Bitcoin Forum

If a mixer receives coins that are from a known theft, as far as I know they remain neutral to the whole thing and limit themselves to do their job (mix the coins). There are certain sites like Helix that as far as I know are fully automatized, run on a onion tor website and deliver clean coins, after that I would say it's impossible to find, so he would proceed to sell in exchanges. Of course if he isn't a total idiot, he will not dump and will sell slowly so he doesn't get caught.

So in this situation... how can they find them? I wish they find them and people can recover funds but what if he runs coins through mixers?

Considering that he was able to obtain the coins that way, I highly doubt he fails on the exchanging process. The only thing that thieves may fail at is the last process: keep your coins stored without the ambition of exchanging them quickly.

If they get run through mixers, it does help to change up some of the ways you can trace the coins and it makes it considerably more difficult to determine which address holds the funds, but you could probably still find them if you really wanted to track the person down. You just have to spend a lot of time checking each address and seeing if any sync up to moves from the original wallet.

If you run through the mixers several times or with several mixers, it is not possible to find out the trace.

I think that stolen BTC from Bitfinex is lost forever for them.The thief knew what he doing then and surely now will not make a rookie mistake to give them possibility to return funds.It's too late for anything else but to try to prevent things like this in the future.

But I think the deposited coins to the mixer going to be delivered to another mixer user later, at least it is the way most coin mixers work. So if you cannot recover these coins from coin mixer anymore, why not send them to some address, wait longer, and then you could use the coins as everybody expect the coins come from the mixer to somebody else? Or you believe if you use the coin mixer in the future and you end unlucky with these coins, you going to be investigated ?

This isn't how it works. If they just keep the coins and then spend them without mixing etcetera then they will be traceable. It's not a question of what people "expect." If they are mixed correctly and at a mixer who co-operates and doesn't sell them out, then no one will be able to follow where those coins end up. You can't just not be secure because "people won't expect it." I won't leave the front door to my house unlocked because people will expect it to be locked, do I? That's security through obscurity which is a poor ideal to follow.

It's hard to do that, considering that Bitcoin is anonymous. And I think that they won't use that kind of public service, they will probably make their own mixer and use it by their own.

Until now I haven't seen any news that an exchange has found stolen bitcoins when a user deposited on their exchange addresses, so I don't have any idea how would they find bitfinex stolen bitcoin, maybe after a while they can find but the hacker can exchange and withdraw them in less than a minute!!

they can tag the known addresses with dirty bitcoin on them in their code (it is a simple process) and so if they receive any funds from those knows addresses the exchange blocks the account immediately.

but the question here is about using a mixer, and i think if it is used in smaller amounts and used correctly then it can be possible to become untraceable.

That is impossible to trace funds from someone using a mixer service. That is what their entire business is built around on. It is next to none to find out where those bitfinex funds are now.

hacker was not a newbie he will not do childish mistakes but we can not losse all the hope we should do till we lost him

Well agree he can put them thru mixers several times, split the amount to smallers pieces & start spending ,liquidating ,slowly & with out any trace,i dont believe finex will manage to get him/find him

is bitfinix bust then i hadnt heard if they are actually gona get people their funds back?

Then let's imagine this scenario: If a hacker transfer the funds from A to B and then send from B to exchange address(C) then the exchange will not be able detect that the funds are from those stolen?
I'm not sure how they can detect but if it is only for direct payments from dirty addresses marked as to known dirty address then this is not secure to find the hackers.

This is very true. As childish minds make foolish mistakes.  ::)
This hacker was skilled in his craft and was a veteran with knowing how the system works and what were their flaws. If he was a child/newbie he would of left bread crumbs at the scene of the crime and they would of caught him by now with making such stupid errors.

I think that using a 'trusted' mixer is key. However, no mixer gives you 'clean' coins. It just gives you a different type of 'tainted' coins. Afterall, most coins a mixer has will be tainted coins to some extent.

