Recently I saw a WSJ article where they surprisingly couldn't find a story 2, and so it said something like: stock prices decline as investors sell risky assets
Which is almost a tautology, so idunno, maybe that's better than the usual thing, but then scroll down the article and it says bond prices were also down as investors also sold their less risky assets
I don't have a problem with that part, calling something a sell off, or a buying frenzy. It's used to mean increased/decreased demand, nothing about the number of individual investors (which isn't necessarily equal, btw, but it's not a part of the meaning of the phrase.)
Yes, it's a dark pattern in journalism. They hint at causation while having plausible deniability. Used to bother me too when I checked Yahoo Finance, every other day the market would be up/down "as" whatever happened that day that might have anything to do with the economy.
The thing I learn early in my career when I was working in finance was that research analysts are pretty useless. There are too many factors that go into why a stock goes up and down including unknown parties executing large trades for their corporate strategy. I used to joke the weatherman has better predictions because at least he has a satellite. There are simply too many parties trading to truly know.
My rule of thumb is that at least 50% of a financial headline is true. The up/down part is safe to assume as true (at least at the time of publication), and the “because of” part is almost always complete conjecture.
If I had to guess, a better explanation might be that there is going to be downward pressure and regular dips of the prices of cryptocurrencies at least til fall as the covid stimulus programs wind down making less cash available for speculation and as things reopen providing more other places to spend money.
The news business makes no money if there isn't any news. And financial news has a high value audience for advertisers, so there's huge incentives to create drama where it may not exist.
Much harder to get clicks if your headlines are accurate. This would have to be the headline on most days:
"Millions of People Bought/Sold for Thousands of Competing Reasons Again Today, Short Term Randomness Continues"
Not just financial reporting. "Portland burns as Trump golfs" type stories were super common as well over the past 4 years or even "Politician X does Y as covid cases rise" if media wanted to throw shade on Politician X last year
Seems unlikely that the FBI sitting on a way to break ECDSA would use it to recover $2 million. Much more likely that there was a tumbler or exchange that they were able to link to the attacker and use to seize funds. Maybe they even have backdoors in some popular crypto wallets.
Ah, it's very interesting if they were seized after having been transferred to a different wallet. That is going to reduce trust in Bitcoin considerably. It will be difficult to be sure that the coins you just bought are not subject to seizure by the authorities.
It’s well-known that money transfers are public in bitcoin and on/off ramp via virtual asset service providers like coinbase requires kyc and is subject to aml/ctf (anti money laundering and counter terrorism financing)
More likely typical law enforcement methods than technical: they seized equipment with key, accessed an account where the key was transmitted (like email or a phone), wire-tapped an insecure channel, or strong-armed a defendant into revealing it.
> This was about principle and demonstration of capability.
Still not worth it if a crpyto function has been broken. If it was because of the encrypted chat app honeypot they ran, it might be different, but even then, only if criminals are moving to something else.
If the US has the ability to quickly break a BTC wallet, it is a public demonstration of warfare that should act as a deterrent in other theaters of war.
> They also don't have the perpetrator.
I don’t think we have a full manifest of who was involved in the colonial attack or the personnel that have made up Darkside.
Even if we did, successful pressure on the perpetrators or their successors does not require holding the individuals directly.
I think it's that BTC is easier to get victims to buy without oversight. There are Bitcoin ATMs. Buying Bitcoin from an ATM is like sending money via Western Union, but without the teller there to spot someone looking like they're under duress.
As for anonymity on the receiving end: the BTC can always just be exchanged for a more anonymous currency like Monero. You might think that'd require the criminal to KYC to a [centralized] exchange, but there are decentralized exchanges (i.e. DEXes — on-chain, crypto-for-crypto exchanges with no support for fiat deposit/withdrawal), and these have no need for KYC, since they don't touch the real banking system.
Know Your Customer (KYC) — a compliance process required by Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws, involving getting a unique government-issued identification document or other similar "identity proof" from your customers, before allowing them to use your service.
Any service that takes deposits or processes payments in certain countries is required to follow those countries' KYC/AML regulations.
The actual AML laws are mostly about noticing when a given person has processed $10k or more through your service in a single day. But note that that's "person", not "account." You have to de-anonymize your accounts, in order to associate them with people, in order to obey the law.
The conventional KYC "compliance" measures — gathering ID documents et al — are actually not part of the law itself, but rather are industry best-practices for following the AML laws. The KYC process gives service-providers the information needed to restrict each person to having only a single account; and therefore allow service-providers to treat each account as a person under the letter of the AML laws.
I still don't believe the FBI actually seized the bitcoin. We have zero proof of anything.
We are just supposed to take the FBI on their word? There is a huge motivation for them to lie about seizing the BTC, in an effort to discourage other copycat crypto criminals.
1) These arent problems for ransomware hackers because they arent goals for ransomware hackers
2) even if these were goals for ransomware hackers these aren't problems either
It requires a special hubris to really think people that earn crypto want fiat. Just like people assume people that use Monero want clean bitcoin, its an absurdity that doesnt even consider that many just want and keep Monero. Its the same for fiat.
