Wat? They had cold storage, the cops just used a $5 wrench attack, kind of. Basically they stashed their profits from the operation to BTC, then just held it.
Plus, these guys were (mentally) able to keep to those bitcoin for 100x of growth. I would guess they are likely to have more from other, legal sources, which potentially makes them millionaires. Why (indefenitely) stay in prison with a billion when you can go free with a million.
> Plus, these guys were (mentally) able to keep to those bitcoin for 100x of growth.
Given the time, I'd wager growth was completely fortuitous. They held it for the same reason I hold mine. Conversion requires either a source willing to exchange large amounts of cash for crypto, which tends to be impractical. Converting to cash through conventional sources (legal exchanges), necessarily involve either large bank deposits or, in cases like Coinbase or Kraken, conversions to cash are directly reported to IRS. I only say this because I'm in the same situation, except I didn't obtain it illegally.
Germany has very lax sentencing. for $2 billion I would just do the time. I am still guessing it was unprotected file on desktop. Probably the criminals kept the only copy of keys on a thumb drive , which when confiscated meant they had no choice but to comply.
You think you can just get out of prison and use the money? They will be watching you and anything you buy with it or any cash you convert it to will be seized again. Might as well give it up for reduced sentence.
There aren't any nice places without extradition treaties where you won't be murdered by the people in charge, police, criminal gangs, et al. Or otherwise de facto forced to turn over the money for protection, after which you'll be discarded if you're lucky (and disappeared for convenience if you're not).
So I am unclear on this. In Germany or the US, if you rob a bank, hide the money, get arrested, and serve a X year sentence, what happens when you are released? Could you use the money? You have already served for the crime. I suppose they could keep some criminal charges in reserve? If nothing else, eventually the statute of limitations would kick in where the money is fair game? Just be sure to declare it on your taxes, lest they get you like Capone.
IANAL but I suspect this is the kind of thing civil forfeiture is originally intended for. You would have to sue in court and prove the cash was obtained through legal means.
The 5$ wrench is just a simple example of social engineering. No amount of cryptography will help you if the guy holding the keys can be talked/pressured into handing them over.
I wouldn't say all social engineering is a $5 wrench attack. A $5 wrench attack is having physical access to the person and using physical means (handcuffs, prison cells, guns) to convince them to comply.
You’re taking it way too literally. The joke is that all this fancy-pants cryptography is meaningless when the nerds that employ it will mess their britches at the first whiff of real consequence.
I’d also add that a lot of the rhetoric in the cryptocurrency world is based on this very board game-y mentality where it’s like a contest to set the rules up so you win, which completely misses that in the real-world people just choose not to follow your preferred rules.
No police force says “oh, you have impregnable cryptography and a 42 character password, well, we only have one prisoner slot so you can go free now”.
in modern day, at least stories I heard, criminals will be placed in temp holding sell (worst places), once max time in temp jail is expiring (legally allowed), they just add new charges, so effectively, you will be held in worst jail cell possible for weeks if not months, this is how I understood from stories of multiple life time criminals with 10+ years in jail time served.
If police shows up to seize something then you can either cooperate (hand it over voluntarily) or risk additional penalties (fines, prison time, ...).
I read this story as "law enforcement was able to figure out that they have bitcoins, so they knocked on their door, and the criminals opted to hand it over instead of prison time".
So yes, they transferred it, but I wouldn't call this voluntarily. It's just that the applied force is as visible as the seized bitcoins.
It would be rather strange to expect a mechanism that bars governments from holding bitcoins to be built into the protocol, and thus it is rather strange that you expect this to have ever been the intention.
Whatever the "intention" was, what the parent says was the second most advertised supposed feature of Bitcoin by crypto bros (second, as first was "getting rich quick").
Sure, lack of government control is a main selling point, they just did not mean the term "control" in the way that both of you appear to be interpreting it.
