Drug dealer loses codes for €53.6m Bitcoin accounts
irishtimes.com Garda officers said they were hopeful advances in technology would one day enable them to access the bitcoin so it could be sold.
Well, if the police was asking for the private keys that protected my million-euro stash of drug money... I would have 'lost' them too. In that vein, I wonder if they keep an eye on the wallets, and for how long.
If I were in their position, I would sign up for one of those services that alert you when coins move. I run one [1].
I'd then set the alert to go to coldcases@police.ie saying "new evidence on case number xxxx". That way even if the current staff retire, it'll be followed up on.
The chance that some random service run in the Bitcoin space exists in even a years time is vanishingly small.
Yes, even yours.
It is plausible to run a service on a $5 VPS. Pay $120 ahead of time and you have it for two years. I don't know why you think it would be so fragile. It wouldn't be difficult to run locally either.
Until it gets owned by an unpatched CVE, anyway.
Pretty hard to own a VPS which has no external ports open, even if the software on it is years out of date. In fact, updating software is probably a bigger security risk than not doing so, because you never know when someone manages to package a malicious bit of code into a common debian package.
Also, if it did get owned, I'd just have to spend a few hours rebuilding it - no bitcoin wallets or anything to steal on there.
Fair point about updates being a mixed bag. But “no ports open” doesn’t always mean safe. Maybe someone can pass some evil bits inside transaction metadata? (Disclaimer: no idea what I’m talking about w/r/t transactions, or how much parsing you’re doing)
If that were possible it would be exploited on every instance of the insecure software. Luckily what you are saying is far fetched. Why is it that you think a VPS is some fragile thing that is sure to be exploited? There are literally millions of instances chugging away, serving up files. Let's use our best judgement.
Sound like FUD, what reason do you have to think a VPS set up correctly would have such a high probability of being exploited? What numbers do you have that show this is common?
(Also, again, someone could easily run something locally)
If I close down, I have to refund all my customers.
And it isn't a limited company, so those refunds come out of my personal bank balance.
You can bet I'll be running it for 10 years.
I’ll hold you to that.
Sparing himself from the old '$5 Wrench attack,' I see... well, goes to show you that Bitcoin does in fact work after all: it proves to be capable of averting confiscation, even if it means giving up (perceived?) ownership.
I'd like to believe people who amassed this much wealth in Bitcoin would have backups of backups etc... but I've heard too many goxxing like stories about people losing millions, and other similar exchange exit scams over the years.
Is there anything preventing them from brute-forcing the wallets from now until the end of time?
They might get lucky in a millennial or two.
They'd pay more fpr electricity. That's the point of modern widely usedencryption standards. Not to make it intpossible but completely impractical.
The size of the keys is such that you could convert all of the matter in the solar system into a computer, and still not have enough compute performance to reasonably have a chance of recovering the key. People are a lot easier to break.
I'm sure IBM has a Quantum Watson for this.
........
they would be better off (by several orders of magnitude) just buying a bunch of lottery tickets
Imagine how many lives were destroyed with drugs worth €53.6m.
Oh no, anything but the devil's lettuce. Wont somebody think of the children!
Don't make light of cannabis, it is a drug and like all drugs has side effects. Even moderate use can seriously retard and arrest brain development in teenagers and it can accelerate the onset of schizophrenia in those who are at risk. It's also been associated with lack of motivation, focus, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety among a host of other issues later in life.
Fully grown adults should be able to choose to do what they want but people who peddle drugs to children deserve nothing short of the death penalty.
That’s the current value of bitcoins. <100k€ in 2012 when he acquired them.
>"...bought most of the bitcoin in late 2011 and early 2012 using cash he made growing crops of cannabis."
More like a couple of thousands.