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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 26 2020, @07:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the up-in-smoke dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

"In early 2017, he had just over 6,000 Bitcoin in one account, but he feared it may be too easy for a hacker to access," the Irish Times noted this month. "He decided to spread his wealth across 12 new accounts and transferred exactly 500 Bitcoin, worth almost €4.5m, into each of them."

The keys to those accounts were written on a piece of paper and stashed with Collins' fishing rod for safekeeping.

But later that year, Collins was cuffed and jailed for five years for drug possession, as dealers are prone to do. Believing his tenant was no longer able to make rent, Collins' landlord emptied his house and threw out, among other things, the pot peddler's fishing gear.

As it turns out, within the aluminum case of the weed-slinger's fishing rod was the sheet of A4 paper on which the digital keys to 12 Bitcoin wallets was scribbled. The paper was, among Collins' other belongings, sent to a dump in Galway and, it is believed, ultimately incinerated at a facility in either Germany or China.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Wednesday February 26 2020, @07:41AM (25 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Wednesday February 26 2020, @07:41AM (#962762) Homepage Journal

    That's a heck of a lot of weed...

    Of course, the truth may be different. Apparently, you can be thrown in jail for refusing to reveal your passwords. However, if you tell the police that they were thrown out with your fishing gear, well...

    Seriously, the guy goes to the trouble of splitting his Bitcoin into different wallets, and we're supposed to believe that he wrote all twelve keys on the same piece of paper, and had only one copy of this? Riiiight...

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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @08:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @08:48AM (#962770)

    he did this when price was was like 30 cents for a bitcoin as opposed to ~$8000 it is now.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @09:05AM (16 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @09:05AM (#962774)

    I think the worry was that individual collections of bitcoin could be "stolen" through electronic means (no idea how these things actually work). there have been stories of exchanges being broken into and bitcoins "stolen". so the splitting into 12 would protect against that.

    in any case, this would not be the dumbest thing that this particular person did in their life (I would say "still dealing weed after being a millionaire" tops that list).

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:11AM (14 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:11AM (#962783)

      Actually hiding it in a fishing rod doesn't seem like a stupid idea. It's not like a drug dealer would want to stash the bitcoins in a safe (that's like painting a bullseye on the money). Or worse a bank "safe" [1] deposit box (which is like painting a bullseye AND announcing the start of hunting season)...

      Having just one physical copy isn't that stupid - lots of people have only one physical copy of their valuables in a safe (and sometimes they're just naive enough to trust a bank with it[1]) .

      And maybe he actually has more than one copy but this incident just gives him plausible deniability...

      [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html [nytimes.com]

      In 1998, Mr. Poniz rented several additional boxes, and stored in them various items related to his work. He separated a batch of personal effects — photographs, coins he had inherited from his grandfather, dozens of watches — into a box labeled 105. Every time he opened it, he saw the glinting accumulation of his life’s work.

      Then, on April 7, 2014, he lifted the thin metal lid. Box 105 was empty.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @01:06PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @01:06PM (#962812)

        >Then, on April 7, 2014, he lifted the thin metal lid. Box 105 was empty.

        White wageslave retard PWND. Bet he opposed men marrying little girls too.

      • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday February 26 2020, @01:14PM (12 children)

        by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday February 26 2020, @01:14PM (#962813) Journal

        Having just one physical copy isn't that stupid

        Well, only in the sense that it is incredibly stupid.

        Suppose there's a fire?

        Suppose mice get into the location you decided to store the paper and think it'll make just dandy nesting material?

        Suppose the landlord throws out all your stuff?

        Suppose there is a tornado and your shit is scattered far and wide? Or, depending on where you are, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a flood, a mudslide, a sinkhole...

        Suppose someone burglarizes you and ... likes fishing?

        I mean, come on. How difficult is it to make multiple copies (on paper no less!), at least lightly encoded and with no hint as to what the contents mean, and stash them in various places that are both secure and not subject to same potential risks?

        The stupidity of the approach as described is beyond believable. If actually true, the self-owned idiot must have the IQ of a snail.

        No, that's just being rude to snails. I apologize.

        --
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        Father: I don't know. I'm still paying.

        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 26 2020, @03:37PM (2 children)

          by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday February 26 2020, @03:37PM (#962895)

          All of which are of course also problems with storing paper money...

          • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday February 26 2020, @05:16PM

            by nitehawk214 (1304) on Wednesday February 26 2020, @05:16PM (#962966)

            Only if you were storing it in million dollar bills.

            --
            "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
          • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday February 27 2020, @06:59PM

            by fyngyrz (6567) on Thursday February 27 2020, @06:59PM (#963655) Journal

            All of which are of course also problems with storing paper money...

            Not the same at all. You get one copy of valid paper money.

