
How Did Dread Pirate Roberts Acquire and Protect His Bitcoin Wealth? [pdf] - ebabchick
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/839348/silk-road-paper.pdf
======
Swizec
Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. He took me to his cabin and he
told me his secret. 'I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts' he said. 'My name is
Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you
will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread
Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been
retired 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia.'

~~~
boldklubben
Rarely does a comment make one feel euphoria. This, to me, is the heart and
soul of our internet.

------
nikcub
Picked apart and debunked within hours of being published. A good summary
thread:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1reuwq/vigorous_deb...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1reuwq/vigorous_debate_over_shamirrons_supposedly/?sort=top)

The real story here is how Adi Shamir can get caught up in such horrible
published research, not once - but twice now[0]. They keep referring to
blockchain.info as _the_ blockchain, and have again scraped the website
(referring to 'HTML output') to get their data - even after it was pointed out
to them _last time_ that the websites are just a representation of the
blockchain.

You really have to question just how much the authors understand what they are
writing about when they don't even understand the blockchain. This research
isn't even worthy of a blog post, let alone being published as an academic
paper by a noted cryptographer.

[0]
[https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921](https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921)

~~~
Luc
> They keep referring to blockchain.info as the blockchain, and have again
> scraped the website (referring to 'HTML output') to get their data - even
> after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a
> representation of the blockchain.

I'm not sure THIS is really the issue worth debating. Their first paper
states: "On May 13th 2012 we downloaded the full public record of this system
in one of its two major forms (1), which consisted of about 180,000 HTML
files." "(1) We believe (but did not verify) that these two forms contain
exactly the same information, and even if there are tiny differences they are
likely to have only a negligible effect on our statistical results."

That, to me, is acknowledgement that they knowingly chose to scrape the
website instead of parsing the 'real' blockchain. If I'm guessing, I'd say
they did it this way because they had someone with the skills to do the
scraping available to them (when all you've got is a hammer...).

> even after it was pointed out to them last time that the websites are just a
> representation of the blockchain.

Yes, 'just' a representation of the blockchain. Good enough for all their
intents and purposes...

But, you know, we could just email them.

~~~
Luc
On the other hand, by scraping they miss out on stuff like
[http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-
sa...](http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/new-mystery-about-satoshi/)

------
downandout
It stands to reason that Bitcoin's creators would have believed that they
needed a killer app as a catalyst to spur acceptance. Silk Road was ideally
suited to show off the advantages of Bitcoin over more traditional payment
methods. However, Silk Road didn't pop up until nearly two years after Bitcoin
was first introduced.

This paper is trying to make a connection between a few transactions sent from
a very early Bitcoin address to some Silk Road addresses. It is possible that
if this early address belongs to "Satoshi" that he was simply buying from Silk
Road. Whatever he was doing, the connection is tenuous at best, which of
course is the entire point of Bitcoin. DPR is facing a life sentence, so there
is a good chance that if he has partners, the feds (and eventually the rest of
the world) will find out about them as part of a plea deal.

~~~
josu
I read the article and I think that they state clearly that the connection
between DPR and Satoshi is pure speculation. It is true that they could as
well not have mentioned it, but hey, it makes it for a more interesting
reading, and as long as the journalists don't get a hold on the paper and
print "DPR = Satoshi", no harm done.

>It could represent either large scale activity on Silk Road, or some form of
investment or partnership, but this is pure speculation.

~~~
midmagico
It's done up in clean paper form. It's got the name of a major cryptography
researcher on it. It has an abstract.

Does this mean I can sit down and write a similar-form paper consisting of
wild speculation about Shamir being financially in bed with the Citi
Foundation specifically to write hatchet-job pieces linking trivially-
discoverably innocent people to black market drug bazaars?

No, of course not. I'm a nobody. But when Shamir does it, dozens of people
spread it to thousands of others and now I}ruid is almost certainly wondering
whether he's going to get a knock on his door.

How much more of a dick do you have to be before people in general just agree
that it was a shitty thing to do with so little evidence?

It's not interesting, it's reputationally dishonest, and damaging.

------
liamzebedee
The important things to note about the relation between DPR and SN:

* There was an account/wallet that was created a week after Bitcoin mining 'commenced' in 2009.

* SN was known to have been active in the early mining. However so was Hal Finney (inventor of RPOW). They refer to it as the founder's wallet, but I think it would be more appropriate to think of it as the wallet of an early miner.

* This early miner's accumulated into it over 77,600 BTCs (mostly from mining operations)

* During June 2011 (4/6/2011 - 28/6/2011) almost all of these bitcoins were moved into a second account

* On the transaction graph, on one path, 45% of these bitcoins are are transferred to another wallet over the course of _late_ 2012 to new year 2013. On the other path, the remaining 55% is sent to another wallet over the course of _early_ 2012 to the same day new year 2013.

* The 45% wallet has a little of its funds sent to the 55% wallet, and then has laid dormant since a month back. In the 45% wallet in March'13, a fifth of the wallet is sent to the 55% wallet. Again, from the 14/9/13 to 23/10/13, another 15% is sent to the 55% wallet.

* However, if we look at the 55% wallet, we can see a clear link to DPR's wallet. In March'13, the 55% wallet sends 6 transfers totalling 2.5% of its balance ($1000) to another wallet, which sends this to DPR's account (as we know from the FBI's discovery of the wallet).

The authors suggest that all of these accounts belonged to the same person,
this same early miner they call the founder. This is a possible flaw in their
argument, as there were multiple early miners, Hal Finney being one of them.

The transactions that divided this wallet into the 45% and 55% wallets could
have also split the ownership.

Lastly, __it 's very important to understand __that while it may not be
publicly recorded in the blockchain, these accounts could 've changed hands by
manually exchanging the private keys, and thus could bring into question the
basis of this speculation.

