A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite (2014)

[kf]

https://magazine.atavist.com/a-thousand-pounds-of-dynamite

[dang]

If curious see also

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18661581

2016 (a bit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11802353

https://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/ - on the same topic - discussed twice in 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9725851

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9816123

[simonebrunozzi]

> John Birges Jr. was 19 years old. He liked weed, beer, girls, and the Stones.

I really like this passage here. So poetic in its own way.

[agency → simonebrunozzi]

This quote cracked me up

> The other had short dark hair and protruding ears. “A hayseed,” Yablonsky said. “A goober type.”

[notdonspaulding]

Investigative journalism at its finest.

[ajuc]

> The feds always got them at the money drop.

That's one problem bitcoin is solving.

[ISL → ajuc]

Bitcoin makes the flow of money beyond the money-drop transparent. Every last morsel of the ransom is permanently marked.

Bitcoin has many remarkable properties, but permanent anonymity is not one of them.

[wyck → ISL]

I think your missing the point, a money drop is about transportation/distribution and not anonymity. Transporting money is the hard part and bitcoin has changes this area more than anything. Being anonymous is easily circumvented by various other techniques, some new, some old.

[parliament32 → ISL]

There are many low cost bitcoin mixers/tumblers out there.

[JoeAltmaier → ISL]

You can't be anonymous as a member of an exchange?

[blarg1]

Hate it when they write articles like this, makes it hard to skim it.

[m_eiman]

Scrolling was broken for me until I removed the extra parameters in the URL, to make it https://magazine.atavist.com/a-thousand-pounds-of-dynamite

[dang → m_eiman]

Ok, we changed to that from https://magazine.atavist.com/a-thousand-pounds-of-dynamite?n... above.

[encom → m_eiman]

Scrolling worked for me until a popup blocked the content, so I backed out.