Whatever other effect this has, it's likely to put bitcoin back in the mainstream news. "Has Satoshi come back from the dead?" "Who would waste a million dollars?" People love mystery and high stakes.
Not sure who actually profits from this, but I assume it would be someone holding a lot more than that and looking to offload.
EDIT: Deleted a mysterious appearance of the word "sometime" (...did Satoshi put it there?)
It could also be that the founds are somehow related to illegal activities and this is just a way to get rid of them. Remember how hard it was for the Bitfinex hackers to launder their Bitcoins.
This is pretty much a proof of burn, it proves that X person has no longer access to these coins.
How would this help that hypothetical person in any way? If the coins are stolen, then the victim will want the money back. They won't care if the "same" coins are given back or not. Money is fungible. If someone steals a $10 bill from you and burns it, are you going to forsake your claim to $10? I bet you'd even be happy to get two $5 bills back rather than nothing.
It proves that you destroyed X coins.
Example, with the Bitfinex hack, about 120k Bitcoins were stolen, but they were blacklisted and unspendable even on the darknet. So the hypothetical hacker could try to negotiate returning x percent of the coins if he is let go with the rest. Burning coins could prove that he means business, and that he could just burn the entire 120k Bitcoins.
There must be something going on behind the scenes.
I'm trying to see a way for burning the coins to be useful in some way, but I'm not yet seeing it in your scenario. If it were the case that there had been a theft, and the thief wanted to be able to spend a fraction of what they stole (instead of get it all blacklisted), wouldn't the deal involve sending the remaining fraction back to the original owners? If you steal something from me, I'm interested in getting (at least some fraction of) that thing back, not in you provably destroying some fraction of it.
It is pretty much a prisoners dilemma. If the coins are blacklisted, then both the Hacker and the victim are in a lose situation and it is a stalemate.
Now let's imagine the victim tells the hacker they are not willing to negotiate and hope that law enforcement will catch the hackers like they did in the Bitfinex case. The hacker could destroy some coins every X days to make it clear to the victim that this is not a good idea.
This is just a wild scenario. But had I been the Bitfinex hacker I would have done crazy things such as sending blacklisted coins in small amounts to many random addresses, those of exchanges, developers, non-profits, Satoshi Nakamoto etc.. Just to create chaos as it would have caused those people a lot of trouble and would have forced some kind of resolution.
FWIW, bitfinex was willing to buy the coins back on what they claimed was a no-fault basis and even put a significant amount of coins into third party escrow for that purpose.
Back in the early days of Bitcoin... Zhou-tong, after robbing his own business (Bitcoinica) blind, did something kind of like what you were suggesting -- raining down coins on random people and creating general chaos. I think it was more mania and panic rather than a well considered strategy.
I think in general you don't see stuff like that through a mix of (1) it's less easy than you think, and (2) thoughtful people don't become serious thieves in the first place, it's not worth it.
For this analogy to fit, the bank robbers would have to destroy (some of) the notes/coins/gold bars (that is, the stuff both parties care about), not execute people (whom the robbers don't care about but the other side do). Which would convince the other side not that the robbers are serious, but that they're idiots.
Well, if you don't have hostages, demonstrating that you're capable of destroying the entire bank vault if they don't let you walk out with half makes sense
For regular money, "the same coins" isn't usually meaningful. For bitcoin, it is perfectly possible to say yes, this is the same money, and those other coins in the same wallet are not the same.
Since we can track bitcoin perfectly, it's hard to argue people who have the exact stolen item shouldn't be required to return it.
Fungibility is just a social convention. Anything we can tell apart we can decide to treat non-fungibly, and we can tell bitcoin apart.
I specifically took the example of a (physical) $10 bill. You can definitely tell apart two different $10 bills. They have serial numbers, for example. They're different physical objects.
Sure. I said we can decide to treat things we can tell apart as non-fungible. I didn't say we had to.
