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Comment by hibikir | Hacker News Reader

It's not just about receiving the ransom, but how easy it can be to access the original funds.

The story of, say, someone successfully kidnapping Bezos in a lightning operation and trying to take a good bite of his wealth is quite different than the same if you kidnapped Satoshi while he has access to his keys. It's not even in the tracing, but how much you can take away successfully, and how fast.

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It's about ransom, not about keys. Fortune 500 company CEOs and such have a special insurance for the cases like this. There is an old movie Proof of Life about the topic.

It'd be trivial for Bezos to take out a loan for a ransom to buy crypto in a new account, and then transfer it to another crypto account.

While being held captive and done in a way that doesn't give away the location of the kidnappers? The larger the loan Bezos takes, the harder that will be.

The extremely wealthy like Bezos have contingency plans and systems for this situation.

> While being held captive and done in a way that doesn't give away the location of the kidnappers?

I’m assuming it wouldn’t be Bezos himself doing it. You would contact his employees and tell them to get you the crypto if they want him back.

Which assumes those staff doesn't have instructions on how to handle such a situation.

Why? Would the instructions be different from „do what the kidnappers say and get the money back from the insurance“?

Absolutely.

So what would the instructions be typically?

> The extremely wealthy like Bezos have contingency plans and systems for this situation.

Yes. That's the point, the ideal target is one that doesn't have contingency plans, not someone who has crypto.

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