They may have used the exchange before with similar amounts, but the FBI was unaware of the specific TXID associated with other ransom payments in the past, so they wouldn't have been able to seize the funds in the account until now.


If you are trying to maximize your privacy with a mixer, and are afraid the government is running a mixer as means to monitor transactions, you would send all of your coin through multiple mixers. You won't gain any additional privacy if you split up your coin as you are moving it through the various mixers if you ever recombine your inputs, and this includes cashing out via the same exchange, even if you are making multiple deposits to the exchange. I would also make a similar point as I did above, as the hackers may have used the mixer in the past for similar amounts, but the FBI did not know at the time that stolen coin was being processed via their mixer.

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I wonder if this article is related: The FBI Secretly Ran the Anom Messaging Platform, Yielding Hundreds of Arrests in Global Sting.

The FBI was apparently helping develop a "secure" app, Anom that encrypts messages sent to other Anom users, and inserted a weakness in the encryption such that the FBI was able to trivially decrypt the messages remotely.

Mixing 60 BTC+ via CJ is not trivial with today's prices.

I had thought about the possibility that the FBI scammed the hackers via some promise that was unrelated to being a mixer. I am not familiar with the communities the hackers may be a part of. The FBI may have had a CI, or may have had an agent undercover himself in one of these communities, but I would think seizing the coin would blow the cover of either the CI or undercover agent.

Well coin was sent to bc1qq2euq8pw950klpjcawuy4uj39ym43hs6cfsegq on May 27. Why was the coin sent to this address that day? Under what circumstances?

If the above address was created by the hacking group, it would have been done so on a server the FBI was able to compromise and access the private key. When coin was sent to the above address, every address spend-linked to the address was zero'ed out, so it is theoretically possible the FBI was able to compromise the server the private keys were being stored in when the hacking group was receiving ransom payments. Being that the group had previously announced they are shutting down, it is not unreasonable to believe they were in the process of cashing out all of the payments they had received in their various hacking endeavors.

If bc1qq2euq8pw950klpjcawuy4uj39ym43hs6cfsegq was created on a new server the FBI compromised, the hacking group would have created a new private key on a new server. There would be no reason for the hacking group to do this, and as such, I believe discredits the theory the FBI was able to hack the hacking group.

For some reason, Twitter thinks it should censor elected officials willy nilly. This censorship only hides potentially harmful content elected officials make, and this will make it more difficult for voters to hold the elected officials accountable at the ballot box.

What is even more bazare, Twitter thinks it is okay to allow unelected dictators to say what is arguably worse statements and not be censored.

If you are going to cash out $2 million+ worth of crypto, you need to eventually move it to an exchange. If it was an exchange that the DOJ has authority over, I would think they would have made it public they had returned the stolen coin.

What makes me believe the US government is running a mixer is this quote from a CNBC article:


Probably not. The address the coin was seized from is bc1qq2euq8pw950klpjcawuy4uj39ym43hs6cfsegq according to paragraph 33 of the affidavit in support of the warrant. It is clear there is a link from the ransom payment to the seized address. The private key in question actually has ~69 BTC, but some of it cannot be traced to the ransom payment.

The warrant also says the FBI has access to the private key of the above address. I would find it hard to believe an exchange would hand over one of their private keys, I think they would move the coin to a fresh address, not created on their production servers. This would leave the possibility that FBI was able to somehow hack the hackers, but IMO this would not make sense, because why would they be creating private keys on a new server?

There is a thread about this - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5342486.0

The recovery is nothing compared to the economic damage the shutdown caused. It may deter future ransomware attacks in the future though.

The pipeline was effectively out of business until the ransomware was removed from their systems. This meant they either had to rebuild all their systems or pay the ransom. It seems they had difficulty even after paying.

It is also possible, the government is running a mixing service, and recovered the coin when the hacking group tried to launder the stolen coin via mixer.

The government specifically did not reveal how they recovered the coin. If they had not specifically kept this a secret, I would have speculated they seized the coin when they deposited it to an exchange.

I would find it fairly unlikely the government hacked the hackers, and very unlikely they were able to crack their private keys.

Twitter declared access to their services a "human right" despite banning Trump and other conservatives.

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Does Nigeria have *free* elections? If so, this is ultimately an issue that needs to be resolved at the ballot box. Good luck and stay safe.

