
Dark Web Drug Vendor Pleads Guilty After Feds Traced His Bitcoin Transactions - wglb
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/legal/dark-web-drug-vendor-pleads-guilty-after-feds-traced-his-bitcoin-transactions/
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ttoinou

       All in all, this is just another case where authorities have proven once
       more that Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency isn't really anonymous
       as it was advertised for the past decade.
    

Wait who advertised that ? I have always read that bitcoin was pseudonymous
(not anonymous) and with public record of all transactions and wallets

~~~
dogma1138
Bitcoin isn’t really pseudonymous either (not by design) it only has one type
of transaction that is always public and there is no inherent deniability as
far as wallet ownership goes.

There are some currencies that attempt at providing anonymity or at least
deniability but those also haven’t been tested yet either against capable
forensic adversaries.

~~~
coralreef
Isn't it pseudonymous? You use addresses to send and receive money, not your
real identity. And anyone can generate addresses in a vacuum. Combine that
with a VPN or some network routing, and its basically a mountain of work to
trace any address or transaction to a person.

~~~
dogma1138
It does not offer inherent plausible deniability and only relies on the
relative anonymity of your internet connection to hide your identity.

Look at the difference between Bitcoin and say Monero when it comes to
anonymity.

My point isn’t about something being easy or hard but rather if the anonymity
comes from the design of Bitcoin or is it circumstantial to how you use it and
it’s essentially only the latter.

The network was never designed to be anonymous and there isn’t any way to
“hide” transactions or to deny your association with a wallet or an address if
they trace the IP to you or you end up holding the private key it’s game over
and nothing Bitcoin does impacts on the difficulty of this task.

~~~
coralreef
Sure we're talking about pseudonymity though, not anonymity.

~~~
dogma1138
Yes but the source of it isn’t Bitcoin but rather your own opsec which can be
employed for any other commodity transaction.

~~~
nyolfen
your name on the network is your wallet address, and not your own, actual
name. hence psuedonymous. you’re inventing some bizarre definition of the
word.

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armitron
Even with all the mistakes that he made, I think he would have easily walked
had he not done the thing that sealed his fate: bringing his hot "work" laptop
(possibly unencrypted or otherwise compromised) with him to the US.

All his other mistakes put together were not enough for the feds to hang him
since there is plausible deniability:

The "writing style analysis" may seem advanced but in practice is laughable in
terms of false positives.

Being in a possession of a bitcoin address that received payments from a drug
trafficker isn't enough evidence to convict. But of course allowing the feds
to go through his laptop where he had the trafficking signing keys and other
credentials can not be explained away :-0

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tylersmith
Using technology to subvert the State is a large cat and mouse game and the
first mice are bound to make mistakes. It's the risk of jumping in before
having a better grasp of the underlying technology that you rely on for
security. Eventually the market will move nearly completely to more private
currencies but the "game" will continue. Some people like to focus on the
"high reward" part of "high risk/high reward" a lot more than the "high risk"
part.

~~~
CodeWriter23
Storing one’s ledger in a publicly-viewable, massively replicated database is
a pretty big on the risk factors IMO.

~~~
tylersmith
Yes, absolutely. Unfortunately the majority of people don't fully understand
what the system is and how it works. Sound bites and misinformation are
regurgitated and spread like the plague while solid understanding requires a
lot of work exploration.

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cf498
>US authorities arrested Vallerius in September last year, at the Atlanta
airport after he arrived in the US to attend and participate in the World
Beard and Mustache Championships that was being held in Austin, Texas.

And is facing a life sentence.

Dont travel to such countries. Never ever period.

Crossing a border is a big decision, no matter how cheap the tickets are. I
dont get people who keep doing this, its not like those are split second
decisions.

Why in your right mind would you do this without carefully considering what
the effects of you being in that country might be. I had female friends
talking about going to holiday in Dubai, another friend with a Turkish
passport visited his family in the south east recently.

Think for a moment for gods sake.

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deltateam
> I had female friends talking about going to holiday in Dubai

You get a 1-dimensional perspective every time something local goes wrong and
is masqueraded as international news. Its like if a civil rights violation
from one US city on any given day was elevated to the world stage. It would
sound like much more of a nightmare than anything going on in the UAE.

Most females I've talked to absolutely love Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Even people
that have moved there.

The best analogy to the experience is Disney World. Lots of thrills, and adult
sexual behavior is stifled, except for minor infractions instead of simply
thrown out of the park you'll be thrown in a horrible prison.

