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Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

This appreciation in price has made a lot of shady people fabulously rich.

While MtGox still has 200k BTC, the thief(s) went away with 650k BTC - now worth almost $2B - richer then most hot shot unicorn startup founders worshiped these days.

If they ever get caught, they should be awarded some kind of prize - biggest and cleanest heist in the history of humanity. I mean, this is a proverbial "for $2 billion, would you create an anonymous transaction in the block chain?". (!?!)

Then there are the drug dealers, the drug market admins who stole coins and all the other hacks, extortions, pump-and-dumps, etc.

These shady people are now rich and are probably thinking about investing their money - into companies, politics, etc. They are joining all the other nouveaux riche from all over the world who made their money from corruption, arms trades and everything in between.

Interesting times ahead indeed.

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This is assuming everyone who acquired BTC held on to them to this point, I very much doubt that's the true for any scenario you mentioned except the MtGox.

Also 650k BTC - could you ever cash that out at anywhere close to current price :|

> Also 650k BTC - could you ever cash that out at anywhere close to current price

Instead you might cash it out at several times greater than the present price in a few years. It would be easy to drip 10k BTC into the market and liquidate several hundred thousand coins over the next year.

>drip 10k BTC into the market and liquidate several hundred thousand coins over the next year.

Really ? You could put 10k BTC on sell side per day and the market wouldn't collapse in a week or two ? From what I can see on this exchange : https://www.bitstamp.net/market/tradeview/

You could push it below 2k$ with less than 10k BTC, I'm assuming there are bigger exchanges - I'm not following BTC close - is there an aggregate of exchange bids on big exchanges ?

Could you crash the market a bit, buy a lot of BTC, and then wait for it to recover again? I wonder if that would be a zero-sum game or if you could gain from such a cycle. E.g. I'm not sure if the price adjustment is instantaneous, or follows with a lag (in which case you could certainly make money).

Also, it might be very hard to move large amounts anonymously onto an exchange, and if you did that (even assuming they couldn't trace the BTC to your nefarious origin, or they are clean), I'm sure you are violating some market manipulation law somewhere.

>and then wait for it to recover again

If you demonstrated you could do this once - why would it ever recover ? Who would invest in it again ? Especially with so many altcoins.

They could use something like https://cumberlandmining.com/ and not affect the markets

Shouldn't we be able to see on the blockchain if these coins have been spent again? That would be interesting to see.

Also, I would not know what to do with 650k hot bitcoin. I think nobody is currently tracking "taint" and would refuse tainted BTC. But I would have trouble liquidating much less. It seems even the anonymous "guy in the park" wants to see documentation nowadays. Governments have really stepped up their anti-laundering game.

Pretty sure BTC owners are only a small part of the shady people who got rich by any means.

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