Did Loaded (aka “Jimmy Zhong”) taint Greg Maxwell’s wallet?

[nullius]

For my continuing responses Re: Mixer restrictions, I reviewed the start of a classic thread I hadn’t perused in eight or nine years:  gmaxwell’s 13-year-old I taint rich! (Raw txn fun and disrupting 'taint' analysis; >51kBTC linked!).  Woah.  I actually sort of vaguely remembered that a participant described themselves as “loaded”, but I didn’t make the connection that it was the Loaded (u=73652)—who allegedly had an alt mb300sd (u=36986)—and who, much to his dismay, now has a Wikipedia article about him.

Anyone else who wants to be associated with 40k BTC

Code:

0100000003c8e2c94e9

69d9d66aae4812b6cf156f32267b773fb2118db696bb847ebd3454a198b59fbd

I've handled pricy assets before, but perhaps thats the most I've ever had move on a single keypress. Very cool.  I'll have more outputs up in a minute.

LOL, I definitely want to be associated with 40k BTC.  Very cool.  Is the offer still open, Loaded?

...soooo...  Did this actually taint the wallets of Greg Maxwell and other participants in the thread?  Sorry if this was discussed to death while I was sleeping; it’s not coming up on a search.


Notice to moderators:  For the following reasons, I’m posting this on a board where gmaxwell has the mod bit set, and then self-reporting the OP.  I almost posted it to Investigations.

• Courtesy to gmaxwell.  I’m not stirring shit about him.  However, he did start the “I taint rich!” thread to evolve the discourse about taint.  Maybe he got more than he bargained for?
• I’m sort of protesting the dox of Loaded and their putative alt mb300sd.  Just because the U.S. government doxed them and it was headline news, that does not make it compliant with forum rules.  And as we all know, compliance is a buzzword of pure virtue throughout the Web 4.0 fintech industry!  For my part, I think it’s none of anyone’s fucking business what Loaded/mb300sd has printed on their government-issued slave card.  Anyway, I will let the forum’s Rules Compliance Officers (= moderators) check my compliance with the forum rule that restricts doxes to Investigations.

As such, I wouldn’t strenuously object to moving this to Investigations.  However:

• I do think this should be a public discussion, per the purpose of the “I taint rich!” thread.  Maybe gmaxwell got even more of proving his point than he could have wished for?
• I guess that Loaded may have lost access to their forum accounts.  Just in case they ever check the forum to see what people say about them, this thread should be readable 100% anonymously—and it shouldn’t be hidden in a place requiring Full Member status to access.

Not joking about the latter.  The criminal prosecution was a transparent cash-grab that reeks of hypocrisy.  Funds were not restored to the victim of the theft—and if Loaded was a danger to anyone, they’d still be in a cage.  Just to pad their own wallet, the U.S. government used a $5 wrench attack to rob the bitcoins that Loaded stole first from a drug dealer, plus the bitcoins that Loaded earned by honest means.  USG are armed robbers, hardened violent criminals under colour of “law”; that’s worse than a nonviolent hax0r idly jiggling a security flaw in a DNM checkout the DNM needs to hire other hax0rs to secure, as the police don’t honestly care about protecting it.  It would be nice if Loaded gets their life together, and returns to cryptocurrency.

After all, Loaded taught us an excellent lesson about why we need to make Bitcoin fungible.  Without on-chain privacy, every UTXO is an NFT.  It taint right!

Blacklist providers maintain sets of outputs that are blacklisted or tainted in some way, for instance because the owner reported them stolen or because it’s believed they are owned by some criminal enterprise.

If you see this as a good thing, you hate freedom.

[Danish Ali]

What's important to note is that in this instance we are dealing with an instance where multiple parties had contributed to the transaction. Both Loaded's input and gmaxwell's input were consumed in the transaction, with the outputs returning the funds to the respective parties. This means that if you were a blockchain analyst, you could use the common input ownership heuristic to group these two inputs and assume they are linked to one entity.

However, this is not evidence that they are owned by the same party. Bitcoin only ensures that the inputs are authorised to spend their respective UTXO. There is no requirement that all inputs within a transaction are owned by one person. All we know is there's been a public association between them. The original experiment demonstrates exactly how this is a limitation.

[nullius]

The original experiment demonstrates exactly how this is a limitation.

I understand the purpose.  That’s why I love that thread, I have it bookmarked, and I looked back upon it 13 years after the fact.

In retrospect, it succeeded in that purpose much more than intended.  That could be a good thing or the opposite, depending on how one looks at it.  Be careful what you wish for?  If you set up an innocuous public demonstration of why taint is a bad concept, you just may entangle your wallet with the future subject of a Wikipedia page that says, “Known for: Largest theft of Bitcoin in U.S. history”.

It’s surprising that I can’t find any discussion of this from the time period when Loaded was in the news.  More surprising that no one seems interested in it now.  Perhaps I just didn’t locate the thread with the big discussion before?

[Danish Ali]

I understand the purpose.  That’s why I love that thread, I have it bookmarked, and I looked back upon it 13 years after the fact.

In retrospect, it succeeded in that purpose much more than intended.  That could be a good thing or the opposite, depending on how one looks at it.  Be careful what you wish for?  If you set up an innocuous public demonstration of why taint is a bad concept, you just may entangle your wallet with the future subject of a Wikipedia page that says, “Known for: Largest theft of Bitcoin in U.S. history”.

It’s surprising that I can’t find any discussion of this from the time period when Loaded was in the news.  More surprising that no one seems interested in it now.  Perhaps I just didn’t locate the thread with the big discussion before?

You are right. Whilst there was an aim to have a transaction for demonstration purposes the fact remains that there is a permanent link between gmaxwell's wallet and Loaded's wallet on the blockchain (as you said). This is a great example of how taint analysis can be a bad way of finding possible links. In this case it can lead to a false assumption that both parties owned the same funds. It can also show how taint analysis can give false conclusions. There is a historical link between them however there is no evidence they were commonly owned.