That's an insane amount of coins to mix, and as others have said you simply receive coins that were tainted in a different way. I've got a genius way to mix coins, how about starting a 1k BTC give away and seeing how many idiots show up and then just issue the reward to myself and so I have plausible deniability where that 1k BTC came from?

Oh wait...

Did bitfinex even published what flaws were exploited to stole so many Bitcoins ? There had to be a way to get the Bitfinex private key/s. If not, inside job is possible instead.

The attacker stolen ~119kBTC, the largest mixer that I am aware of, bitmixer.io, can handle no more then 2,500BTC at a time, and some blockchain analytics companies are generally aware of many mixer's bitcoin addresses.

First of all, the attacker would likely not be able to launder all of the stolen BTC through mixers, because if he tried this, he would simply end up with a transaction that is easily linked to the theft. Secondly, if he tried to launder a small amount of the BTC through a mixer, then a blockchain analytics company would be able to figure out with decent certainty where the money "left" the mixer.

There have been some speculative reports that there was heavy futures selling on OkCoin prior to and durring the hack, and that the attacker used his inside prior knowledge of the attack in order to sell the futures market short in order to profit from the decline of price after the hack was disclosed. I am not so sure if this is plausible though because the fact that the amount of bitcoin in multisig addresses were massively dropping was public information, so people that were watching knew that a large hack was likely takingi place, they just might not have known who was getting hacked.

well i really doubt it was an inside job because there were examples before that for such stuff you can be punished hard, though i have never heard anything about the way he stole it

There are multiple ways to wash Bitcoin and you'll never find them.

By the way, I'm starting a new exchange. Just go to GiveMeAllYourMoneyDumbasses.com

Here's my photo of me and my coonskin hat so you know I'm legit.

http://www.glacierwear.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/r/a/raccoon_fur_davy_crockett_hat.jpg

You have to remember that was not one hacker that stolen those funds, there was more than one group of them,
exploiting the network. I doubt we will see dumping of them this year, they are too famous i think.

They will never find them because in my opinions they already think about the possibility of that and if they through mixers or not the ending will be same.

That is also a likely scenario. A group of them it would be more difficult to track especially if they hit the exchange all at once.
Nothing that was given yet with how they managed to do it still.
So still likely scenario is that it was an inside job as well. :-\

I agree with you if the bitcoin is mixed with several mixers the is no how in this world that it will be detected(especially when you mix it little by little amount and send each mixed coin to a different address)  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D


AFTER THAT YOU CAN  STILL EXCHANGE TO ALT-COIN THEN BACK TO BITCOIN THEN MIX AGAIN AFTER THAT SPEND IT LITTLE BY LITTLE




REMEMBER TO USE A VPN THAT DON'T KEEP TRACE AND DIFFERENT NON BLACKLISTED SOCKS5 BECAUSE BITCOIN SENT CAN BE TRACED TO AN IP ADDRESS

HAPPY SPENDING[/color]

it wouldn't be the first time an inside job happens in the exchanges leading to a hack. but even if it weren't that doesn't change anything about how bad they have performed in case of their own security.

I think the hacker has already made a lot of money by shorting the bitcoin before the hack news leaked out. So there is no immediate need for him to spend the stolen money now.

He doesn't really have to run it through mixers. He can just start going through different sites and it will be mixed by themselves.

any "site" or service out there that is accepting bitcoin as payment can be keeping logs, so you see coins moving out of 1HackersBTCAddress... and check who the other address belong to and go to that "site" and ask them who did this and they will give the information to the authorities.
this is the way they caught kickass owner :D he was using coinbase and also he was buying stuff from itunes

Mixing themselved all 1,00,000BTC+ from where i don't think this is possible. I have seen somewhere actually hacker is trying to agree upon legally owning some % of stolen fund and returning remaining back to bitfinex. If this happen than it will be good for all including price of bitcoin may go up.

These Mixer services can be subpoenaed to give up the information, if needed. It all depends on what the law wants to do, and if they want to take it further. As far as I know, nobody has laid a formal

charge at a Police station or given proof that they did? Some people even think, some of these services are honeypots for government agencies. As far as I know, nobody has ever received information

from the company in my signature space, so it's safe to say, they are not one of them.  ;)

Coinbase is a different case. If the Kickass owner was to use something like Bitmixer, they would probably not have figured it out.