If it's things we can't tell apart (say, liters of oil in the same tank), we are pretty much forced to treat them fungibly. I say pretty much, because there are such things as LIFO and FIFO accounting conventions - sometimes we do our damndest to tell apart things that can't really be told apart.
But if we can tell them apart, it's up to us. We have decided to treat money (incl. physical bills) as fungible in most contexts. With laws.
Even with laws there are limits: If someone wants to pay a debt to me, and offer to settle with a 200 NOK bill, it would be illegal for me to refuse, even if I knew this bill had been stolen from me earlier that night.
But if it was a $10 bill, or a bitcoin, it would be perfectly legal for me to refuse. With crypto tokens in general, there's to my knowledge no government on earth stopping me from declaring that I will take payment in bitcoin minted only on Thursdays.
No, the fungibility of money is law, established by legal precedent. Specifically the case of Crawfurd v The Royal Bank (1749).
> On 30 July 1748, an Edinburgh lawyer named Hew Crawfurd mailed two £20 notes to the merchant William Lang in Glasgow, but the letter was lost. Prior to sending them, Crawfurd had meticulously signed his name on the banknotes and recorded their serial numbers, so he notified the Bank of Scotland and advertised his predicament in several newspapers. One of the notes was never found, but the other note turned up at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Crawfurd requested the Royal Bank to open a multiplepoinding action with respect to the note, but the Bank refused. Thus he brought suit in the Court of Sessions against the Royal Bank.
> Both banks were alarmed by his action, as an adverse finding would subject banknotes to infirmities of title like any other property, which would threaten the idea of paper money as a common circulating currency. Despite their generally poor relations with each other at the time, they agreed to cooperate and jointly defend the case.
> No, the fungibility of money is law, established by legal precedent.
Laws ARE a kind of social convention. And to the degree that the fungibility of "money" is law, law also decides what counts as "money", and there's no reason why they (yes, they, not it - law is actually people) should let your crypto-token of choice count as money for legal fungibility purposes.
They purchased them on Binance, theoretically with a fully KYC'd account given that Binance tightly regulates large withdrawals (especially now after the DOJ coming after them).
People know who Satoshi is or was, in that it's the same Satoshi that invented Bitcoin. (But nobody knows who that is or was "in real life".)
But if an agency has access to that wallet, then any transactions would be visible to everybody. Activity on Satoshi's wallet after all this time would shake up the Bitcoin world pretty hard.
I don't know how sudden activity on this known-inactive wallet would accomplish any of those things.
BTC is trackable. How would the NSA use $41B when everyone in the world could see where and when it moved?
And if the Fed had it, why would they sit on it and not say anything? the whole point of the Fed is stability, and sitting on unstable currency -- which would get even move volatile if people found out about their hidden supply -- would be a waste of time.
re: who profits from this, got me thinking - even though $1m is a drop in the bucket of the market cap, could burning that amount of funds have any meaningful effect on the price? since the time of this transaction, prices have gone up 1.5% which is not huuuugely significant and causation != correlation
I think the hacked whale account makes most sense to me tho
Even assuming that this would increase the price by 5% (which did not happen and would be quite a stretch goal), the sender would have needed to trade in over 20 million USD just to break even. People have bet money on stupider ventures, sure, but the risk and required capital to even hope to make money make this explanation not likely in my eyes.
Not common with Bitcoin itself-- even if someone comes up with something that actually will move the price, it's hard for them to be the ones that profit from it.
The P&Ds are common with thinly traded premined coins.
The altcoins have done a fair job of sweeping people with zero scruples away from Bitcoin. I'd be quite surprised if this were someone trying to drive up the price of Bitcoin.
I've not been following Bitcoin news for a few years now but I seem to recall there were lots of reports about BTC "whales" making up a significant proportion of the overall wealth on BTC. And how they used their position to manipulate the market to some extent. A quick Google seems to back my assumptions too, eg https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/052014/why-b...
