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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: 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.”

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  • (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.