Anatomy of a $40M+ Bitcoin heist

http://thinkdifferent.ly/stuff/sheep-bitcoin/

by jrecursive • 13 years ago

61 44 13 years ago

thinkdifferent.ly

yardie• 13 years ago

Interesting. What's $40MM in bitcoin?

I ask because most of these articles are trying to shock you with the exchange value rather than the BTC value.

alexkus• 13 years ago

Article says 5500BTC.

betterunix• 13 years ago

The overwhelming majority of Bitcoin users are concerned with the exchange value, so it makes sense to give that rather than the "native" value.

interstitial• 13 years ago

So you're saying it's not a currency, but a speculative play?

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

How is it any different from "one ton of gold" versus "$40 million in gold"? Surely the latter provides more useful information to the general public?

AsymetricCom• 13 years ago

"Useful" for somebody, sure. I don't think that fact has any use for the pubic.

kelnos• 13 years ago

Gold is generally less volatile, so saying "$40mm in gold" would likely have some lasting significance. But in a month, that $40mm in Bitcoin could be worth $20mm or $60mm or something else entirely. Giving the actual value in BTC would let us know how much exactly.

celticninja• 13 years ago

96000 btc i believe was the figure being thrown around however I also saw 39000 btc at the every early stages and that is much closer to the $40million estimate given in OP.

elif• 13 years ago

At first I imagined a prosecutor frustratedly trying to convince a judge of the validity of an audit trail like this... but in reality it would probably just come down to an expert witness testifying that it is valid.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

So the '324 is FBI on phone handset' comment, is this the FBI transferring $40M from Silk Road wallets to some other wallet? Or is it something else?

Also one wonders what is done with the 'evidence' after the case. I could imagine the FBI simply deleting the wallets but does anyone know their actual policy?

shawabawa3• 13 years ago

I could imagine the FBI simply deleting the wallets but does anyone know their actual policy?

Pretty sure whatever their policy is, it isn't "throw away $150million of seized assets"

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

Except that it's not $150 million of seized assets, it's a bunch of electronic money that could or would at one point potentially sell for approximately $150 million if there were enough buyers for the offered digital product.

What does the FBI or other agencies do with intercepted drug money and criminal possessions? Drugs get destroyed, that much I know, but not sure about the other stuff.

dutchbrit• 13 years ago

Is't this relaties to sheep market?

Tuna-Fish• 13 years ago

I could imagine the FBI simply deleting the wallets but does anyone know their actual policy?

In the US, law enforcement gets to keep a portion of whatever they seize. You can bet your ass they will not destroy millions worth of assets -- entire departments will get bonuses for years for this.

Law requires them to liquidate the assets through auctions, they cannot simply sell them at an exchange, or set a price for them and sell them at that price. There are plenty of companies that specialize in organizing such events.

wmf2• 13 years ago

An exchange is an auction, but I'm sure there's some regulatory capture here that won't allow the government to use any existing exchange. There may be a business opportunity here.

femto• 13 years ago

If the FBI deleted the wallets, I could imagine someone privately keeping a copy of the crucial key digits. A nice little retirement nest egg for 30 years time, once this incident has been forgotten. If the bitcoins have been officially deleted, it seems reasonable that the government bureaucracy would then cease to be interested in them.

minimax• 13 years ago

One great thing about bit coin is that all the metadata is available to everyone. You would be hard pressed to make a fancy chart like this with fiat currency.

krisdol• 13 years ago

just a minor nitpick, but bitcoin is also fiat currency.

quotha• 13 years ago

By that, do you mean that bitcoin does not have any intrinsic value?

mburst• 13 years ago

I think a government needs to back the currency before it becomes a fiat currency.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

just a minor nitpick, but bitcoin is also fiat currency.

Bitcoin is not "fiat currency" by the most common definition(currency whose value is supported by the mandate -- or "fiat" -- of a government for its use in certain domains, but which is neither a directly-useful commodity on its own nor backed by a promise of exchange for a commodity.)

Bitcoin is "fiat currency" by another broader definition ("currency that is neither a generally-useful commodity on its own nor backed by a promise of exchange for a commodity"), which has historically largely been equivalent to the more common definition, because prior to Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies, no one was using unbacked currency that weren't supported by government fiat.

Its probably better to use a different term for the broader definition, since there is no fiat necessarily involved, there are meaningful differences between unbacked currencies supported by government fiat and those that aren't, and there are now meaningful examples of unbacked currencies without the support of a government fiat.

swalsh• 13 years ago

I wonder how many people knew what a fiat currency was before bitcoin... actually wait.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22fiat%20currency%22

Estragon• 13 years ago

I see no interesting features in this visualization. What part am I supposed to be looking at?

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

Does anyone gain anything from these graph visualisations? The first few times I saw one I was impressed, but this one is so huge and nondescript, I think it's impossible to take much away from it. They're kind of like info graphics; you see a few that make sense, but many more are just jumping on the bandwagon.

Anatomy of a $40M+ Bitcoin heist

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