I don't think bitcoin was designed to be impervious to government influence. The intention was to not be limited to a single controller, not that no controller be a government. Despite what some people think, bitcoin is not a "stick it to the man" invention
Ultimately if bitcoin is to reach the peak of a standard currency that some feel is inevitable (and some feel is futile) it would necessarily require government involvement. It wouldn't be a single government however. Monetary policy would have to be driven by a consensus of nations. That would possibly be the best (or least worst) way do do things.
None of this has any particular bearing on today's Bitcoin, if it's going to replace money it's not going to be in the next few decades. If it's still working in 50 years time, there might be a chance.
If you eliminate the noise of speculation on day-to-day levels of bitcoin, the underlying value difference between the current usefulness of bitcoin and the current trading price represents people placing bets on the likelihood of that success condition.
> The seizure came after the "accused voluntarily transferred" the bitcoins to an official wallet of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), police added in a statement.
Seizure is a technical word here, not what laypeople expect when they hear the word.
The US Government is already one of or the largest know holder of Bitcoin. And that is without the assumption that the US Government owns the Satoshi coins. It would be fine if governments decided they want to hold Bitcoin. I see no issues.
I was wondering why they would give up the 2B EUR, as the prison sentence here in Germany can't be that long afaik. But then imagined they could probably be extradited to the US for their 'crimes'. Not sure if that'd actually happen though... Germany refused extradition based on too low prison living standards before.
Then again, if you can't leave Germany and have 2B EUR that would be seized if you try to use it, it is game-theoretically a loss as well.
Maybe they saw a deal as their only possible restart in life.
Really depends if the coins were really known/tainted. I'm sure you could find ways to mix it in intervals, in smaller amounts, that could allow you a luxurious life indefinitely. Although I have to admit I don't know how much harder it has become, as I exited crypto some 5 years ago.
The site contained no piracy, only links. If it was a "piracy website" why are German authorities not going after Google, Yandex & co?
There was no law forbidding what they did at the time they ran the site, even if there have been law changes since. It's the PirateBay nonsense all over. In that case it was later discovered that one of the police officers investigating the site had previously worked for Warner Brothers before returning to the Swedish police.
> In that case it was later discovered that one of the police officers investigating the site had previously worked for Warner Brothers before returning to the Swedish police.
Revolving doors [0], IMHO should not be permitted.
This has been discussed numerous times over the years, you can read the court documents for the "kino.to" case which was very similar here: https://openjur.de/u/961112.html
The key is usually the part where it's done with the explicit goal of making money exclusively off copyrighted material ("gewerbsmäßig begangene unerlaubte Verwertung von urheberrechtlich geschützten Werken"), that's also why the court case of TPB was so focused on how much money their ad business made.
Google, YouTube and other similar players are very well integrated in the whole DMCA takedown process and you can't really compare them.
Friends of mine who watch movie streams on similar sites tell me they always get their links from Google. Apparently all you have to do is input the movie name, together with relevant keywords.
Since authorities started cracking down on these streaming link sites, they now have to frequently change their URLs, so ironically general search engines like Google are the fastest way of finding the latest working links. Google has the exact same business model of making money with ads on their site, which people visit to get those links.
It's easy to look up rulings and see that European courts interpret the law the way you say - 100% correct. It's rule of corporations, not rule of law. Google will never be touched, even though they have served a larger number of supposedly illegal links to users. Of course Hollywood doesn't go after them because it's a fight they could not win.
The point is not if you are able to find streaming links on Google in the window of time before the copyright holder files a DMCA (https://lumendatabase.org/notices/search?term=google+streami...) notice and they are blocked from the index or not, but if the site has a legal process to process these.
I don't find it very hard to see a difference between "illegal" streaming site with no contact information, imprint or company behind it vs. large companies that have a working legal framework to take down content and do so all the time.
1. The primary use case of Google is not to find pirated streams.
2. Google responds to lawful take-down requests.
> Google has the exact same business model of making money with ads on their site, which people visit to get those links.
