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Comment by Raed667 | Hacker News Reader

One of the linked transactions: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/432ded9...

The destination address (https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1YAR6opJCf...) seems to have received ~216 BTC yesterday in the span of 4 minutes

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The hacker will have a rough time converting these to USD without exposing himself. If they’re in Russia they probably don’t need to care, but there’s a reasonable chance they live in a country that the FBI can reach.

On the other hand, no one can do anything until the coins are moved or more information is uncovered. What a nightmare to lose $3.6m overnight.

Just use Defi - take a loan from a "smart" script with a collateral of tainted bittokens, then cash out loaned tokens, and never repay the loan. Isn't Finance 2.0 amazing? :)

Not gonna work. Your loaned tokens are traceable back to your tainted bitcoins (in this case wrapped btc on ethereum).

Does the FBI care about individuals losing bitcoins?

Yes, I think it funds their war in Ukraine

couldn't he convert it to monero, perform a couple of wallet to wallet transfers (maybe even divide the amount along the way), and then sell from there?

Or just make a deal with someone in Russia?

That’ll likely go about as well as making a deal in RuneScape. Though the hacker doesn’t have many options.

Isn't it surprising that an early Bitcoin adopter has "only" 216 Bitcoin? Didn't he join at a time where you'd be mining full blocks solo?

(One of his later tweets claimed that "it's basically all gone" or something like that, implying this wasn't just a small fraction of his total coins.)

It looks like his oldest commit is from February 28, 2011[1], and the first pool was created in 2010[2]. I'm not sure when he started using bitcoin.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?after=d8bdee0fc88...

[2] https://compassmining.io/education/bitcoin-mining-pools-hist...

People forget bitcoin wasn't worth anything for a long time. You take care of an asset worth millions very differently than an asset worth pennies and too much of a pain to transact for cash anyway.

Someone being around since 2011 and believing in bitcoin, and only having hundreds of BTC today is implausibly rare.

Back in 2011, a desktop CPU would mine thousands of bitcoins per month.

No, that's factually wrong. In 2011 you would need to mine with at least a GPU, and a single one would barely produce 100 bitcoins in a year if not less.

You're thinking of 2009, when it was first released and nobody knew anything about it.

I know that by the time I even looked at it in 2011 you couldn't mine anything with a desktop CPU.

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