When SW was being proposed, there was a community debate if bitcoin should be hard forked to allow for a max block size increase. SW was an alternative to increasing the maximum block size via the use of signature weights.

There is no alternative proposals to Taproot, and there is no serious technical opposition to it either, that I am aware of. I suspect the delay in signaling support for Taproot by the miners is due to them reviewing the code, running their own tests, and checking for security vulnerabilities.

You're right, if someone were to realize capital losses in a year after they realized capital gains, they would not be able to offset the capital gains with losses. If your scenario is changed such that someone sold their AMC shares prior to the end of the year in 2021, if they sold their AMC shares at a loss, that loss would offset gains from 2021. Your scenario is somewhat similar to a trader who was had a $800k tax bill on ~$45k in trading earnings due to the wash sale rule (based on the facts presented in the article, I believe he probably qualifies as a "professional trader", which would exempt him from the wash sale rule).

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You bring up AMC as being a reckless investment...the price of AMC stock has gone from ~$2 to over $60 at its high. Nothing has changed regarding AMC's fundamentals this year, and if anything, AMC's long-term prospects are weaker than they were going into the pandemic as people will be content with not going out to the movies. I don't think those buying AMC stock are even speculating on it's underlying financial performance, but are rather using excess money from the government to bet they can make more money via the greater fool theory. There are many stocks with similar patterns. People are throwing money at NFTs like candy, that has no real value other than bragging rights.

My concern with the above is that a lot of speculative money has also gone into crypto. I believe bitcoin has real long-term value, but my concern is what happens once all this mania ends, and it will end, probably sooner rather than later. I think there will be a blood-bath with bitcoin (and other crypto prices), and it wont be pretty. It will probably spill over from a similar blood-bath in other asset prices.

There is an eviction moratorium right now, and millions of mortgages are in forbearance. This is while the unemployed have been receiving direct payments in the form of unemployment that is often greater than the wages they were receiving. The delinquency rates on rent, and the number of people on mortgage forbearance programs are not consistent with the unemployment rate, and the size of unemployment payments. It is possible that some of the money that should have been used to pay for rent and mortgage payments, instead went to things like AMC stock, NFTs, and other speculative investments. The only way I see near-term deflation is if these rent and mortgage payments need to be repaid on a large scale, and people start cashing in their "investments", and the price declines from these investments spills over into other asset prices like commodities and homes. I think it is unlikely the mortgage payments will need to be repaid immediately because the GSEs will likely allow homeowners to essentially turn 30-year mortgages into 31-year mortgages, and to pay the year of missed payments after they would've normally paid off their mortgage. Delinquent rent payments might be a different story, but I think many landlords will be willing to forgive back rent in exchange for renters moving out to prevent their units being tied up by non-paying renters.

Commodity prices are through the roof. These prices are not heavily factored into CPI inflation numbers because it is rare for a consumer to directly buy steel or lumber. Over time, these prices will have to result in higher prices at the cash register for consumers. Companies have been able to draw on their existing inventories of commodities they use to make their goods, and otherwise absorb price increases, but this will not last forever.

Block times can be off by up to two hours, so it is technically possible for block n to have a reported time after block n+2. Also, there is the potential for blocks to become orphaned, so block x may have a block time of y as of y + 5 minutes, but as of y + 15 minutes block x may have some other time.

Memory/thread constraints should not be an issue. Executing a script remotely on a server optimized for script requirements is trivial, and uploading an output file a single time to your server should not be an issue for a ~20 GB file.

I don't think there is any proposal to eliminate the ability to offset capital losses to capital gains, so someone who invests recklessly, and loses a large portion of their fortune would be able to use those losses to offset any gains they had from earlier in the year. If they spent a portion of their fortune, and subsequently recklessly invested in something, this might be a different story.


It is far more likely that inflation will exceed norms to the upside than it will to the downside. There are currently shortages of many things that help produce goods/services (commodities and labor), and there is a pent up demand for discretionary, and non-discretionary goods/services due to massive government stimulus in the form of direct payments, and via low interest rates that have pushed up asset prices, and lowered mortgage payments.

