
The Big Bitcoin Heist - yarapavan
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/the-big-bitcoin-heist
======
mr_woozy
I'm in Iceland reading this now and almost every sentence of this article is
filled with embellishments and half truths

~~~
confiscate
care to give some examples? Because I am a curious reader who does not live in
Iceland and don't have the context to be able to identify the embellishments

~~~
mr_woozy
sure it's always frustrating because it does nothing to change the narrative
of what's repeated outside of Iceland regardless of the truth.

>"At 32, Stefansson is the most famous thief ever to emerge from this polite
and friendly island, ranked by the Global Peace Index as the world’s most
peaceful nation."

Patently false. So far our most famous criminal would be
(Tomas)[[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/iceland-
murd...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/iceland-murder-
victim-birna-brjansdottir-autopsy.html)] or runner up for any of the various
banking / cartel that siphoned money out of the country during the crash.
Sindri doesn't even register with most people here except as a petty thug.
Bjarni Ben the old prime minister or Sigmundur David both appeared in the
Panama Papers here as well.

>It was cryptocurrency, ironically, that helped save Iceland after the bankers
bankrupted it. I have no idea where the author got this but Cryptocurrency has
provided any material benefit to Iceland in any form or shape, I say this even
though I'm a BTC advocate. First it was our fishing industry which was able to
sell high abroad and return with Euros to exchange for ISK and then it was the
tourism boom (as much as we all hate it here) from 2014-onwards. Crypto
currency mining here doesn't employ anyone, doesn't get aggressively taxed (it
should) and often gets industrial market rates on large enough consumption
(just like the aluminum smelters).

Oh and to correct another misunderstood thing about Iceland we get around 70%
of our power generation from HYDROpower not Geothermal like everyone things
(that goes towards home heating mostly). Which means .......Dams, lots and
lots of dams flooding areas of Iceland and destroying the nature the tourists
come to see.

> Today, Bitcoin mines consume more energy than all of Iceland’s homes
> combined.

This is just repeated ad-nauseam abroad now more than any other statement and
its entirely attributed to a single electrical engineer for the electric
producer company who was commenting on if the building trend kept at the same
rate back in 2018. It didn't obviously but any idiot journalist now stumbles
across some _other_ article saying it so they just repeat now too. Smelting
consumes FAR more electricity here than any other industry.

These are just a handful, nobody likes these guys here, no one is cheering for
them we're mostly embarrassed that they're gleefully unaware of badly they
make Iceland look international as the posterboys for big, dumb, meat-head
rubes, that were used by a foriegn criminal who never got caught. Classic
Icelandic hnakkar.

~~~
lostlogin
Thanks for this.

> Classic Icelandic hnakkar.

Google isn’t helping me much or I’m missing the point.

~~~
adamfeuer
This article explains a bit about it:

[http://icelandreport.blogspot.com/2006/03/necks.html](http://icelandreport.blogspot.com/2006/03/necks.html)

------
zepearl
> _In Iceland, it is not a crime to stage a prison break: The law recognizes
> that inmates, like all human beings, are naturally entitled to freedom, and
> thus cannot be punished for seeking it._

Funny :)

~~~
danielbln
The same is true in Germany. You'll probably break a few laws while breaking
out of a prison, but the act itself is not punishable and will not yield you
more time.

~~~
beerandt
What's the economic result? Any relative increase in attempts since there's no
incentive not to?

~~~
WJW
The sample size is so low you can't get any meaningful results. And use of
violence against a guard or breaking prison materials is still illegal (since
it's illegal to use violence against anyone and/or to destroy property). But
if the door is left open and you walk out without harming anyone, that in
itself is not illegal.

~~~
beerandt
So how does this work in the case of initial arrest? Or a fugitive thats not
necessarily am escapee? There's no incentive to surrender?

~~~
zepearl
> _Or a fugitive thats not necessarily am escapee?_

I'd guess that that person, not being at that point of time a "detainee",
would get the outcome of the other laws related to "resisting arrest" or
something similar (like when police wants to do a check on you and/or your
vehicle, etc... and you run off).

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paulpauper
yeah he stole a bunch of stuff that is probably already obsolete as of
publication of this article. huge cost too in transporting and setting it up.
there are and still are guys who made as much as that or even more just
quietly running crypto giveaway scams on YouTube and twitter without all the
fanfare of an actual heist. of all the thefts and heists involving bitcoin,
this one is downright unimpressive in terms of dollar amount.

>Mr. X told Stefansson that he would give him 15 percent of the profits from
as many Bitcoin computers as he could steal from data centers across Iceland.
The total take, Stefansson calculated, could be as much as $1.2 million a
year—“forever.” Because, with the stolen computers, Stefansson and Mr. X would
establish their own Bitcoin mine.

yes because mining computers never become obsolete

~~~
mr_woozy
>yes because mining computers never become obsolete

exactly!

