Peter wrote:
How come that practically all the IT scams involve a BTC payment for the ransom to unlock your system, etc?If they are all traceable, are they being traced?
The traceability is in the Bitcoin system itself. As soon as you exit it, you can have a point of non-traceability:
Malibuflyer wrote:
For every Euro they issued they at the very same time took 8.83ct in BEF, 31.955ct in DM, 20,312ct In FF, etc. out of circulation.
You mean 40.3399 BEF, 1.95583 DEM, 6.55957 FRF, etc :)
please do not quote out of context, especially if it omits the point someone makes.
We have the same opinion, the full quote was “And there is absolutely no doubt that bitcoin is in a speculative bubble, most people buy it not because they want it to exchange it for goods or services at its current value, they buy it to exchange it for goods and services at a future, higher value”.
By leaving out that I wrote that I think it is a speculative bubble you are technically correct, but distort my position.
sorry, you are right!
Peter wrote:
How come that practically all the IT scams involve a BTC payment for the ransom to unlock your system, etc?If they are all traceable, are they being traced?
It depends how much they want to follow. It can be made more difficult with coin mixers, however there’s also a reasonable question if some of these are actually run by government agencies to keep a track of these things.
I guess most people use BTC because it’s the biggest market and they maybe think most people won’t take the effort to track them down, particularly if they make it difficult by trying to obfuscate things.
IT folks presumably would be more likely to be early adopters of new technology.
I guess it comes down to whether or not risks of having a decentralised system which is leaderless and permissionless being used by some undesirables is worse than having government controlled currencies which are also used by undesirables
Malibuflyer wrote:
There is no mechanism to prevent new nodes being added to the network. Everybody who wants to establish a node can do so
That’s precisely my point. If a group see’s a huge addition of nodes. Some of the whales may act to secure the network by also adding a large number of nodes. With a number of people doing this it makes it much harder for one person to fight the many.
Malibuflyer wrote:
No – I always said it’s all about mining capacity and not about non mining nodes. You are the one who pretends non mining nodes have a significant say.
So why would china be kicking miners out of the country if they’re mounting a 51% attack?
Malibuflyer wrote:
Complete misunderstanding of the mechanism of transaction fees.
1. It’s not only about speed but more significantly about if the transaction is executed at all. There has not been a single transaction in the last 4 weeks that has been executed at less than 2 USD fee – and yes, there are loads of transactions with less fees offered in the backlog that just do not get executed.
I don’t follow this at all.
There have been loads of blocks recently which have not been filled with transactions and quiet times in the mempool. For instance the most recent block 687950 had only 475 transactions with an average rate of 2 sat/vB . and transactions on there at 1sat/vB
Malibuflyer wrote:
Very optimistically one could say that lightning is for bitcoin what western union is for normal currency.
Or lightning is credit card payment compared to Fedwire.
Malibuflyer wrote:
El Salvador – really?
Yes Really,
Maybe they’ll be the only one. Perhaps they wont.Malibuflyer wrote:
most of the illegal drug, weapon and human trafficking “businesses”
You seriously think most of these use bitcoin for their operations? I thought that the payments for those wanting to be transported over to europe were paying cash.
Malibuflyer wrote:
sorry, you are right!
Thank you.
Now – this is a bit tongue in check – all is needed that I can convince you of the difference between what requires 51% of “votes” (undoing transactions, which is determined by technology) and what requires a broader consensus, which is not driven by technology.
I’lt try to explain it in a different way. I find it hard to translate “Geld ist was gilt” from German to English, but the meaning is “Money is what people believe is money”, and by implication “Money is worth what people believe it is worth”.
There is nothing preventing you, me, Peter and Graham deciding that we want our own, different version of Bitcoin, we fork the chain, and off we go. If we can’t convince anyone to come with us, we can happily use it to buy things from each other, but nobody else will do that so the value outside our little club will be zero. And the threat that we will no longer accept the original Bitcoin from the other millions of people is not likely to sway many.
But if it is the other way round – it is everyone BUT the four of us who moves to a new version – we would either join them, or effectively abandon the Bitcoin we hold.
So there is no hard and fast number of people or nodes required to make a change to the protocols; a 90% that does not include the major exchanges would not work. But if all the exchanges colluded and went together, that might well drag along everyone else, even if they represent only a few % of nodes. The chain may also split and you end up with two.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Complete misunderstanding of the mechanism of transaction fees.
1. It’s not only about speed but more significantly about if the transaction is executed at all. There has not been a single transaction in the last 4 weeks that has been executed at less than 2 USD fee – and yes, there are loads of transactions with less fees offered in the backlog that just do not get executed.
This is demonstrably bollocks. Here’s just one I pulled from a block today. Far from unique. $0.05
Cobalt wrote:
all is needed that I can convince you of the difference between what requires
I guess in the end we are actually not far away from each other, because we are basically saying exactly the same thing: There are mechanisms that can completely destroy the value of bitcoin that can not be prevented by the best technology in the world.
While some people believe that bitcoin is “algorithmically secure” and either consciously or unconsciously believe this creates some kind of value protection, the truth is that it does not. It might only require a single twitter star to fundamentally destroy btc value if his fanboys react accordingly.
Seashells, tulips, glass perils, greensill credit notes, Bitconnect, Woodbridge Security Shares, Bitcoin, etc. all had/have their times when it was accepted by some people as a value exchange token. And as long as one finds “the next one who wants to buy” everything is fine.
All of that systems, however, shared some commonalities:
- If one looks at it very carefully, it has been a surprisingly small group of people who actually traded in it. The public noise was much bigger than the actual usage
- This group had a more or less strong conviction, that they have found the holy grail and all of the others are just “stupid” that they do not understand how great this system is
- The end came fast and mighty. There were little signs of warning before a complete breakdown
I know nothing about bitcoin except basically what I have read on here. But if the history of the Bitcoin is so traceable, why was the FBI only able to recover 50% of the Bitcoins recovered from the ransom paid by the American power company? Also I believe the ransom was $11 million, surely a company with that sort of funding, would be better off and cheaper hiring a team of investigators and a hitman so that the culprit can never do the same thing again.
gallois wrote:
But if the history of the Bitcoin is so traceable, why was the FBI only able to recover 50% of the Bitcoins recovered from the ransom paid by the American power company?
Traceability and the ability to confiscate are two different things. As I understand it they only got the bitcoin because the ransom people had some of it wallet with the keys stored on a server in the states. The Feds were then able to get access to the server and the keys. Thus able to sign for and take back the bitcoin. Presumably the other amount has gone elsewhere.
I think the culprit was part of group which do a lot of these targeted attacks. I don’t know how easy it would be to trace them.
I did find it especially odd that the US administration basically told them to pay the ransom though. It’s opening the door to more. Especially as some critical systems are operated on pretty insecure old equipment which was absolutely fine until some bright spark decided that it needed to be connected to the internet.
Still resident Biden has given Putin a list of 16 things he shouldn’t hack. I feel sorry for whoever was no 17.
