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Comment by hendzen | Hacker News Reader

What if the upward price pressure is actually people buying massive amounts of bitcoin to pay off new ShadowBrokers-based ransomware? And the corresponding rise in alts is the perpetrators using the alts to launder the ransom?

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Here is a plausible explanation: People can't convert to local currency so they are investing in anything to diversify.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6a0cyz/when...

>>> why Bitcoin has been soaring: >>> Chinese exchanges are temporarily banned from margin trading, which has significantly cut down on the number of people shorting. (which is what held Bitcoin's price down for so long) >>> Bitfinex, one of the most high volume exchanges, lost the ability to withdraw fiat. This literally meant the only way to get funds off of it, was to buy Bitcoin.

That seems unlikely given the volumes of trading we've been seeing. We probably should have heard about a spike in ransomware last week if there is a causal relationship.

Disclosure: I work for stellar and I have no clue what caused the spike in trading and price.

Could it have been spillover hype leading up to the activation of Segwit on Litecoin?

Sure, could be. I mean, from my perspective the whole term ICO has come out of nowhere and there could also be some bullshit hype money around that too. I hadn't heard the term until a couple months ago and now there are articles about my employer having done one.

I've given up trying to guess the markets in cryptocurrencies... I wouldn't have the first clue how to divine any accurate insight from their movement alone. To me, there has been tons of really weird phenomena in the behavior of the altcoin markets for a while now.

I could also just be stupid :)

Still doesn't prove causality of course, but there's an article on the front page at this very moment about a spike in ransomware. And most ransomware (and ransom in general) is paid quietly, not discussed publicly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14324129

Yes, I'm well aware. And if you look at the dashboard for the botnet (https://intel.malwaretech.com/botnet/wcrypt/?t=24h&bid=all) it looks like we're dealing with ~80000 infected hosts.

Unless I'm reading things wrongs (and that certainly could be) it seems like the ransom from those hosts would still be several orders of magnitude lower than the new money that appears to be coming into the exchanges.

How do the alts (other than zcash and monero) help launder bitcoin?

I guess if someone did BTC -> exchange A -> altcoin -> exchange B -> BTC that's theoretically traceable but fairly difficult in practice.

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