Now I'm not saying that the OPs theory about this being a pump and dump is likely correct. But I don't think it is any more speculative than the other ideas offered here (jilted ex / copy&paste error / testing code that mistakenly shipped / etc)
Inevitably when you see people talking about "whales" they end up linking to exchange wallets (which naturally experience activity that both leads and lags trade).
And they're also talking about parties controlling 1000 BTC levels... which, while an astounding amount of money, are still small compared to the markets.
I can't say it's impossible, but I'd rate most of the other speculation above it.
Then again, nothing stops someone from trying something that won't work...
The OPs point was this the "pump" part (ie get people talking about Bitcoin again). If their theory is true (and I'm not saying I believe it is), then the dump part wouldn't be transferring to another wallet, it would be selling their remaining Bitcoin.
If this is a pump and dump scheme (and that's a big "if") then they would need an order of magnitude more than 27BTC (ie the amount they sent to this wallet) for this to work.
Well, I'm speculating that the $1M is just a (massively expensive) gambit to get the public interested in bitcoin again and lead to a "pump". The "dump" would then involve the even larger amounts that the person in question would have to be holding (for this scheme to even remotely make sense).
Let's say you sit on ~2716.9 BTC. You have a scheme that'll cost you 26.9 BTC to shift the price. You "only" need the scheme to successfully increase the price of your remaining 2690 BTC by 1% to have recouped your cost. Any movement higher than that and you'll profit.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it's not unusual for pump-and-dump schemes to involve burning a lot of value to trigger the pump they're trying to profit off of. You need to treat the bit they're planning on dumping as separate from whatever capital they're prepared to invest to make the pump happen.
Doubtful. Almost any other wallet seems possible, but Satoshi's wallet isn't one that you would randomly have copied moments before making a million dollar transaction.
I think even the richest people on earth will take the time to double-check a million-dollar transaction.
For someone to have done this accidentally and not bothered to double-check, it seems to me they would need to have fat-fingered both the address and the amount. This person is typing with hams.
For people with say 10 billion dollars, losing a million is losing 1 / 10 000 of their wealth. It’s as if you have 10 000 dollars in savings and lose 1 dollar in the couch cushions.
Plus that wealth is generating more wealth. Logically, a multi-billionaire wouldn’t care.
That's nonsense, not only the "it's like 10/15$ for me and you" argument quite weak, because ordinary people tend to pay attention to the addresses they send money to (regardless of amount), but people don't get rich nor stay rich by not caring about their spending either.
With binance, you have to double check the withdraw address, especially for something large like this. I'm surprised their own processes didn't flag it.
You're obviously working under the assumption that the sender is someone for whom one more or one less MUSD makes any kind of difference to his everyday life.
I'd think these criminals must have a way to "properly" do money laundering without getting caught too easily, e.g. sending to an account they control that can't really be tracked down to a person, cashing out in a country with near zero regulation of cryptocurrency, then somehow getting real money out of it. It would be surprising if this isn't already an entire business out there.
+1, it's gotten pretty easy to do bitcoin tracing these days IIRC. there's definitely cash out methods but for this large of a sum, seems like it'd be difficult?
I wasn't suggesting they could pay to someone else. They could pay to their own address at no more risk than paying the genesis block address.
The risk to them comes when they try to spend the funds later. They'd always have the option of dumping them on something unconnected to them for bragging rights with relatively low marginal risk.
Wouldn't that hacker include some text in the transaction to prove who did it or send it to an address they control? How they can prove they are the ones that can brag?
This exactly. Whatever the motive, whomever fully realizes that this address is watched with a very fine tooth comb and simply isn't possible to go unnoticed.
Why the expenditure? Someone above basically said marketing -- marketing Bitcoin so headlines hit the masses and maybe get some sort of ball rolling again. I think it's safe to assume there is a larger plan in the works and whomever responsible has played their hand and now hopes the cards fall as they projected, for whatever ends.
He may be convinced that wherever the this Bitcoin will be tracked wherever it goes. And confiscated if it ever reaches a centralized exchange. (Due to pressure from law enforcement, the whale and even Binance)
Unfort we have somewhat replaced "password" with "phone access" + pass code for majority of cases since 2FA is really just "phone (password manager) or password" + "phone (sms or one time token app)".