I am not saying he has to mix that much amount of BTC. He can just mix some now, and some later through different mixers or exchanges. You don't have to relate your identity on all sites to withdraw coins.
That was a proposition made by bitfinex, but I doubt he would agree to that in any case.

Once the coins are mixed in a very good service like Bitmixer, Cryptomixer or another mixer in the deep web which I don't recall now chances are small that the exchangers finds out who is the hacker. Mixers are the perfect place when you want to make "money laundering" in the bitcoin cryptocurrency but are also something that helps criminals a lot like the story of hackers or people who are involved with shady things over the dark net. For the moment if someone looks under an address of bitcoin they need a lot of tools to only have a small chance to find out to who this address belongs. Not even law enforcement agencies can help in this case even if they are involved.

You can't run 120,000 BTC through mixers. There just isn't enough liquidity in the world across all mixers to even begin to launder that amount of bitcoin. Sure, if he wanted to mix 50 or 100 BTC here and there -- and he would probably want to run them through multiple mixers -- he could maybe do that. But he would need to be very, very careful. Several blockchain analysis firms are watching those coins, and once they start moving, clues start being given away.

Bitcoin is not anonymous. It's pseudonymous. While an address is not by definition linked to a human identity, it certainly can be in many ways if a user is not very careful to cover all tracks.

Making your own mixer with that amount of hot coins would just put a target on your back when everyone realizes that you're delivering tainted coins from the Bitfinex heist to your customers.

So it is better to use a existing big mixing service. But how can you make your coin safe without being identified by the mixer?

Nowdays there aren't many bitcoin mixer but some that I know are bitcoinfog, bitmixer, cryptomixer and a mixer with .se domain(can't remember now), but how it works are that you send your coins to bitcoinmixer and they send you coins that someone else sent to them, so your coins will go to somewhere else and someone's else coins will go to you minus the mixer fees.

The mixer service will not reveal your identity to anyone, if they not forced to do that through legal means. So your coins are safe, if you send it

through these mixers. Even if your coins are clean, it might be mixed with coins that were acquired by illegal means... Nobody knows where their

money came from and how it was used, and this fits with what is happening with fiat money too. Freshly mined coins are the only clean coins.  ::)

Which authority can force the mixer to reveal the identity of the users? Can the police in China to force them?

If they where hacked it means that somehow the private keys where hacked

who on earth would put the private keys online anyway, surely for a meagre

amout of funds and to do some automation some private keys would be online

though the majority should be in paper wallets inside safes with insurance,

The mixers does not have the potential to mix all the bitcoins that were hacked so probably the hacker will start mixing the hacked bitcoin by starting with a small amounts so they can't be traced, I don't think that the bitcoin mixers will blacklist these addresses like the exchanges because they have profit from this.

The way bitfinex was hacked was not published yet by bitfinex which make it quite doubtful that it may be hack by some insider. How bitfinex can be so careless in putting funds in online storage from which it can easily get hacked.

I think exchange can not find out if hacker use bitcoin mixing services, it will be hard to track and bitcoin mixing services will not give their users who has done bitcoin mixing. It is just my opinion if It is happening.

don't you think mixer services are not exactly swiss banks
oh wait ...even swiss banks are obliged to give their customer's account info to the authorities nowadays
long gone the times when the anonimity of your deposit and identity was the swiss banks trademark
what I'm trying to say,that there are concrete people behind every mixer service and sometimes they just could not say no to guys with guns and FBI or ANB
letters on their vests
 

Tracing coins through exchanges will lead you nowhere!The source of incoming coins would still be hidden if they're not part of a famous wallet which I believe hacker will be smart enough to not list any details on the blockchain.By now,the coins would be mixed already and maybe even I've a part of it bought through exchanges.

If the exchanges can cooperate with the authority, it will help a lot to find the criminals and the hacking will reduce.