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brenden2
Here's an AP version of the same story (works in private mode):
[https://apnews.com/55117fb55a714e909fb9aaf08841a5d6/Bitcoin-...](https://apnews.com/55117fb55a714e909fb9aaf08841a5d6/Bitcoin-
heist:-600-powerful-computers-stolen-in-Iceland)

~~~
brenden2
And also about the escape:
[https://apnews.com/db543dc5d2774098acf398984ac7324a/Suspect-...](https://apnews.com/db543dc5d2774098acf398984ac7324a/Suspect-
in-Iceland's-'Big-Bitcoin-Heist'-escapes-prison)

------
GuiA
I thought bitcoin mining hardware was only useful for a few months at best due
to rising complexity built in the protocol? If so the computers hidden by the
criminals won’t be very useful when they get out of prison a few years from
now.

~~~
seibelj
There is also a premium on fresh block rewards that have not been spent yet.
These are called “coinbase transactions” which is why the company is called
Coinbase. The reason these fresh coins are valuable is that they are untainted
by prior transactions and have various uses because of that. So mining BTC has
an additional premium above the spot price of BTC.

~~~
blotter_paper
> The reason these fresh coins are valuable is that they are untainted by
> prior transactions and have various uses because of that.

What "various uses" are you talking about? Are you talking about fears of
future blacklisting, or something else? If fears of future blacklisting, the
only use I can see would be speculative holding. I've written raw Bitcoin
transactions, and I don't know of any technical distinctions between coins
that would change how they can be used based on prior transactions.

~~~
seibelj
If you have fresh coins you can say you mined them which is good for financial
reasons. They also have zero prior history so companies like Chainalysis
cannot link them anywhere.

I really don’t have more to say on this subject, just think about it for a
while.

------
ur-whale
[http://archive.is/np6rz](http://archive.is/np6rz)

------
sschueller
March 2018

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ajross
All I could think when reading that headline was "Which one?". Frankly this
incident (a physical theft of mining hardware) isn't even that interesting in
a "bitcoin" sense. Presumably the hardware was attractive because it's easily
liquidatable (being used by inherently gray market folks already) and not
because of any value from their bitcoin role per se.

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unnouinceput
550 Bitcoin computers? I assume are the dedicated type, not general ones like
the one I use to type my comment. If so, those go obsolete in like half a
year. The heist, with its mined bitcoins, its maximum of several millions
(USD) at best, even at 20k USD/bitcoin. Become a politician, you'll get these
money and much more in those 4 years of a single mandate, all legal because
they are called donations.

~~~
kortilla
No: [https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-
di...](https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-
disbursements/personal-use/)

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paulpauper
>In his teens, Stefansson graduated to drugs: pot, speed, cocaine, ecstasy,
LSD. By the time he turned 20, he was growing cannabis. His rap sheet soon
included 200 cases of petty crime. He broke into people’s homes to steal TVs
and stereos, and somehow managed to extract $10,000 from some slot machines in
a Reykjavík bar.

yikes. I'm sure he's hardly the only one. It makes you wonder if Iceland's
purported low crime and peacefulness is due to under-reporting of crime and
crime being ignored and excessively lenient sentencing guidelines, than
because of the absence of actual crime. If all the criminals keep being
released over and over, then the prison population will be very low yet there
will be crime everywhere anyway. lenient sentences heavily tips the moral
calculus in favor of criminals, both petty and major.Time is money. time
behind bars means less time for stealing.

~~~
mr_woozy
It is a large reason actually, we don't have enough well funded programs for
mental help or drug addiction and roughly 70% of prison inmates are there for
drugs and just cycle in and out running up huge fines which they'll never
actually be able to pay.

Also please keep in mind because of our sovereignity but low population we win
a lot of categories for "most this of any nation" due to sheer per-capita
mathematics. We're basically the most-per-capita country out there in many
ways.