The fact of the matter is that you're not one of the slaves. That side of
things won't be your experience.

You hope you don't get sexually assaulted and judicially victim blamed, and
thats the same anywhere.

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newfoundglory
Most women I know wouldn't go there - including myself. Maybe we run in
different circles.

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sundvor
Yeah, you read about women reporting rape, then being jailed for extramarital
sex, and realise that ... no, just no.

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deltateam
Its like if a civil rights violation from one US city on any given day was
elevated to the world stage. It would sound like much more of a nightmare than
anything going on in the UAE.

~~~
sundvor
Point.

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yani
It is not right to have customs search his laptop. Anyone with that much power
will abuse it one way or another.

~~~
cstejerean
Why isn’t it right? By this point they had a very reasonable suspicion that he
was the criminal they were looking for based on his bitcoin addresses and then
further confirmed by analyzing the writing style. That certainly seems like a
good enough reason to search someone’s laptop.

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alistproducer2
Dude's OPSEC game was pretty weak. If you're going to do stuff that could get
you imprisoned for life, you'd think you would be more thorough.

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58x14
I don’t understand the sentiment of these comments. This isn’t an impressive
example of mass blockchain-and-IP-address correlation and collection - this is
an embarrassing example of an inexperienced user publically posting wallet IDs
directly linked to his Localbitcoins account.

This is as much “tracing” as it would take to look up a license plate. Add to
that a lack of full disk encryption and international travel...

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dang
Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments?

This is in the site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

~~~
58x14
To what are you referring? /s

~~~
dang
Thanks for the edit!

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yolo1897
they found so much on his laptop, he didn't even bothered to encrypt his
stuff? it seems that he have made so many mistakes for his job

~~~
always_good
Even then, nothing seems perfect.

I have FileVault turned on in OSX. But I noticed that, since the latest
version, if I open my laptop within some interval, it doesn't even make me
type my password again.

And sometimes I've even opened my laptop many hours later and it inexplicably
bypasses the login. Just seems so precarious.

I read how the FBI(?) faked a scene (a fight?) near the Silk Road creator so
that they could nab his laptop while it was open. Well, I chuckle at how
unnecessary that would be for my laptop: just walk up and open it. The piece
of shit probably won't even make you log in.

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cup-of-tea
Did he try to sell drugs in the US? How can they arrest him for things he did
back home?

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tylersmith
For selling to US customers. Similar to the GDPR and European customers.

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merinowool
It is not going to be long before people will have to wear armbands stating
their citizenship...

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jMyles
Finally, chemical compounds in demand by adults for private consumption will
no longer be available. Victory in the war on drugs!

~~~
tylersmith
You're being downvoted but imprisoning OxyMonster for selling things to
willing customers will have almost 0 effect on the opioid markets. It's a
costly symbolic gesture that will affect nobody but him and his family.

~~~
nighthawk1
I think many times these arrests are meant to be a demonstration that law
enforcement is doing their job. I imagine even the arresting agents realize
this guy is a drop in the ocean and his customers will quickly flock to his
replacement.

Similar to those folks who work in a corporate environment who complete a
document that they know will be jettisoned into a corporate black hole but
checks off a requirement.

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tylersmith
Sure, but "doing their job" is a bullshit excuse for taking somebody's life
away. Honestly it's worse IMO. They know it accomplishes nothing except making
them look a tiny bit better to their bosses. Destroying a person's life for
career advancement is quite different than making a worthless gdoc that nobody
will read.

~~~
giarc
>excuse for taking somebody's life away.

There are a million other things he could have sold online that wouldn't have
resulted in 20 years in jail. Whether you agree with the illegal status of
drugs or not, if someone choose to subvert the law, you can't expect law
enforcement not to prosecute.

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jMyles
> if someone choose to subvert the law, you can't expect law enforcement not
> to prosecute.

Sure, that's fine.

But it also obfuscates the more important point: I _can_ expect (and I do
expect) that a reasonable, mature society stop this idiotic practice in the
first place.

Refusing to learn from the failures of drug prohibition throughout history is
one thing, but continuing a current and clearly failed experiment for an
entire century is flabbergasting and childish.

Who will be the last person who's life is ruined for no reason? Will it be
this dude? Or someone in the same position tomorrow?

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amingilani
And this is why Zcash excites me so much! It's everything Bitcoin is and much,
much, more!