~~~
nullc
I'd make a reasonable bet that those motions were to one of the early
exchanges, — based on the timing, maybe Britcoin. I'd consider it doubtful
that the later owner of those funds was the same as the earlier one.

I'm not sure why they'd hypothesize that someone who apparently used Bitcoin
only some time after it was widely made public, and then used it in a rather
poor manner anonymity wise (the aggregation), was the founder— other than to
make headlines like this one. :(

In any case, the address in question
([https://blockchain.info/address/12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmk...](https://blockchain.info/address/12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmkAduhWv?sort=1))
doesn't belong to Satoshi, it belongs to Dustin Trammell: [http://bitcoin-
otc.com/viewgpg.php?nick=I}ruid](http://bitcoin-
otc.com/viewgpg.php?nick=I}ruid) ... who was actually my first guess, and
could have easily been discovered by anyone with 20 minutes and access to
google. :(

I really can't understand why such a respected name is attached to work of
such low quality.

~~~
jnbiche
I agree. When Shamir wrote the first Bitcoin paper over a year ago, we in the
Bitcoin community eagerly awaited the paper, looking forward to the revelation
of some obscure new security flaw, or other issue.

Imagine our surprise when we realized that not only did the paper not reveal
anything new (Satoshi mined many of the early coins -- Eureka!), but that in
order to do their analysis, they _scraped the entire blockchain explorer web
site_ to access Bitcoin's transaction history, and then commented on how
difficult it was to access that history.

So little was their research and understanding of how Bitcoin works, that they
misunderstood its most fundamental property: the shared public ledger that
sits on the desktop of anyone running the reference Bitcoin client.

Unfortunately, it looks like they're after publicity, and not new knowledge. A
big disappointment.

~~~
feral
>When Shamir wrote the first Bitcoin paper over a year ago

You mean 'when Ron and Shamir wrote their first Bitcoin paper'? as there were
several prior papers about Bitcoin; including one myself and a co-author wrote
on a similar topic in 2011.

We obtained our data directly from the blockchain, using a modified version of
Gavin Andresen's bitcointools which we put on github (although its now out of
date).

We also made the extracted data available in an easy-to-parse format, for more
info see: [http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.ie/2011/09/code-
dataset...](http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.ie/2011/09/code-datasets-and-
spsn11.html)

------
ok_craig
Two really interesting things to me are (1) that it's now possible to have
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets and not have them seized when
arrested; and (2) there's a lot of speculation that bitcoin was created by a
government entity and that that's who Satoshi is - what are the implications
of that entity funding DPR?

~~~
TwoBit
Can somebody explain to me how the FBI could seize his bitcoins without
knowing his password? My passwords for such things are long, written nowhere,
and I enter them on oddball platforms and applications (e.g. not Windows). Is
that not enough?

~~~
pudquick
They probably have his wallet file, but it's encrypted and he hasn't given
them the password.

So in theory it's "seized" ... if they can brute force / guess the password.

But in practice, with access to a computer, DPR could probably transfer the
contents from the address to a new wallet.

~~~
Xcelerate
Does no one think that with _that_ much money in his wallet, he wouldn't have
simply memorized the private key in addition to storing it somewhere? The keys
aren't really that long or hard to memorize and I would certainly remember
mine if I had any significant amount of money tied to it.