Block 824513 was mined on Jan 5, 2024 7:00 PM UTC [1]
Block 0 was mined on Jan 3, 2009 6:15 PM UTC [2]
Delta is almost exactly 15 years.
Someone who is grateful for Bitcoin celebrates by provably and forever shrinking the overall supply by BTC 26.9 (coinbase of block 0, the addie the coins were sent to, is unspendable by design) thereby making every other Bitcoins out there a tiny bit more valuable.
[EDIT]: as nullc correctly pointed out somewhere else in this thread, these BTC 26.9 actually can be spent if you happen to have the private key to block 0 (Satoshi, assuming he's still alive, would).
Only the coinbase (the block reward) of block 0 can't be spent by design.
So this now looks like a "thank you Satoshi on Bitcoin's 15th" and not a provable way to shrink the supply.
BTW, beyond mass media claims, the top Satoshi "archeologist" is Sergio Lerner, on a series of articles that go deep (in the hacker sense) [1] you can see the list on his blog but some examples are: "A New Mystery in Patoshi Timestamps" (2020) [2] and "The Patoshi Mining Machine" [3]. Many previous articles recommended.
There is an speculation that Satoshi himself is "just" dead.
I'm pretty certain Satoshi's identity is known, although not publicly stated and/or confirmed by anyone. I believe a handful of the early developers had very strong suspicion as to who was behind the name, but never pursued a confirmation of it.
My money is on Len [1]. The sheer number of coincidences, crossing of rare skill sets and interests, time, place, penchant of pseudo anonymously publishing things and happened to take his own life <2 months after Satoshi's final gloom-filled message, "I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future".
Great twist, as someone who knows Sergio since elementary school he was always perfectly capable of being him but from my knowledge of other details I don't think so. Just an opinion.
BTW2: adding a little bit of serendipity to this Sunday I came up with this repository [1] which seems very dangerous and fishy. It says that "34 000 Satoshi Nakamoto wallets with pubkeys (50 BTC each other)" but the download points to a .zip with an .exe. In GitHub you can denounce people but do you suggest to investigate the .exe before right? Seems like a good, and probably simple, reversing play.
On the context of Satoshi's public keys, you cannot (like some other blockchains) get his/her/their public keys from the address.
Yes, I removed it but I assume someone could check that collaborative here since I put the warning/warning/warning beforehand.
It would be great if you add to your comment the best way to act in this case? I could research the potential malware but I assume that GitHub has some tooling/resources to quickly research it? It is like the automatic scanning in Gmail. If it is an obvious malware it could be detected with existing tools. You can also run it in a very isolated VM and/or computer and see what happens behind the scene in a black box manner.
BTW3: I played with our AI friends to do an image of this conversation [1].
A lot of cryptostealer malware is bespoke and won't get caught by scanners, but you could start by dropping it into virustotal.
Particularly anything that looks like wallet crackers is frequently full of malware-- as I assume people feel less worry of arrest and less moral concern with robbing other (wanna-be) thieves.
From my experience on bitcointalk ... It's often hard to prove it's malware, as a popular technique is to make the software phone home for some quasi legitimate looking purpose and then have an RCE vulnerability in the phone home interface.
It may even be the same guy that keeps making new trojans that work this way over and over again.
Virustotal doesn't give any alert [1]. Good opportunity to analyze it by myself.
Wait! It is not clear that Virustotal analyzes ZIPs [2]. When I upload the EXE within, it gives different results but no virus alert [3]. The weird thing is that [1] result in "clean" status over the antiviruses tested while [3] results on "Undetected".
Many of us have to work for decades to gather this amount of money, if even possible. Not even taking in account that we need to spend most of it to go through this amount of time.
Average mid level programmer in our country will have to work 190+ years for this amount of money.
[edit]
Now, I think I should focus on other things. Average politicians can earn (/s) 50x more money in 5 years than what average programer earns in 190+ years.