            The important thing passwords on paper have in common with money is that they can be valuable.

            However you can have N copies of passwords, unlike money, so copies make perfect sense. I don't just have one copy of my passwords, and I don't have them all subject to the same risks, either. They're not even bitcoin related, but there are a lot of them and they're not at all easy to remember, so I do the smart thing and make sure they're retrievable.

            --
            Life's a beach...
            and then you dry.

        • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @08:52PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @08:52PM (#963073)

          Ya, no backups? DUH! Was the guy on drugs!

          Oh wait ...

          • (Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday February 27 2020, @12:22AM

            by arslan (3462) on Thursday February 27 2020, @12:22AM (#963238)

            Come on. He's just doing QC on his product! That's a sound business plan.

        • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:04AM (6 children)

          by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:04AM (#963279) Journal
          Sometimes you have no choice. Here there's a central registry of births, and you can get ONE birth certificate, the original. No such thing as an authentic copy, a certified copy, etc. If the original gets lost, you have to have it revoked (you are given a revocation code which you store separately if you have any brains). Once revoked, you can order a new one, with new serial number and revocation code. Anyone can verify the cert is current with the persons information and certificate serial number. Copies are not proof, only that original.

          Given there's only one original, you can't store backup copies - they're useless.

          --
          SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
          • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:03PM (5 children)

            by fyngyrz (6567) on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:03PM (#963657) Journal

            Sometimes you have no choice.

            Sure. But with passwords, which are the subject at hand here, we do have a choice:

            • The safe and sane one: keep copies
            • The unsafe and unnecessary one: don't keep copies

            --
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            Because they are all pawns, and their
            king doesn't exist.

            • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday February 28 2020, @02:37AM (4 children)

              by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday February 28 2020, @02:37AM (#963915) Journal

              Both have risks. It boils down to two options.

              1. keep all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket like a hawk. The downside is that if it's gone, it's gone and nobody, including you, can gain access to your shit (which is better in many cases than someone else gaining access);

              2. Make multiple copies, knowing that every copy increases the risk that someone else gets access to your shit and changes the password, so you end up with nothing and they end up with everything.

              In most cases, you're better off under scenario 1. In both scenarios, you lose your crap, but at least in #1 nobody else gets to profit from your loss, maybe find interesting stuff on your hard drive that can blackmail you, steal your identity and take ALL your stuff, etc.

              Scenario: you lose your phone or laptop. Ideally nobody else can access it, and all you've lost is your phone.

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              SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
              • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday February 28 2020, @02:25PM (3 children)

                by fyngyrz (6567) on Friday February 28 2020, @02:25PM (#964105) Journal

                Both have risks.

                Yes. But those two options are not even remotely equivalent — not if you're smart. Multiple copies of passwords can be stashed so they are encrypted, anonymous, and incredibly difficult to find or accidentally run into, and these three things are trivially easy to accomplish.

                Again, it comes down to using your head. Also, again, phones, money, passwords — these things are not equivalent. Phones can just be phones, they don't have to be troves of data (that's a choice.) You can have multiple phones. Lose one, so what. Use another. Disable the lost one and move the number to the next phone. Done. If you managed your risk poorly, that's on you. We know how they work. Money is one copy only and any specific unit portion can only be secured in one way. Passwords are multiple copy and can be extremely well secured in all instances.

                Sure, you can do things poorly, and if you do, your risks increase enormously. But why would you?

                --
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                • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday February 28 2020, @05:05PM (2 children)

                  by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday February 28 2020, @05:05PM (#964171) Journal

                  So you store multiple encrypted copies of your passwords all over the place - and forget the encryption key. How are you any better off? Using a password manager? You still need to either remember the key, or if it's a hardware key, hope nobody else gets their hands on it. Screwed either way, but the latter is worse, because again anyone can take your crap, change your passwords, and steal your identity.

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                  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday February 28 2020, @07:35PM (1 child)

                    by fyngyrz (6567) on Friday February 28 2020, @07:35PM (#964290) Journal

                    No. Same thing applies to keys as it does to records. Really, your argument has already foundered, capsized and sunk on this one. All I can see now are bubbles. 😊

                    --
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                    • (Score: 2, Disagree) by barbara hudson on Saturday February 29 2020, @03:35AM

                      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday February 29 2020, @03:35AM (#964493) Journal

                      That's your opinion, but it doesn't stand up to reality. Most people lock their phones. They'd rather someone attempt 10 times to unlock it, and brick the phone, rather than have someone else access to their data.

                      And if you admit you wrote down your pin, you're not covered for any loses by unauthorized withdrawals on your debit card. Which is more likely to be discovered if you leave a dozen copies floating around.

                      It's always better to lose all your data than to have someone else have access to it.

