The NSA Worked to "Track Down" Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal
Internet paranoiacs drawn to Bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency. Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, Bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable - while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of Bitcoin's fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.
It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something.
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The NSA Worked to "Track Down" Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal
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(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:48AM
Both men pulled as hard as they conceivably could. One man gained some footing, but then the other man gained an equal amount. So far, they were tied in this high-stakes duel. The men both wanted to utilize the object for themselves, and as a result, it had turned into a game resembling tug of war. Which one would ultimately be the victor? If there was an audience, they would be drenched in sweat from the suspense. Then, something tore.
Screaming. The woman's screams became even louder; some of her shoulder and leg muscles had been torn apart. But the men merely chortled and kept pulling. One man pulled on the woman's left leg, and the other man pulled on the woman's right arm. Torn muscles, broken bones, immense pain, and screaming to accompany it all; what a wondrous combination. Suddenly, the men came to a realization.
They worked well together. To be able to produce such stellar bloodcurdling screams was praiseworthy in and of itself. Thus, the men smiled at one another in a gregarious fashion and decided to utilize the woman together. They had discovered the beauty of teamwork. It had been a fulfilling day, one in which learning and men's rights could thrive. The men laughed as they violated the woman... together.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:59AM (20 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:17AM (19 children)
How fast can I create wallets and transfer currency between them?
Are there any crypto-currency lenders? I'd love to borrow some currency in one wallet and pay the loan from another wallet 10 milliseconds later - offering 0.5% of the loan for those 10 ms.
Perhaps I can even buy some in-game-currency on the track and sell it seconds later for another crypto-currency?
Really? Is data-mining in the NSA-stored-traffic so fast?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 27 2018, @01:12PM (2 children)
You are coming very close to describing HFT in stocks as well...
There are effective brakes on the speed with which most individuals can move money, the number of people who can move a million dollars twice in an hour is very small (1m US citizens) start trading large volumes of bitcoin for other things quickly, I'd expect the brakes to be applied there, too.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:17PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:08AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @02:32PM
Bitcoin transfer speed depends very much on how much you are willing to pay for it. In the end, you may find that by trying to evade from the three-letter agencies, you've transferred all your Bitcoins to miners around the world.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:23PM (14 children)
Totally and utterly irrelevant.
The transactions are in the ledger, they've got all the time in the world to trawl through that and taint more and more wallets.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:12PM
That and the transactions aren't real until they become part of the blockchain. No miner is going to include a shitload of $0.10US transactions with no mining fees included in their blocks. When "they" do track you down they'll add money laundering to any other charges they have for you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:29PM (11 children)
Not if the wallet is one-use (and all records of it deleted after you're done) or you use one of the collective services (at your own risk, of course). The real problem is that your money has to get into bitcoins somehow and become something usable on the other end when you're done. That can be attacked more successfully.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:12PM (1 child)
Doesn't this kind of go against one of the fundamental tenets of Bitcoin, that all transactions are reproducible and permanently recorded? If you can't tell where a Bitcoin came from, what keeps people from just making up their own?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:28PM
No, because reuse of a wallet is not essential to the system or its tenets.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:12PM (8 children)
My god, have they reinvented write-only memory again?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:43PM (6 children)
What's so hard to grasp here? Ledger isn't much good for financial tracking, if the things that are tracked never repeat. Using the same wallet for a bunch of transactions means they all get linked together to whoever is finally determined to possess that wallet at the end. If I use a new wallet for each closed cycle transaction of money into bitcoin and back out again with any record of that wallet deleted on my end, then they will have a hard time linking those transactions to me. Maybe the behavior is sufficiently unique that they can track it that way, but it'll be hard to prove anything in a court of law (though perhaps not hard enough to prevent a search warrant).
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 28 2018, @06:13AM (5 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @07:41AM (4 children)
I did write
so yes, I did realize that. I also know that knowing one of the two parties to a bitcoin transaction doesn't automatically give you the identity of the other party. Using wallets (which is just software for storing private keys) once means that they'll have a much harder time pinning any patterns on a bitcoin launderer. And since you aren't actually keeping any bitcoins in my proposed scheme, you don't need to store any record of the transfer.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:18AM (3 children)
And again, you've overlooked the virality of taint that I mentioned in my very first post.