Personally, I like the Singaporean model where they pay their politicians a lot of money in salaries. It seems like such an obvious way to get higher quality talent with less corruption. I vaguely recall that the US president makes 1/4 what George Washington made in salary (with inflation). Congresspersons and Senators should be paid well for their service, given the importance of their job.
I'm of the opinion that politicians above a certain level (in the UK: prime minister, members of Parliament and maybe mayors) should just get a permenant annuity for the rest of their lives on the condition that they can't make money from anything else, ever. No stocks, no "speaking engagements" or do nothing bribery jobs. It would be expensive yes, but cheaper than the cost of corruption. Maybe have the value of the annuity be based of rank, MP gets 300k/y and PM gets 500k/y.
Appreciate the British perspective. I don’t think that would work in the US; the people at the top are the rainmakers for their parties, and the party will take care of them somehow. Rather I think it’s more interesting in a knowledge economy to use the money printer to move talented people into public service who otherwise would’ve wasted their lives in the private sector positioning themselves as close as possible to the money printer (while also setting a high floor price for their services).
Mostly insider trading. Real estate and stocks especially. For long sitting politicians, they usually do this through family members.
Some also clean up by taking huge speaking fees for giving speeches, but only those at the top with heavy celebrity power. Can you usually pull this one off.
Guessing insider trading and speaking fees pale in comparison to brokering power through access and horse trading. As a simple example, LBJ got rich by getting radio/TV licenses and opening stations.
Wow, not even sure how to answer to that, but insider trading is illegal. So you either implying that they are all crooks, or that they could do that if they wanted but in the latter case that doesn't answer the question of how they make their money.
I thought it was common knowledge that politicians are crooks. There's even information out there on politicians trading patterns, and how they very often seem to buy or sell certain stock right before a huge news affecting that stock comes out.
Hate to break it to you — and hate even more to point you at a link behind a paywall — but legislators (and especially their family) indirectly trading on what they learn in their “work” isn’t, legally speaking, insider trading, and while it is now technically illegal getting members of Congress on either side to effectively police their own behavior has proven (shockingly) ineffective.
ya, but they aren't really making money insider trading. at least in aggregate. full analysis of their trades usually show an underperforming portfolio, despite grandiose articles that claim the opposite, which just cherry pick a few successful trades and ignore the bad and mediocre ones. It's mostly power brokering and it's the same way rich people and their children get and stay rich. Money flows to those with money because people want to buy influence and power.
That’s not what the linked story says. It says that the top case beat the market by 200% and that it was through an Nvidia position purchased 4 years ago. The Congress person in question hasn’t made a single trade in the last 3 years.
The 10th best position was 63% better than the s&p. That’s just a touch better than keeping your money in qqq.
There might be evidence of congressional insider trading but the bare numbers aren’t it. In a population of 540 people you’d probably find similar outliers to what that article outlines.
Should have been more precise, the top position got returns of 10X (1000%) the market’s index return, meaning that congressperson “earned” $10 for every $1 the market gained, while the worst position got returns of 2X (200%) or $2 for every $1.
The key thing is that of 100 trading members of Congress -of which not one (I believe) is a professional, full-time stock trader — 33% beat the SPY, and that this has been consistently true… the average professional, full-time trader can’t consistently do that.
You might not see evidence of fire, but I definitely see evidence of smoke.
Your linked article does not say that either. If you have some other source please link it.
But more importantly your understanding of how trading is judged is flawed. It is trivial to find a population of traders that includes 33% of them that beat the market last year. In fact you can do so going back every year through time.
What is hard (but not impossible) is to find a single trader who has done that consistently for many years. That’s because beating the market isn’t interesting, it’s beating it on a risk adjusted basis which is.
In fact your linked article hints at this. The most active traders in Congress _under_ performed the markets.
There simply isn’t evidence in aggregate that Congress people get market advantage through information only they have.