This is a disingenuous claim for the reasons mentioned above.
> Google will never be touched, even though they have served a larger number of supposedly illegal links to users.
False equivalence for the reasons above. Piracy links are a small fraction of Google's use case, not the primary advertised function. They're also responsive to following lawful requests.
> What if I accidentally link a copyrighted work and I happen to run ads on my site?
If you make a site that legitimately serves a different purpose, then you accidentally post a single link to pirated content in a truly good-faith accidental manner, then you response to any requests to take it down with a good-faith action in a timely manner, you are in a completely different category than dedicated piracy websites.
There is no equivalence.
Furthermore, the law generally takes intent into account. You can start reading on the general concept on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
Computers don't care what you intended, but the law cares a whole lot. As programmers we sometimes aren't used to that. There law isn't executed by a computer, but by judges who can see that the clear purpose of a website like this is piracy.
Because the real world is vague too. The law is dynamic, not static, any specifics are taken into account by judges and prosecutors, non specifics are speculated, intent and malice is considered, and so on.
>In fact, what if I link to something and it is changed to a copyrighted work silently?
Then you'll 99.99999% just get away with it, as nobody cares for some lowly link.
If (and it's a big if) it attracts attention for some reason (perhaps it gains tons of traffic and suddenly some music/movie label is calling for your prosecution), then you might be prosecuted.
In which case your prosecutor will assume your guilt, your lawyer will argue that you are innocent and somebody switched your original link, and the court will try to find what really went on, after hearing all of them, and checking any evidence, looking into whether there was intent and malice involved, and so on.
Same as if you stayed in a hotel with a friend, and the other day you were found sleeping, and the friend murdered. The law doesn't have a special provision for "but what if somebody else came in the room with a spare key and murdered my friend" either.
It’s kind of irrelevant who the police officer worked for. In the end courts have to interpret the law and decided how a law is applied. Even if a law might not explicitly state the exact circumstances, the court may decided that the spirit of the law was broken. It’s of course a more difficult case to make for investigators, why law makers might then codify the law more precisely.
When are we going to stop calculating BTC total value by multiplying number of BTC times what is, let's face it, a spot price. There is no way you could sell 2 billion euros worth of BTC. You can't convert them into real property.
A quick look at the 24-hour trading volumes of the top 10 crypto exchanges (only a single trading pair per exchange of BTC against a USD or equivalent) gives a total volume of ~3.8 billion dollars. Many people say that there is a lot of fake volume in crypto but this is still a pretty conservative number. The total BTC volume according to CoinMarketCap is about 23 billion, but I prefer the smaller number because it gives a much better picture of the volume that could be feasibly captured with pretty unremarkable exchange access. If we assume that one can capture 5% of this 24-hour volume (a reasonably conservative assumption given good enough trading infrastructure), it would take about 11 days to offload that amount of bitcoin by selling across the top 10 exchanges.
So you absolutely could convert an amount like that into "real" assets. 11 days doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount of time to me, and we haven't even talked about OTC deals or other providers offering block trading services.
Those numbers aren't new inflows of capital into Bitcoin. They're the total volume traded both buys and sells. There are traders, market makers, etc both buying and selling many times a day, and anyone wanting to make large block trades can get a sufficiently modest piece of that. 5% is very achievable with very little price impact even in markets with lower liquidity than Bitcoin.
All that matters is if there if fresh money coming in and how much there is if the German government tried to sell. We have no idea how much money is fresh and how much there is wash until someone places a legitimate market sell for a large quantity of BTC.
I'm not saying it is wash trading since I don't have a cristal ball or insider info but after the recent lack of price action from the ETFs, it doesn't suggest the existing volume is legitimate.
> All that matters is if there if fresh money coming in
Every time a trade happens, someone is "coming in" and someone is "getting out". The more trades there are, the more opportunities there are for anyone (including the German government) to take the other side.
