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Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

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The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

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You are here: Home / Politics / Glibertarianism / Schadenfreude Open Thread

Schadenfreude Open Thread

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OK, this is fun (via yr humble blogger’s brother).  Follow a Bitcoin thief in real time:

The thief’s problem is that the angry Bitcoin account holders whose money has gone are following the thief through the tumbler, by sending him small amounts of cash that are appended to the larger amount as it is split up and moved on. Each Bitcoin transaction generates a “blockchain” record showing its history, and the appended loose change thus identifies where the bulk of the money is going. The theft victims are hoping that eventually the thief will be prevented from cashing out his accounts because doing so would lead to him being identified in real life.

So far, Reddit user sheepreleoaded2 believes he has identified 96,000 Bitcoins (about $100 million) being exchanged by the thief

…

The blockchain record is here. The last transaction was just a few minutes ago. The thief appears to have split the 96,000 coins into packets of ~1,000 each, sending each one on a different route.

Lais_of_Corinth,_by_Hans_Holbein_the_Younger

So, great, right? Follow the money; catch the thief; restore their lost property to the fine upstanding citizens trading in Bitcoins in the first place….

Errr, no:

Unfortunately for those who have been ripped off, the chances of them getting any money back are slim: Once a Bitcoin transaction has been made, it cannot be reversed without the consent of the recipient.

Other than weeping for the glibertarian dudebros and/or criminal masterminds who’ve been ripped off, what’s on your mind?

Image:  Hans Holbein the Younger, Lais of Corinth, 1526.

Reader Interactions

98Comments

  3. 3.

    MikeJ

    I was watching History Channel this AM and they had a show about Einstein on. Some real doofus talking about him. Tim something? Lovelsomething?

    Pretty good anyway.

  8. 8.

    Tom Levenson

    @MikeJ: Awww. Shucks.

    (Had fun taping that one. First experience w. the Errol Morris trick of interviewing right into the camera.)

  10. 10.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I’d imagine the only way to actually turn the stolen bitcoins into a conventional, accepted currency is to launder them finding suckers to exchange them for resell able goods that have tangible value. Even if you had to buy a Maserati with bitcoins and sell it used, you’d still be ahead in currency that is accepted outside of the closed bitcoin monoculture.

    In the meantime, the dudebros are out whatever they squandered on this crap in the first place, which means they’re suffering. Which makes me happy.

  11. 11.

    MikeJ

    @Tom Levenson: Nobody understands when you shout out, “I’ve posted pseudonymously to a web site and that talking head has responded to me!”

    Damn near as exciting as the first time I was stopped at a red light and heard my own voice doing an Applebee’s commercial.

  17. 17.

    Tom Levenson

    @Omnes Omnibus: No idea. The show must be three or four years old now, and it seems to pop up whenever the History Channel folks can’t think of anything better. They don’t tell me…and I have the barest minimum of cable, which means I don’t get the channel.

  18. 18.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    I don’t understand any of this. Don’t you have to identify the guy you’re sending fractions of a bitcoin to before you can send him a fraction of a bitcoin? And if you can identify someone as soon as they try to cash out a bitcoin by connecting it to a bank account doesn’t that mean that you can identify someone as soon as they buy a bitcoin for real money? And in that case, what good are they for illegal transactions?

  21. 21.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @MomSense: The parked Aston Martin DB5 destroyed in Skyfall was created by a 3D printer. At least they did not wreck one of about 1100 DB5s ever made for the movie.

  23. 23.

    MikeJ

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Do you know if the program is going to be replayed? And, if so, when? I’d like to see it.

    I did a search on my Comcast box for Einstein, and as I had guessed, a bunch of hits for the Little Einsteins came up. The funny thing was, Defending your Life by Albert Brooks also came up. Brooks had to change his name for show business. His name at birth was Albert Einstein. I was impressed Comcast made the connection.

  24. 24.

    ? Martin

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    I’d imagine the only way to actually turn the stolen bitcoins into a conventional, accepted currency is to launder them finding suckers to exchange them for resell able goods that have tangible value.

    Considering that most bitcoin seems to be tied up in illegal activities, laundering and cashing them out doesn’t seem to be a huge problem. Worse case he buys a bunch of drugs which he may well be able to sell for a profit.

  25. 25.

    Suffern ACE

    @Tom Levenson: have you thought about theorizing that Einstein met aliens? We’d have no end of your appearances on that channel if you could prove that the aliens gave Einstein an end of the world prophesy that is being carried out by Masons.

  28. 28.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @MomSense: I was very happy to have found that out. I would have hated it if they had ruined something rare and special for the movie.

  30. 30.

    Suffern ACE

    @mdblanche: humph. I heard it was to be so bright that even us New Yorkers could see it in our bright night sky, if we’d only be able to look past our noses.

  31. 31.

