
No Sean Spicer Didn’t Make Some Secret Bitcoin Transaction - altoz
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/no-sean-spicer-didnt-make-some-secret-bitcoin-transaction-94b4851844b5
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PierreRochard
Thank you for the educational write up! Bitcoin literacy is sorely lacking
among journalists, and yet they often forget to contact experts such as
yourself...

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makomk
Well, Patribotics is the blog of a conspiracy theorist who thinks everything
is part of a vast Trump-Russia conspiracy, so in this case I think it's more
simply the result of not wanting to look for details that'd debunk the claims:
[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/08/is-
conspira...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/08/is-conspiracy-
queen-louise-mensch-right-about-donald-t)

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PierreRochard
TIL! I just saw "Laurelai is an independent journalist"

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kleer001
Oh, I was under the assumption it was a pin or a similar tool that needed to
be confirmed from his verifiable twitter acct before the funds were
transferred to a previously agreed upon bitcoin wallet.

But that's a stretch.

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empath75
Louise Mensch seems to have gotten lucky on one story and it's gone to her
head. Her twitter feed is just full of nonsense.

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ComputerGuru
There's a comma missing after "No" in the title, and it's driving me insane.

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altoz
Corrected

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ibotty
not what I see.

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huac
What time zones are these things in?

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ryan-c
Bitsig.io and Blockchain.info appear to show everything in UTC. This Gizmodo
tweet, screenshotting Spicer, will show up in whatever timezone you set
Twitter to
[https://twitter.com/Gizmodo/status/824635801657114624](https://twitter.com/Gizmodo/status/824635801657114624)
\- you can easily verify it's several hours earlier.

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glubGlub
It looks like a wi-fi password.

I harbor a strong intuition that Sean Spicer lacks a certain _je ne sais quoi_
, required to even consider trying to bitcoin.

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nonbel
>'the private key can be determined from the brain wallet string, which is
Sean Spicer’s tweet"

So the string was a brainwallet seed? Then he was tweeting about bitcoin
afterall. On the other hand, literally any tweet could be made into a
brainwallet seed. So, in principle, all tweets are about bitcoin.

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ryan-c
The bitcoin transaction happened hours after the tweet.

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nonbel
Right, I saw that was claimed. I didn't check timezones, etc but assume that
is correct. Still, the interesting point remains that any tweet can be turned
into a bitcoin-related topic.

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chias
As far as I understand it, the purpose of bitsig.io is to put any arbitrary
text into the blockchain. This makes the statement trivially true, akin to
saying that any tweet can be turned into an architecture-related topic by
spray-painting it onto the side of a building.

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ryan-c
Bitsig.io doesn't put arbitrary text into the blockchain. Given a string, if a
Bitcoin address exists with sha256(string) as its private key, bitsig.io will
publish the string, address, and first time the address was used. It also has
tools for facilitating transactions to such addresses (which should never be
used to store money). Hence stuff like this[0] from before bitsig.io existed.

0\.
[https://bitsig.io/?addr=1AJ3vE2NNYW2Jzv3fLwyjKF1LYbZ65Ez64](https://bitsig.io/?addr=1AJ3vE2NNYW2Jzv3fLwyjKF1LYbZ65Ez64)

