune.
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The price has been fairly stable over that period. It fell a bit on the news but has mostly recovered.
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No, that's not what people have been saying at all. No one is saying that the NSA can create SHA-1 collisions at will, or decrypt AES at will. Geeks on slashdot should be able to succeed in protecting data they really want hidden, such as a bitcoin wallet. It sounds like this guy did just that. No reasonable interpretation of the 5th amendment would allow the government to force him to give up his passwords.
The "Privacy Chicken Littles" have been complaining about the NSA tracking their locations, analy
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The years of good chat and having a valued 'name' gets ~malware ~spyware ~keyloggers in.
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It is an American tradition to attribute any and all actions of government to the President personally. He is the symbol of the country, and thus takes all of the credit and all of the blame - even in situations like this, where there is no evidence he was even aware of Silk Road or has ever shown any knowledge of bitcoin.