You would be more interested in discussing number 2 because I still say converting illicit funds to fiat isnt an unsolved or even difficult problem. But its so low on the list of priorities for this user story that its not really worth splitting hairs over. Ransomware hackers dont have an issue exchanging time for food and shelter, they are able to just accumulate and play in the crypto ecosystem which is what they really want to do already, with more. To many, its like someone stealing gold bars. Sure you go melt down an ingot or two eventually, but you’re really just hoarding the gold the sake of hoarding the gold. Crypto has the additional benefit of being internationally liquid for other digital assets and digital services instantly.
But this won’t be a 100% closed ecosystem still right? You pay rent to your landlord in crypto, and they pay their employee in crypto, but somewhere there will be someone exchanging it for Fiat down the chain. And that’s invisible risk (unlike say, transacting in cash with your landlord knowing it can’t be traced).
Then launder all your crypto because you dont know if someone thinks you are a hacker from 20 transactions ago trying to cash out
This of course makes your legal actions indistinguishable from hackers laundering their own crypto, shifting the methods away from probable cause to completely benign
Yeah the "follow the money" line from the FBI felt like a red herring. Yes you can follow the money through the addresses but it's not like they include routing numbers to tell you which bank manager to go convince to cooperate. Feels like Darkside got sloppy and left their private key unencrypted on their payment server which got seized/compromised.
True, but chanting that at every correlation you see is a great way to never learn from anything.
To be honest it's a bit hard to believe this reporting has nothing to do with the price dropping ~10%, given that one of BitCoin's big parts of its value prop is precisely supposed to be that governments can't do this.
Bitcoin says that whoever has the private key controls the funds. In this case, whoever was in custody before the FBI took the funds was seriously negligent in protecting their private key (which is not that hard to do).
Governments can simply take the private keys if they wish along with your computer. Come up with smart ways to avoid that (but I'll memorise the private key!) and they'll just lock you up instead.
In the case of coins moving through exchanges, they can simply take the coins instead by threatening the exchange.
In many other cases they can also catch you when you try to use the money by converting it into a currency that people actually use to transact like USD.
That it is "easy" to protect private keys is the theory, yes. If it turns out not to be an accurate reflection of reality, that's going to affect the value proposition of BitCoin.
As best I can tell, Bitcoin has moved more than [it has so far today, ~6%] on 42 days in the last year, and 38 days the year before that, considering open-to-open values.
10% daily moves happened four times in May: twice in each direction.
Statistically, we should consider it just a normal, unremarkable day for Bitcoin.
True but the cryptocurrency world doesn't seem to understand that. They're always tying events to price rises, and making proclamations about what will happen to the price in the future as a result.
That is true - it is, after all, entirely possible that the BTC price drops caused the Colonial ransom seizure. [1]
Perhaps people are correctly estimating that as BTC is likely to lose another use case for it (ransomware)[2], there is now less demand for it, thus resulting in the downward price pressure we've seen over the past few weeks.
Perhaps criminals are correctly predicting that 'their' BTC might be taken away from them, thus causing them to liquidate their positions, thus resulting in downward price pressure. [3]
[1] I am, of course, making a joke.
[2] The writing is on the wall, due to the government reaction to the Colonial hack.
[3] No, Monero is not a solution for them, because the FBI is not stupid. XMR:BTC is largely sideways. If ransomware switches to it, it's likely that exchanges transacting in privatecoins will be treated as international money launderers. https://coincodex.com/convert/monero/bitcoin/?amount=1
True. But the prices of most of the ALT coins are correlated with BTC, which has also caused them to go down too (in the same way they went up with it before May).
I wonder if the future push towards Proof-of-Stake away from Proof-of-Work will one day stop this happening.
It’s not, but it sets the precedent that the FBI will seize bitcoin without any kind of due process when it is able to recover proceeds from a criminal transaction
.
This jeopardizes the use of Bitcoin as a currency for cross-border criminal transactions which is a large if not majority share of its use case.
So it’s easy to see why its value went down — fewer criminals will want to use it.
>This jeopardizes the use of Bitcoin as a currency for cross-border criminal transactions which is a large if not majority share of its use case.
Do criminals seriously expect that bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is safe against the wallet being hacked? Hardware/cold wallets have been around for years, so this is more of an opsec issue than a technology issue.
Hell yeah they will, honestly it's about time we did some more aggressive offensive security operations.
But what does crypto have to do with criminals? Criminals just need to up their op sec game, they know that. BTC dropping is only related insofar as this stupid correlation is getting pushed hard in the media right now.
A possible causal factor is that much of the crypto world actually thinks BTC is private. It's not. It's the opposite: a 100% public fully replicated ledger.
I agree with others about correlation, and bitcoin has been on a wild ride for the last few months, but shines light on one of bitcoin's few use cases as a currency--crime--not being as good as people used to claim.
They are more than welcome to do it if I break any law but I have to say you I'm not. By the way they can seize funds from your or my bank account as well there is nothing special about "crypto" coins they are not outside the law code is not law.
Excuse my ignorance but, how would it show that? Gaining credentials to a wallet does not appear to me to show that the Ethereum proof of stake system is not secure.
