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

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/07/as-feds-fumble-with-bitcoin-the-internet-trolls-the-fbis-private-wallet/

by aelaguiz • 13 years ago

74 50 13 years ago

nwh3• 13 years ago

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.

gigq• 13 years ago

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-...

nwh3• 13 years ago

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.

dimastopel• 13 years ago

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

RF7803081• 13 years ago

The real troll is that people use bitcoins

lnanek2• 13 years ago

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.

Karunamon3• 13 years ago

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.

mseebach2• 13 years ago

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...

mediocregopher• 13 years ago

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.

robert_foss• 13 years ago

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

skc• 13 years ago

I actually suspect the joke is on "The Internet"

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

andrewfong• 13 years ago

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

dmd• 13 years ago

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?

plorg• 13 years ago

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.

geuis• 13 years ago

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.

oakwhiz• 13 years ago

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

notahacker• 13 years ago

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.

the_watcher• 13 years ago

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.

aeturnum• 13 years ago

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.

yebyen3• 13 years ago

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.

andyakb• 13 years ago

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

dmix2• 13 years ago

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

ajross• 13 years ago

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.

craigching2• 13 years ago

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.

yebyen3• 13 years ago

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."

applecore• 13 years ago

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.

erikpukinskis• 13 years ago

And it was only above $150 for six days.

GrinningFool• 13 years ago

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...

qwerty_asdf3• 13 years ago

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?

DougWebb3• 13 years ago

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.

qwerty_asdf3• 13 years ago

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.

njharman• 13 years ago

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

rarw• 13 years ago

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.

jedunnigan• 13 years ago

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

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

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