    ? Martin

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):

    I don’t understand any of this. Don’t you have to identify the guy you’re sending fractions of a bitcoin to before you can send him a fraction of a bitcoin? And if you can identify someone as soon as they try to cash out a bitcoin by connecting it to a bank account doesn’t that mean that you can identify someone as soon as they buy a bitcoin for real money? And in that case, what good are they for illegal transactions?

    Accounts are anonymous. So you can track an account, but the identity can’t be known until you cash out. However, you can create new accounts, send bitcoin to the new account and with effort hide the money in the fog of transfers. So the real challenge is tracking the original stolen bitcoin though the transaction chain which is what these guys are trying to do. If they lose the chain, the money will be effectively laundered and when the guy cashes out, there will be no way to trace it back to the original stolen ones.

    The ability to launder bitcoin is a feature of the system. It’s not unlike gold in that way – just melt it down, recast it, and there’s effectively no way to identify it as the original gold you stole.

  41. 41.

    KG

    Once a Bitcoin transaction has been made, it cannot be reversed without the consent of the recipient.

    On the legal side of it, there’s a principle called “bona fide purchaser in good faith” – basically if you have no reason to know you’re buying stolen or misappropriated goods, the rightful owner can’t recover them from you. Of course, if you know (or should know) you’re getting stolen goods, then you’re screwed

  42. 42.

    Aaron

    Wait, isnt the whole point of bitcoins is that they are not traceable? And according to this, they are?

  43. 43.

    NotMax

    @MikeJ

    Show biz names run in the family.

    Albert Brooks’ brother is Super Dave Osborne.

    Their father was the character actor who went by Parkyakarkus.

  45. 45.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    @? Martin: Okay, but if these guys can track all of the transactions after a theft, why couldn’t law enforcement track all of the transactions after an illegal purchase and be waiting for the bad guys when they try to cash out?

    And what’s the downside to the thief if he can be identified? I doubt the people he stole the money from are going to want to press charges given that doing so would invite law enforcement to snoop around in the bank accounts the bitcoins were stolen from. Are the victims going to take out a hit on the thief? (Paying with bitcoins?) And if that’s the level of thugs we’re talking about shouldn’t the people who ran Sheep Marketplace be going into hiding about now? And wouldn’t that development act as a bit of a disincentive to be the next money laundering operation?

  47. 47.

    Roger Moore

    @? Martin:

    Considering that most bitcoin seems to be tied up in illegal activities, laundering and cashing them out doesn’t seem to be a huge problem.

    The bitcoins in this case were stolen from “an anonymous site for drug dealers”, so it’s not as if the people being ripped off were a bunch of upstanding citizens. I don’t know if most of the use of bitcoins is by criminals, but it sure sounds as if they’re popular among black marketeers.

  51. 51.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):

    Okay, but if these guys can track all of the transactions after a theft, why couldn’t law enforcement track all of the transactions after an illegal purchase and be waiting for the bad guys when they try to cash out?

    As I understand it, if you run things through a couple anonymous transactions before you cash out, you can’t be connected to the fraudulent transaction. Then again, I am not an expert.

  52. 52.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    @Omnes Omnibus: That’s why my question was an if/then. If these guys manage to successfully track the thief, doesn’t that mean that the whole premise of anonymity of bitcoin transactions is false?

  55. 55.

    ? Martin

    @Aaron:

    And according to this, they are?

    The coins aren’t traceable – but the transactions are (somewhat).

    For example, if you have a $100 bill you stole and I can witness you transferring that $100 by a variety of means, I can still reclaim $100 from you even though the physical bill is long gone. That’s what they’re trying to do here, so that when the bitcoin is cashed out, they can walk through the transaction chain and prove that the cashout was laundered from the original heist.

    What these guys are trying to do is the equivalent of putting a tracer on the money. Adding a fractional amount so they can find the next transaction, adding a small amount again, and following it to the end.

  58. 58.

    Suffern ACE

    Hmmm. I miss Dance Around in my Bones. It’s stories like this where she’d probably pop in about how she was once in an exotic place without shoes and ended up at a party with famous people who were trying to trace a currency horde.

  59. 59.

    ? Martin

    @Roger Moore: 4% of all bitcoin transactions ever made occurred on Silk Road. The FBI seized about 1% of all bitcoin from the site the day it was shut down. Sheep seems to have had similar traffic. Between those two sites, 7-10% of all transactions ever made have been conducted. Now expand that circle to all forms of illegal activity and extrapolate.

  60. 60.

    Suffern ACE

    @MobiusKlein: the smaller the bundles he puts them in, the more transactions he has to make to get of them and get real world money. The drug dealers he stole from only need to identify him once.

  61. 61.

    piratedan

    @? Martin: grifters gotta grift? perhaps they’re simply in training to be advertising agencies that cater to Republicans…. gotta start somewhere..