But don't worry, I'm sure you'd get away with it, because you're smart.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @08:41AM (2 children)
And?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 28 2018, @10:17AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 28 2018, @11:28AM
(Score: 2) by datapharmer on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:45PM
Ah but there are valuable usss for worm... [soylentnews.org] Less chance for firmware tampering for example.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 27 2018, @09:52PM
Heh, excluding the wrench attack, until they finish I might be dead after a long fruitful life in an environment with blackjack and hookers.
I'm sure my historians will be delighted of their effort.
Security is a trade-off between the cost of protection vs the cost of the attacker breaking that protection. Even no perfect security can exist, good-enough security may serve the purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @09:23AM (5 children)
Oh don't listen to them, they're conspiracy theorists after all, they make outrageous claims all the time that can't possibly be true! Why would the NSA need to know about your love life?
/s
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @09:31AM (1 child)
Conspiracy Theorist is a term coined by intelligence agencies to discredit those who are hot on their tails.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:17AM
That's what they want you to think!!!!
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday March 27 2018, @12:43PM (2 children)
My sister was once subjected to a
psychobabbler's interrogationpsychologist's questioning where she was asked "Do you ever feel like you're being followed?"Her answer: "Only when I am."
That about sums it up for me. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @02:37PM (1 child)
Also a nice one:
Psychiatrist: "Do you sometimes hear voices, although nobody is around?"
Patient: "Yes."
Psychiatrist: "In which situations does that happen?"
Patient: "When listening to the radio, watching TV or talking on the phone."
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:43PM
As opposed to this classic reaction to a Rorschach test:
Psych: "And what does this make you think of?"
Patient: "Sex"
Psych: "And this one, what does this make you think of?"
Patient: "Sex"
Psych: "And this one?"
Patient: "Umm, sex"
Psych: "You're obsessed with sex!"
Patient: "No, you're the one showing me Penthouse instead of a bunch of random-looking inkblots!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @01:23PM
Turns out the conspiracy theorists have been right every time, from back when they claimed the existence of an agency nicknamed "No Such Agency" or NSA.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:22PM (1 child)
WTF that it turns out the conspiracy theorists were on to something? You have an agency who is responsible for signals intelligence. It is in their charter to try to break communications. You got something that potentially allows bad actors to hide money. No shit they'll try to figure out how to crack it. That's their fucking job! Who the hell said they weren't trying to figure that stuff out? There are a whole lot of issues that need to be discussed regarding privacy, security, etc., but to suggest that nobody but a few prescient rag-tag group of geniuses believed that they were interested in figuring out how to unmask bitcoin owners are bullshitting you (or they have a strong sense of grandeur).
"See? I TOLD you this was going on! NOBODY believed me!" Yeah, bullshit.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:45PM
Unless ... Recursive conspiracy:
"Hey, there's this thing worth billions, that people use to buy illegal stuff on the web, including drugs. It also can be used to transfer funds to terrorists, cartels, and bribes"
"Nah, let that one be. We need people to do illegal shit thinking it's safe, so that we can frame them all easier and keep on spying and blackmailing anyone we feel like."
"But, dude, They're dumb enough to carry a list of every transaction, and send it to anyone that asks, just because their names are replaced with unique codes. That makes our job so easy I can get my extortion bonus three weeks early"
"Orders from above, ignore Bitcoin because it doesn't have a high enough Threaten Control Puppet score yet. Hey ! Did you see Joe Bill's wife is Signalling with her new sex toy ? He ain't gonna be working on your car for the next 5 minutes"
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday March 27 2018, @03:32PM
https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-01-31-bitcoin-created-by-the-cia-and-nsa-warns-co-founder-of-kaspersky-security-software-firm.html [naturalnews.com]
Obviously.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by OrugTor on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:07PM
Conspiracy theorists are right the way the community of stock pickers are right. Between them they pick every stock. However, stock pickers are generally considered sane.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:23PM (1 child)
A Bitcoin was worth $19,000 three months ago. Today it is worth $8000.
That's some boom.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @07:05PM
soylent can be sort of slow with the approval process for the articles. we often discuss last weeks technology a few weeks later.