~~~
mehwoot
Yeah, you would think that, but you'd also think he wouldn't have made a
number of other pretty elementary mistakes that led to him getting caught,
like promoting the website using a username linked to his email address
(firstname.lastname@gmail.com), asking for help programming TOR services using
his real name then quickly trying to delete his name, twice paying to have
people assassinated that resulted in him getting conned (once to the FBI), and
ordering fake IDs online to be sent to his residence under his name.

~~~
omegant
This certainly could do for a Breaking bad Computer Science version.

------
Luc
On page 12: "For some reason (mistake? a tracking attempt?) the account
received a tiny amount of 1 Satoshi [...] almost a year later on July 23-rd
2012. Its owner noticed this non-zero balance one year later, and emptied it
once more on August 6-th 2013. On September 11-th 2013 he received another
tiny transfer of 0.0000091, and on November 18-th 2013 yet another one of
0.00011. On November 20-th he sends the 0.0000091 but the 0.00011 is still
there."

Could these be rewards for transaction confirmations? (Probably not since it's
not suggested in the paper, and they're the experts and I'm not).

~~~
hrrsn
He would need to be mining to get those.

------
sillysaurus2
Direct link to PDF:
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/8393...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/839348/silk-
road-paper.pdf)

I never know whether it's allowed to tell people they're dead...

~~~
sillysaurus2
Ok, the submission link was originally not a direct link to the PDF. A
moderator changed the link, so my comment is now useless, and hence should be
deleted. But mysteriously I've lost the ability to edit or delete it, even
though it was posted just 16 minutes ago. New HN feature? Maybe the edit time
is now reduced from 2 hours to 10 minutes? Not sure.

~~~
chrismonsanto
You were downvoted in that period, which might have something to do with it
(people are seriously overzealous about that)

------
freakyterrorist
"Inrtoduction" that's some good proof reading right there...

------
VMG
The assumption is that the first blocks were all mined by Satoshi, however Hal
Finney was also running the client early on.

Bottom line, it's clear why the Bitcoin creators chose to be anonymous.

------
hendzen
Just to reference some of the interesting bits to actual
transactions/addresses:

Satoshi address -
[https://blockchain.info/address/12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmk...](https://blockchain.info/address/12higDjoCCNXSA95xZMWUdPvXNmkAduhWv)

Satoshi -> DPR transfer -
[https://blockchain.info/tx/cdcaaa0ff1446d41aae5d32c23da1ff33...](https://blockchain.info/tx/cdcaaa0ff1446d41aae5d32c23da1ff3353765ebaf26ffd32ab912948645c08f)

~~~
midmagico
NO, that address is NOT Satoshi:

[http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewgpg.php?nick=I}ruid](http://bitcoin-
otc.com/viewgpg.php?nick=I}ruid)

------
meowface
Interesting that one of the co-authors is _the_ Adi Shamir.

~~~
psykovsky
More interesting even is the fact that both his Bitcoins studies were
sponsored by Citi. Especially when they seem so empty of value and are only
any good as FUD material against Bitcoin.

------
hristov
Through a brutal reign of imaginary murders.

~~~
meowface
To play devil's advocate, Ulbricht likely felt (perhaps even "knew") that the
murders he ordered were successfully carried out. And intent is usually what
matters most in American criminal law.

He probably did truly feel like he was an extremely powerful druglord, even if
in reality he was a nerd with a laptop.

~~~
hristov
I completely agree, i do not know why you think this is the devil's advocate
position. The murders were imaginary as far as they only existed in his mind.
But he probably believed he was really killing people.

This is what makes this whole situation funny in a horrible way.

------
j0hnb0nk
" Ulbricht grew up and went to high school and middle school in the Austin,
Texas, area. " source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-ross-ulbricht-the-
brilli...](http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-ross-ulbricht-the-brilliant-
alleged-mastermind-of-silk-road-2013-10)

(the owner of the bitcoin address in question): " Dustin D. Trammell Lived in
Austin, Texas " (and has since 2002, when Ross lived there) source:
[https://plus.google.com/116073269295024509653/about](https://plus.google.com/116073269295024509653/about)

Study debunked, nothing to see here, move along eh? Probably just a big
coincidence and they never met or knew each other yet were working in parallel
and Trammell's exact coins happened to end up in Ross's hands. The FBI will be
all over this soon enough.

------
DGrutt
If Satoshi sent coins to the Silk Road as the authors suggest maybe that was
to take advantage of the mixing service. It seems like he or they would want
to cash at least some of these out.

------
dcc1
1\. Inrtoduction

I stopped reading there...

~~~
fchollet
You should have kept reading --it's every other word. I liked the "Reopened on
Novebmer 6th 2013".

The rigorousness of the argument and research is comparable to that of the
proofreading.

~~~
jnbiche
With respect to their research, see my comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6793410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6793410)

And their first paper was also full of typos.