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                      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 26 2020, @03:31PM

      by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday February 26 2020, @03:31PM (#962889)

      Exchanges are a special case - basically you've *already* given your money to someone else (the exchange) that's continuously making transactions. If their computers are compromised, or if anyone working there is corrupt... well, you should have been more careful about who you gave your money to for safekeeping.

      What's the world coming to when you can't trust random people running an online money laundering operation not to steal your money? (Okay, maybe not *all* exchanges are money laundering operations. But there's not really a whole lot of other value to be had in letting someone else store your bitcoin for you.)

      So long as you keep your "password" secret, money that's actually in your bitcoin wallet can't be stolen. Of course, malware on your computer, phone, or whatever else you're using to make bitcoin payments could steal the password, and then your money. And unlike stolen credit card or bank account credentials, there's not currently much chance of getting your stolen bitcoin back.

  • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:16AM (2 children)

    by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:16AM (#962786) Journal

    Seriously, the guy goes to the trouble of splitting his Bitcoin into different wallets, and we're supposed to believe that he wrote all twelve keys on the same piece of paper, and had only one copy of this? Riiiight...

    I believe it. I've seen lots of users do a lot worse than this with my eyes. Passwords on post its, passwords on the white board, passwords on post its on the whiteboard, ..., passwords like "12345", passwords stored in git, passwords used on multiple websites... and these examples are just from the "IT professionals" I've worked with. As in, like, they were making their living by doing pretty complicated IT stuff. I can't get into details, but they were doing things well beyond merges between Word and Excel. It usually involved programming languages.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:30AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @10:30AM (#962788)

      my brain evolved to remember smells, sounds, images and such stuff. not my fault your security system is not designed properly.

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:07AM

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:07AM (#963281) Journal
      You always store a password on a post it under the keyboard. Then you check the logs to see any bad login attempts. Because the postit password is not your real password, just bait.
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      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @11:46AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 26 2020, @11:46AM (#962798)
    This is fake news.

    There is nothing new here that would not also have happened had the pot dealer simply done nothing with the bitcoin. The bitcoin are not gone because he split them up into multiple wallets. No, the bitcoin are gone for what everyone using bitcoin should already know, you lose your password, you lose your bitcoin.

    This is, however, a very good example of how the current, advertising driven press, makes things up in order to generate clicks and ultimately advertising revenue.

    The bitcoin would still be gone if he had done nothing, and stored his password on a paper with his fishing gear.

    The bitcoin would still be gone had he stored them in a hardware wallet, and the landlord threw out the hardware wallet.

    Remember, a landlord clearing a rental is simply looking to throw everything out. As in have dumpster dropped in front yard, pay a few illegal immigrants a sub-minimum wage to transfer house contents to dumpster. So anything not obviously of significant value (like, diamonds or gold coins) simply goes straight into the dumpster with no thought.

    But there would be no 'click stream' from the real story: which is "lost bitcoin password means lost bitcoin". So instead the press makes shit up to make the story seem like something different (in this case: to appear to be "bitcoin lost because owner split into twelve wallets") when there is no real story at all.

    This story is a nice illustration of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect Gell-Mann Amnesia [epsilontheory.com]:

    “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

    In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

    • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday February 26 2020, @07:54PM

      by shortscreen (2252) on Wednesday February 26 2020, @07:54PM (#963051) Journal

      Maybe it was supposed to be a smear piece against bitcoin. I thought it was just an opportunity to point and laugh at the cops who missed out on their chance to grab some sweet, sweet drug money.

    • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday February 27 2020, @03:00PM

      by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Thursday February 27 2020, @03:00PM (#963513) Journal

      By your definition all news is fake news unless you can point to how it personally affects you or the environment which is relevant to you.

      If the story is actually factually not truthful about the story, that is called making things up. Otherwise it is relating details of the story which may or may not be relevant, or may or may not be designed to get you to click it. That's a long stretch from making things up or being fake news.

      Which goes to show that the term fake news has lost all meaning except, "I don't like this."

      The real question not asked is... is the story actually bullshit and the criminal knows exactly where the accounts and passwords are but has given an untraceable lie to the police such that he can shift the funds when and if he ever gets outside the jurisdiction there and to a place that will not cooperate with extradition or further seizure.

      The real hidden fact of the story is that while someone can claim legal ownership of the bitcoin the only persons who control it are both the password owner and a nebulous 51% of the blockchain community who could administratively cause a change by fiat to the chain history (i.e. agreeing to revoke those prior trades and/or shifting them to a different account). That is, if I understand Bitcoin well.

      --
      This sig for rent.
  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday February 26 2020, @04:43PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Wednesday February 26 2020, @04:43PM (#962951) Homepage

    He "lost" his wallets with his fishing gear just like other people "lose" their newly-legislated-illegal assault rifles in a "tragic boating accident."

    Haw!