> after the recent lack of price action from the ETFs, it doesn't suggest the existing volume is legitimate.
This is by no means the only reasonable interpretation of the price action surrounding the ETF approval. It's totally plausible that the lack of price action just means that the amount of money "selling the news" of the final ETF approval is around the same as the amount of money "buying the rumor" of a big influx of cash.
That volume is not wash trading (i.e. "fake volume" in my words). There is fake volume in crypto but that happens largely on the smaller, less established exchanges that are trying to make a name for themselves. You can see this from the "**" markings on CoinMarketCap that indicate that they don't include that volume in their total volume calculations. I did not include any **'d volume in my above calculations.
But don't take it from me. This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200966 elsewhere in this thread agrees that you can move that amount of Bitcoin in a small number of weeks.
We have no idea how much wash trading is happening. I know for a fact that it is not all wash trading but it's also not 0% wash trading. Both extremes are equally absurd to claim.
A billion dollars isn't a lot of money any more. We could start seeing trillionaires appear on stage in about 25 years; which would imply "billionaire" being what millionaire is now.
the new ETFs have had inflows that high over just the last week, so, yes? if bitcoins price has barely moved by ETFs that buy bitcoin based on how much people bought the ETFs then yes there is that much liquidity
As someone who worked for a trading firm that did some* crypto stuff, you absolutely could sell 2B Euros worth of BTC, in a matter of weeks (contingent on market conditions), without significantly impacting the price.
*Some being trading volumes under but approaching $1B/month, although we didn't really have directional price exposure.
and its simply the same standard used for all other asset classes. lets normalize talking about bitcoin using the same standards we use on other things, of course that would require even knowing how other assets are talked about
"An investigation is still underway and no charges have yet been filed, police said."
Whoa.
> "The seizure came after the "accused voluntarily transferred" the bitcoins to an official wallet of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), police added in a statement."
What are the odds this was a trade - "give us the coins or we proceed/extradite you to somewhere else"?
German nationals can’t be extradited to non-EU countries and if they would be, they still serve their sentence in Germany.
Article 16(2) of the German Constitution, 2(3) AICCM
Under the TCA, Germany has made the respective notification under article LAW.SURR.83(2)/article Law.Other. 134(1) (now articles 603, 690) that it will not surrender its own nationals.
Accusation warrants: Germans can be extradited, but only to EU member states and only under the condition that after their conviction, they will be transferred back to Germany to serve the sentence there.
Conviction warrants: German citizens can only be extradited if they consent (section 80, AICCM)
They were sitting on this amount of money for over ten years and couldn’t spend it without leaving a paper trail, and Germans are pretty good at paper trails. It’s “taxes, taxes and taxes” rather than “death and taxes” here.
Personally I would have hosted a German only reverse lottery, where the bitcoins would be divided up between every person that submitted their wallet address and proof of one entry per person with a German identity card. Boom, mass traction of bitcoin in Germany, and you’re god damn Robin Hood. No way the state is going to force millions of people to pay it back.
While the people behind this website were indeed caught in Germany, providers of similar popular streaming piracy sites (kinox.to and movie4k.to) have/had warrants out for them internationally as well as house searches all over Europe. They really don't joke around when it comes to copyright infringement.
You'd need both: law enforcement that looks the other way when it comes to the crimes you commit and good infrastructure. Countries with one or the other are easy to find, but both?
Beyond what other wrote: A polish and a german citizen. Website was taken down in 2013, but they were imprisoned in 2019. Maybe they thought they had got away with it?
This one is also questionable in a country that allows you to buy a Porsche with cash, and which in general has its capital full cash only casinos and bars.
But yes, if you play by the book, you definitely don't want to mess with the Finanzamt.
The rate of violent crimes against people is low, but higher that you may feel by reading the newspapers. There is lots of crime, but typically not violent against other people. Having you home break-in is relatively common.