The economy contracted in 2020 via artificial means (lockdowns) by too much, and there is too much pent-up consumer demand (due in part to direct stimulus payments, and enhanced unemployment benefits payments) to expect a recession in the immediate or near term. The US may see a recession in the medium term resulting from stagflation, and crazy economic policies implemented by the Biden administration.

Assuming there is no known way to calculate Hash1(S) based on Hash2(S), I would agree with you. I had not considered that multiple hash functions could be used to encrypt data and calculate a truely_public key.

If Hash1 or Hash2 are ever reverse engineered to allow someone to calculate the input based on the output, an attacker would be able to execute a timing attack as I describe, but this would violate your constraints, and is probably not a reasonable concern. Bruteforcing the Hash2 function to calculate an output that is equal to the output of Hash2(S) is also probably not reasonable.

I do see one potential vulnerability to what you describe:
An attacker could execute a "false flag" type operation, in which they intentionally publish incorrect 'session IDs' for a percentage of their peers. This might discredit any actual reports of 'session IDs' not matching what they should be, and could hide actual MITM attacks.

I would not give much credence to this analysis. One point he made was that Tesla is running its own nodes, and implied that it is unlikely the nodes are running on renewable energy -- the amount of energy a single node consumes is trivial when compared to even a single miner that can be used to mine profitably commercially.

This person seems to imply that Tesla might somehow use the powerwalls it sells to mine bitcoin. The main problem with this theory is that any electricity tesla powerwalls generate belongs to the customer, not Tesla. Also, if Tesla were to include some kind of ASIC with each powerwall, the effective value of each KwH in excess of consumption would decline over time as difficulty increases.

How can electrum be used to easily create a double spend transaction? I am not aware of this being possible unless both transactions are created prior to one being broadcast.

This is only true if “key” is different for every node pair. If “key” is constant for a node, regardless of who is connecting to it, an attacker can trivially collect all “keys” for nodes, and act accordingly. If “key” changes for every peer a node connects to, it would make a MITM attack impossible to detect. If nodes publish all “key” values for each connection, an attacker could collect this information and act accordingly. Ditto if a nonce is added to key values, as an attacker could run the analysis with many nonce values.

If you are looking at potential plagiarism, you should strip out things like punctuation and emojis prior to reviewing. It would probably also be good to filter out stopwords, but that can be expensive.

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I do agree with the OP. I think this is a very important upgrade and Theymos should promptly devote maximum resources to allow for additional emoticons, preferably before the new forum software is implemented.

Implanting additional emojis will result in additional page views 📺, which will result in additional advertising revenue 💲, which will allow the forum to invest in toilet paper 🧻 futures. This will be the key 🔑 to making sure bitcoin will be successful 📶, and not like the bathroom 🚻, and the price will go up 💹 really high🪂, and the g he haters will be silenced 🔕, so it will be the end 🔚, of CSW claiming to be satoshi 🔬, and so Covid 🦠 can be stopped.  It will also make the forum a magnet 🧲 for fans of emojis 🕯, and tools 🛠 to communicate without words.

The OP is saying that the transaction will be encrypted when it first broadcasts the transaction. The encryption algorithm will be public, and if you know the encryption algorithm, you know that sending n bytes will result in f(n) bytes. A government adversary could review the logs of data transmitted, and look for the first instance of data being sent via port 8333 that is f(n) bytes, with n being the size of the transaction in bytes.

If a government is running a node, they will know about every valid transaction that is valid. In the OP's scenario, the government will also know all peers of each node because bitcoin uses port 8333 to communicate with other nodes.

The 4 hour quote appears to be the result of my crappy WiFi connection on my back porch. I was able to reproduce a ~10 minute download estimate via a datacenter. I have been able to transfer ~a half terabyte worth of videos stored in a storage bucket in seconds.

That is a reasonable desire, however it is something that is more difficult as you are making big data available to the public. Service providers have limited network infrastructure, and need to pay for data sent to the internet, regardless of if they have data caps, or charge you for egress/outgoing data. If you are freely sharing a 10 or 20 GB file(s) using a service provider that does not charge per data transferred, you will eventually get kicked off from that service provider.

Another point is that many people look at bitcoin-related data today. The fact that someone is looking at blockchain data is not the privacy leak that it might have been 10 years ago.

There is a reason why blockchair throttles downloads, and why they charge as much as they do for an API key.