  62. 62.

    Roger Moore

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
    My understanding is that all transactions have a public record, but the people carrying them out are pseudonymous and anyone is free to create an unlimited number of pseudonymous accounts. So it’s theoretically possible to track a lot of transaction chains unless they’re deliberately designed to obfuscate where the money is going. I think that’s what the “tumblers” are: an attempt to mix the money up with other money and then split it out into different sized packets that go to new pseudonymous identities. You can still get some idea of what’s going on in that case by seeing which output packets add up to the same size as which input packets, and possibly by getting yourself into the same tumbler so you have additional information about the outcome. I suspect, though, that a lot of those kinds of attempts at laundering the money are the kind of thing that will fool ordinary people trying to track the money but won’t do much to slow down a dedicated tracker with access to serious computing power.

  63. 63.

    Joel

    How many people have cashed out on Bitcoin, and in what amounts of money? My guess is were talking about Intrade scale in terms of real dollars.

  64. 64.

    handsmile

    Nothing to do with bitcoins, but rather a bit to do with schadenfreude: “Can you beat Boris Johnson on “IQ test” questions?”:

    Last week the Tory mayor of London delivered some controversial remarks on the value of IQ tests, suggesting that some people struggle in life because of low IQs. Moreover, he urged that government policies should favor that 2% of the British population with IQs above 130: “The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.”

    Well, it so happens that Mayor Cornflake appeared yesterday on a radio call-in show and failed two questions presented like those one might find on an IQ test and refused to answer a third. He also stumbled quite badly on several questions related to London’s public transport system. Here’s what stumped the Oxford-educated Johnson:

    http://www.theguardian.com/politics/quiz/2013/dec/03/boris-johnson-iq-test-questions

  66. 66.

    ? Martin

    @Joel: Well, all bitcoin is valued currently at $1.2B, and bitcoin has turned at least 6 times – that is, each bitcoin has changed hands at least 4 times, so about $7.5B has been cashed out. Not sure how many individuals involved.

  68. 68.

    Roger Moore

    @? Martin:

    Well, all bitcoin is valued currently at $1.2B, and bitcoin has turned at least 6 times – that is, each bitcoin has changed hands at least 4 times, so about $7.5B has been cashed out.

    No. A lot of the bitcoins that have actually been cashed out were cashed out at much lower values than where it’s trading today, so the actual value is substantially less. And a large fraction of the bitcoin transactions have been people shuffling money around from one account to another, dividing it into smaller wallets, etc. rather than transactions with outsiders in exchange for conventional money.

  69. 69.

    ? Martin

    Correction, all bitcoin is valued at $12B. And the amount cashed out isn’t actually clear from the number of turns because the value of bitcoin when it changed hands varies. It’s likely that the total amount cashed out is actually less than $12B because the price has gone up so much so quickly. It’s also not clear how many of those transactions were laundering, so it might be less yet.

  72. 72.

    Socoolsofresh

    Bitcoin. Wow, so it’s a new system being developed, that has some problems, which still need to be worked out. Funny when it is healthcare.gov, everyone here has 15 million ways to defend the kinks, and will have endless patience with them figuring out how to make it work. But when it is bitcoin, and it runs into problems, the comments become, ‘heh, dudebros are failing hard, suck it, losers!’

    The partisan cognitive dissonance is strong. It is also amusing because a lot of the commenters here are just in denial dudebros.

  73. 73.

    ? Martin

    @Socoolsofresh: What the fuck are you talking about?

    Bitcoin has no problems to be worked out. There’s no overseer with control of it. It’s pure unfettered free market capitalism. The problems with it are the problems with unfettered capitalism. There’s nothing to fix. There is no ‘bitcoin’ to go to. Nobody even knows who invented it.

    And yeah, nobody is going to cry tears because a bunch of drug buyers and sellers lost their money. But that’s exactly the same as people trying to get health insurance.

  77. 77.

    ruemara

    obviously, I should have asked for donations in bitcoin. On the plus side, I contributed to another filmmaker’s fundraiser and she managed to fully fund her project. I think I prefer a more stable currency than whatever glibertarian minds dream up.

  79. 79.

    fuckwit

    You’re missing the point. If someone steals cash from you, you are FUCKED. Yeah, go to the police, they may or may not be able to help, most llikely not. But if someone steals Bitcoins, you can have vigilantes doing the kind of shit this guy did, and trace/taint the coins. Now, if the turd who stole the coins tries to exchange them, there are many ways he can be found out, and a can of ass-whup will be unloaded upon him, possibly even involving the police.

    It’s a new world. Bitcoins are much more easily traceablel than cash. That’s very likely why law enforcement is not in any hurry to “crack down” on bitcoins.

  80. 80.

