While there is some truth to this depending on the context, for the most part, especially in software engineering world, you don't know everything. Don't be afraid to say if you need to research something or do POC or investigation. No one will be mad at you and if they are, you don't need to be working with that person. I spent many nights frantically trying to figure out things, to make it seemed like I was up to par, when I should have been more chill about it.
- Do what you love, and the money will follow.
My parents, my high school guidance, society, everyone told me this thing in 2002. Many of my friends went into music education and I can say only one or two got a job in this field. Then 2008 hit. This view, it is the survivors bias, what you should do instead is what will make you money, then figure out how to use that skill to do or add to what you love.
Ironically, both of these platitudes have been crucial to my own success. But I think they probably only work for certain types of people, so I don't disagree with you.
My personal approach with "fake it until you make it" has been to decide I am a $thing (one example: an "ultramarathon runner"). OK, now what do I do as a $thing? I do x, y and z. Then, I do those things, because I am a $thing. Ultimately, I trick myself into becoming the $thing.
This all occurs inside my head. I've never discussed or mentioned it to anyone. I've done it time and time again for career decisions and for personal hobbies. I don't believe it's very ego-driven. In my head, I crucify myself for hypocrisy and not admitting faults.
With "Do what you love, and the money will follow", well, like many of you here, that was computers. And like with many of you, the money followed.
If a young person says they want to make a living as a influencer/youtuber/writer/streamer/musician I would tell them to strongly reconsider unless they have a reason of substance besides pure ego to think they can beat the odds. When someone has the foundations to be one of those things it’s usually obvious. There have been people I’ve met in life who I thought “I’m not sure how but this person will be famous”. There many people who just don’t know how to judge their own skills and usually they just need to be pointed to the right place for information.
Tragically, many of the jobs that people dream of and grind for have secret underbellies that young dreamers don’t understand. For example, Hollywood is a vipers nest where films get made. The music industry had its own Weinstein/Epstein combo recently with Diddy. Politics is the same. The most direct path to success in these fields is being willing to sell your soul and body to powerful evil people. So to be successful in those fields with your dignity intact requires a very rare constitution.
Strange, I didn't hear it, now I can see the resemblance, but doesn't seem like a big deal. It was the only voice I really used. I wonder if Spotify will follow, with their sound-a-like Ice-T voice?
I am sorry they were rude to you. I had an experience in Phoenix Arizona recently. I was traveling for work from an illegal state, and we were having a work event, it was nighttime, and the smell started coming in from the street pretty strong, after a few minutes a hotel employee came over and closed the window and the smell went away. Seems like the more reasonable reaction instead of calling the police or trying to get the people arrested, on the other hand it was rude to light up on the sidewalk just outside of an open window/doors. If people were reasonable about their consumption and courteous of others in regard to the smell, there wouldn't be an issue. It's too bad we just can't make it illegal to be a rear end.
I worked in IT for the last remaining newspaper in a major American city from 2010~12. They were going through a major downsizing, and in that time the reporting staff was cut in half and then almost cut in half again. They were required to increase the number of articles by 3x I think as well. Do you think they spent the same amount of time checking sources and fact checking? What would you do to keep your job if you were 29-year-old journalist in that environment?
Maybe I don't know much about bitcoin, but can't you track the address where the bitcoins were being transferred to? Seems like it would be difficult to launder that volume of bitcoin all anonymously where it can be tracked, to a certain extent, through the public blockchain?
There are bitcoin tumblers, essentially the idea is to split up the transaction into multiple transactions of varying sizes to various addresses and to keep doing that in such a way that it doesn't look weird...
Basically they try to hide the transaction among the huge volume of transactions going on, kinda like a VPN or Tor?
1. If the coins were moved through tumblers that would be detectable and highly suspicious.
2. Safely tumbling large quantities of coins is especially difficult. At this scale I would wager twenty dollars that blockchain analysis should be able to trace at least some of the coins with high confidence.
3. It is rumored that many tumblers are run by law enforcement.
Outside the sphere of crypto, this is called "washing" or "laundering" ("cleaned", etc. Anything along this line). "Laundering" is the legal term). Such acts are typically traceable, but generally fly under the radar. Once someone is aware that the money is being washed it is usually uncovered (AFAIK).
Washing crypto would seem even more difficult because transactions are all accounted for. So I'd assume a cleaner would need to have random time variance in redistribution so collisions aren't found. But also, money has to be spent or converted, so that's a big way you could uncover it. Money is harder because cash is still a thing.
1) See that money is transferred from account to washer (instant flag)
2) Search for accounts associated with initial fraud and watch for extraction.