    KG

    @fuckwit: yeah, and then a 1 becomes a 0 or 01 becomes 10 and the wrong guy has all of reddit checking his countertops… Brave new world, that

  81. 81.

    Seanly

    How can I rip off about $10 million dollars worth of bitcoins? I’m not greedy. And I love nothing more than to ruin the day of a bunch of libertarian idjits.

  82. 82.

    ? Martin

    @fuckwit: Um, wut?

    Cash has serial numbers. Cash can carry other physical evidence, not the least of which is that it’s tangible. And cash in other forms is also traceable – bank transactions, credit card transactions, etc. What’s more, these transactions aren’t anonymized, can be subpoenaed, and in fact have people actively watching for these kinds of things.

    Nobody is trying to prevent bitcoin theft because within the bitcoin universe, theft is indistinguishable from a legal transaction by design. Law enforcement isn’t going after bitcoin for a host of reasons, mostly starting with lack of jurisdiction. The SEC (not a law enforcement agency, btw) is who would crack down on bitcoin, and I imagine they’re trying to determine if there’s anything to crack down given that bitcoin is sufficiently decentralized as to make it difficult to implement.

    The only reason that anyone has been able to keep track of this guy at all is that the bitcoin world is still small enough to randomly poke in corners and find him. If you guys get your wish for a larger pool, your feature will vanish.

  86. 86.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    @Suffern ACE:

    Old news. Next Monday at 10:00 p.m. EST on Ancient Aliens: “The Einstein Factor.” “A possible extraterrestrial link to human geniuses.”

  87. 87.

    NonyNony

    @fuckwit:

    If someone steals cash from you, you are FUCKED. Yeah, go to the police, they may or may not be able to help, most llikely not. But if someone steals Bitcoins, you can have vigilantes doing the kind of shit this guy did, and trace/taint the coins

    This is pretty much exactly the opposite of what BitCoin proponents have been saying to sell people on BitCoin – they’re not supposed to be traceable.

    Plus – let’s imagine this scenario with cash. A thief steals $100 million from a group of drug dealers (which is roughly the amount the SFGate story says the stolen bitcoins are worth). Do you really think those guys would be stopped from going after the guy just because it was cash? That kind of vigilante justice among thieves and pirates has been going on for as long as, well, probably as long as we’ve had a concept of private property.

    (Note that if this guy had stolen the equivalent of $100 worth of bitcoins this wouldn’t work at all – it’s the huge sum stolen at one time that make this tracking even possible. And, as some on the associated Reddit thread point out, if it actually works then BitCoin is broken and should be abandoned. So this is not being viewed as a feature – it’s being viewed as a bug.)

  89. 89.

    Michael Brown

    @Socoolsofresh:
    ….except for the fact that w/r to BitCoin…these are not kinks as opposed to features.
    This was the intended design. Libertarinism as it is commonly understood does not work, we have a clear record of it not working. Why is it any surprise to anyone that it is not working within this context?

    …and I Lulz uncontrollably at your belief that the people posting on this liberal/progressive site, being progressives/liberals who base their beliefs on peer reviewed data are ‘dudebros’ in denial….suffering from cognitive dissonance. Projection is awesome isn’t it?

  90. 90.

    Lol

    @Seanly:

    Setup a bit coin bank/tumbler. Let it run for a while to build interest and business. Then once you’ve gotten enough deposits, claim you were hacked and walk away with all the bit coin.

  91. 91.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Question: What happens if he decides the pursuit is too hot, parks all the money in one account, and then ignores it for days/weeks/months/years/forever? Greed suggests he won’t, but it has happened before under these circumstances. Does that money sit there, mocking its original drug-dealing owners forever? Does it become the internet Blackbeard’s Treasure, with a host of hackers everywhere trying to find a way to break into the account before everyone else but not get caught?

  92. 92.

    Bill in Section 147

    @handsmile: The third question is one of those bad IQ test questions. You are required to only be able to have a 12-hour wind-up clock that does not account for am or pm. to answer the way they wanted.

  94. 94.

    Jebediah, RBG

    @Paddy:

    “Where’s the outcry?”

    Oh wait – those babies are already born. No need to give a shit about them. I wonder if that story will make any kind of a dent in the notion that the supposedly religious will always act in loving good faith and need no regulation.

    ETA: Balloon Juice please stop crashing my fucking browser.

  97. 97.

    Another Holocene Human

    @handsmile: I beat him on the first question (which isn’t saying much), but the second relies on equivocation by the interlocutor which … seriously? On a real life test of this (cash flim-flams at the register), I was overwhelmingly successful, so I call bullshit. The last one depends on specialized knowledge. When I set MY alarm clock to 9 in the morning it goes off at 9 in the fucking morning. Specialized knowledge has been the criticism of IQ tests for years, including in Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.

    I prefer the pattern matching tests. A lot less cultural knowledge embedded there.

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