I work in crypto. Transactions can very much be traced. There's no trace of Quadrigas cold wallet holding any large sums of BTC. It's still a mystery what, exactly, did they do with customer funds. It'll be uncovered eventually once enough time has been given to forensic examiners to go through the transactions of the exchange.
It’s important to note that it’s not just splitting up your own transactions, it’s that it’s actually other people’s coins that end up in your destination wallets. As such, it becomes very difficult to trace: techniques for doing this are similar to large scale deanonimization of Tor traffic, and involve large scale pattern analysis.
> It’s important to note that it’s not just splitting up your own transactions, it’s that it’s actually other people’s coins that end up in your destination wallets. As such, it becomes very difficult to trace
It was my basically uninformed impression that the bitcoin blockchain consists of a series of transaction records that look like this:
That is to say, the records show that balances increase and decrease, but there is no actual concept of a uniquely identifiable bitcoin (with, say, a serial number) -- there are only balances held by accounts. On this model, it isn't possible to say that other people's coins end up in your destination wallets. Is that not accurate?
(The fact that you can divide one bitcoin into 100,000,000 satoshi also suggests that there's no such thing as an individual bitcoin...)
The way that it works is that a certain number of coins are created when a block is mined. That number is recorded on the ledger associated with an address. Let's say it's 25 BTC, but it can be any number -- it doesn't matter. If you don't spend any of that BTC, then it exists only as that number -- a chunk if you wish. It is indivisible. It sits as 25 BTC in the account. If you decide to spend 5 BTC of the 25, then the ledger records that 5 BTC goes to wherever you are sending it and 20 BTC goes to your wallet. The previous 25 BTC chunk is removed. The 5 BTC exists as a "chunk" in the other wallet and the 20 BTC exists as a "chunk" in your wallet. The 25 BTC "chunk" no longer exists. Each wallet has a list of these "chunks" of BTC. Let's say that I have a 7 BTC "chunk" as well as the 20 BTC chunk. I want to send 22 BTC to someone else. It will take remove both my 20 BTC "chunk" and my 7 BTC "chunk" and give me a 5 BTC "chunk". I can't remember if the recipient gets a 22 BTC "chunk" or a 20 BTC "chunk" and a 5 BTC "chunk" (it's been a long time since I looked at the source code). I think the former, but it is traceable where the original came from and how they "chunks" where split up.
Hopefully that makes it a bit more clear. The word "chunk" is my own -- if you start using it in other discussions, nobody will know what you are talking about ;-) However, the main thing is that the wallets do not contain balances, but lists of transactions that ended up giving them coins. While there is no such thing as a "coin", it's discrete amounts rather than flowing in and out like water.
Not accurate. You can trace the life of a particular 'coin' value -- which is generated in the coinbase reward in a block and spent later on in a UTXO (unclaimed transaction output). We like to pretend that bitcoin is fungible, but it strictly is not; You can trace the life of every 50, 25 and now 12.5 Bitcoin from birth to currently unspent. They all get mixed, so it can be difficult.
Also, what you are describing is the so called 'account' model -- used by Ethereum, EOS, etc. Bitcoin is a 'utxo' model, which allows specific inputs/outputs to be traced.
This is not true. Say I have a wallet with two Satoshi, and I transfer one each to two different wallets. Then I transfer two Satoshi from those wallets to a new wallet. Which way did each Satoshi take? You can't say!
It looks like it is true in a technical sense; a bitcoin transaction record specifies a prior transaction as its input, rather than specifying a source address. So as a purely formal matter, your example records will look like this in relevant part:
T0885: 100 Satoshi from T0002 to address xxxxx0x # 1 wallet, 2 Satoshi
T1001: 1 Satoshi from T0885 to address xxxxx1x
T1104: 1 Satoshi from T0885 to address xxxxx2x # Each Satoshi moves to a separate new wallet
T1300: 1 Satoshi from T1104 to address xxxxx3x
T1400: 1 Satoshi from T1001 to address xxxxx3x # and then they recombine
From that record, it's clear that one Satoshi moved from address 0x to address 3x by way of transaction 1001, and the other one did the same by way of transaction 1104.
However, there is no instrumental difference between an address's balance from one transaction and its balance from another transaction, as the behavior of the address is controlled by the private key associated with that address, and two balances belonging to the same address necessarily share the associated private key. I'm not sure what this is supposed to accomplish.
The transaction sequence in your example is not possible. A transaction output can only be used once as an input. To me, the operation would rather look like these three transactions:
100 Satoshi from A1
2 Satoshi to A2
98 Satoshi to Ax
2 Satoshi from A2
1 Satoshi to A3
1 Satoshi to A4
1 Satoshi from A3
1 Satoshi from A4
2 Satoshi to A5
Edit: Sorry I referred to "wallets" in my previous comment. This allows a scenario where the Satoshis are kept in separate transactions all the time. But I'm not interested in those scenarios. I'm talking about scenarios with multiple inputs and outputs. Where you can't say which of the inputs went which way. In this transaction:
1 Satoshi from A1
1 Satoshi from A2
1 Satoshi to A3
1 Satoshi to A4
Yeah, I will 'change' my position on this. Satoshis in a single UTXO that are split are fungible - in your scenario you cannot identify the specific sat: either a1->a3, or a1->a4. This is kind of like 'forward fungibility'. You can however trace the value in satoshi's back from A4 to their coinbase at birth. At best, we introduce a UTXO taint percentage from previous inputs. Its this taint from other, external inputs that break backwards fungibility (due to taint).
So make public the addresses, give out a reward for proof of destination, and then let the cryptohacker community get after it. Kraken is offering $100k, we just need the addresses.
The FBI/private companies have specialized tools for tracking Bitcoins throughout their lifespan. All the data is out in the open so there is no hiding unless he converted to Monero anonymously.
considering Monero could you or someone elaborate on this a bit more? Maybe clarify if I'm misunderstanding something:
1) My understanding is, every transaction in bitcoin is public knowledge forever as part of the forever growing block chain. That is, there is no way to ever remove a transfer.
2) The only anonymity built in bitcoin is to hide your identity with pseudonymity, nobody necessarily knows your bitcoin address you are using. However if you are buying coins with credit card for example from person A and spend those at person B, person A will know that you have just spend that money at person B, and person B will know that you bought the coins from person A.
3) The only way(?) to hide, make the transactions anonymous is via tumbling, that is you send your coins into a huge account outside your control that aggregates maybe millions of $ from thousands of people and then sends them out again into random addresses. Nobody except the provider of the tumble service knows where your money went, making you anonymous, your money untraceable. I assume you want to repeat this process a few times with different tumble services.
Is that correct? I'm no expert. Also with 3) how feasible is that with $130 million? I mean to successfully tumble wouldn't I need at least double the amount probably much much more? How large are the tumbles in services such as bestmixer.io? Also it seems to me that with enough heuristics even tumble services could potentially be traced back, this doesn't seem impossible to me?
1. correct; 2. correct; 3. Kinda but Not quite the only way -- you can convert the values in the coins into another chain, ideally something like monero in which 1. applies, but 2. does not. (Monero uses a different transaction format called RingCT, it hides the true inputs/outputs among decoys and signs the set with a ring sig. It also hides the true amount transacted via Confidential Transaction encoding using a commitment and a range proof). Its much easier to tumble the value when the source/destination and magnitude is obscured.
How feasible to do this with $130 million? Yesterdays trade volume for monero was 75 million (thus actual on chain tx's are much less). So it would take a while to do this without drawing attention. I don't have a lot of faith in pure bitcoin tumblers. Possibly scams or fraud. Im yet to see one that works as expected.
Diversity of opinion is one of those facile concepts that look good on paper until someone uses it to prop up support for shit like white supremacy and trickle down economics. Not all opinions are equally informed, or equally valid.
Indeed. Which is why I provided an exampe of one that is both far more nefarious than anything I have ever heard from Thiel, responsible for deaths of tens ofd millions of people, and at the same time being rather welcome in SV.
McCarthyist talking points on body counts? 45,000 Americans die annually from preventable illness due to lack of access to healthcare. ~200,000 Americans die annually from poverty-related causes. Meanwhile the US military and CIA are responsible for ~30 million deaths worldwide since WWII. Assuming the McCarthyite propaganda around Holodomor is accurate, it pales in comparison.
I am not sure if this even should be dignified with a reply.
Leftist talking points about "access to healthcare" only work on those who have no idea or first-hand experience with healthcare in countries that attempted to build that workers' paradise.
Worse, your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do this, for reasons I've explained at length at the links listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402816. If you'd please look through some of those, reread the guidelines, and use HN only as intended from now on, we'd appreciate it.
While there is some truth to this depending on the context, for the most part, especially in software engineering world, you don't know everything. Don't be afraid to say if you need to research something or do POC or investigation. No one will be mad at you and if they are, you don't need to be working with that person. I spent many nights frantically trying to figure out things, to make it seemed like I was up to par, when I should have been more chill about it.
- Do what you love, and the money will follow.
My parents, my high school guidance, society, everyone told me this thing in 2002. Many of my friends went into music education and I can say only one or two got a job in this field. Then 2008 hit. This view, it is the survivors bias, what you should do instead is what will make you money, then figure out how to use that skill to do or add to what you love.