Yes, you can cherry-pick a population that doesn’t have insider information where 33% beat the market in any given year, but you wouldn’t expect that same population to consistently beat the market, year over year. In fact the whole argument for index funds is that, in aggregate, no one, including professional traders or anyone else without unfair market advantage, consistently and reliably beats the market itself over the long run. But it seems here’s a population that both inarguably has insider information and where 33% does consistently beat the market over and over, year after year.
Lack of evidence also simply isn’t particularly relevant, as the point isn’t to convict the legislator — who has the power to ensure such evidence isn’t available, and even if it were that it wouldn’t represent a crime, and even if it did that they wouldn’t be punished, etc — but instead to convince the voter to consider whether or not their vote should go to someone who disagrees with the notion that Caesar must be beyond reproach.
Your argument contains a pretty serious logic flaw. You are taking the top line argument (100 traders 33% beat the market, congress consistently beats the market, thus its indicative of an information advantage). But look at the underlying data. There are very few congress people that beat the market in 2023 and in 2022. I counted 5 members who beat the S&P in both years. Of those 3 have no trades, so were just marking existing positions that happened to be better than the market including the previously mentioned NVDIA stock. A 4th has 1 trade total. The final one is Ron Blumenthal. He is an active trader but also one of the richest men in politics. He made his money the old fashioned way, he married rich.
Every other congress person would have been better off in an index fund as expected. Its easy to write dramatic headlines about Congress people trading, and there are very good reasons that they shouldn't (it influencing their votes is top of that) but there is very little evidence of any significant information advantage in the trading positions or returns of congress people.
the inside trading is a way to mislead useful idiots. you're just eating too many tiktoks about senators month old trading reports.
they get rich the old way, literal bags of money. you cannot win a big construction job without bags of money that go from the engineer to the govt inspector, then the inspector to the mayor, then to the governor. if you did up anything paid by tax, you will find that foundations are always missing several meters of concrete that are in the plan and paid for.
It's as if writing "not a bribe" on a check passes muster. But we've also got superPACs, revolving door regulatory capture, legally exempted insider trading... Corruption is mainstream.
Because no sane person believes that for instance Barrack Obama speech at some random finance gathering is worth a million dollars to pay for. There is no tangible value in such a person saying some random platitudes for a few minutes. Especially when he is not in the office anymore. It's just clever, deferred payment for the favors he did when he was still in power. How can't you see for what it truly is??
Why bother with the speaking? Just write it down as consulting and mail him a check. Or put him on the board and mail him a check. Or send him Venmo and say it's for "rent". There are tons of way to give someone money that doesn't involve them speaking. If it were about giving him the money, far less visible alternatives exist,
so it's really about the speaking.
Look, there's some amount of money that's you're willing to spend on hearing someone you want to listen to speak/perform. Assuming you've ever gone to a concert or a show, that's true, so the rest is down to details. Would you pay $1 to watch former President Obama speak? $2? What's the cost of a dollar to you? If you're willing to spend $2 to see former President Obama speak, why wouldn't your rich friend spend $2, or their friend $4? If someone's got enough money that they're willing to pay a million dollars to hear someone speak, it's more a reflection on how much money they have and how little it means to them than anything else.
If I had a million dollars I'd spend it on other things but if I had a hundred million dollars, I'd totally spend a million to hear a former president speak, or have Taylor Swift play my birthday party.
Rich people spend their money differently than poor people, or are you too poor to see that?
You are powerful because you _have to_ pay a _former_ president to be at your venue? It screams the opposite, actually. Because if you were really powerful you wouldn't need to pay for that. And it would be a sitting president, not the former one with no actual power anymore.
There is nothing special about most rich/powerful people (there are those that are genuinely exceptional of course and built a fortune because of that), they want the same things as "normal" people just on a different level.
Why does some generic reality TV celebrity or "influencer" make money from showing up at a party or turning on some Xmas lights? Surely no one really cares, there are 1000s of reality TV stars. But, it turns out some people do care, so cookie-cutter reality TV celebrity gets paid to turn up.
In "high net worth" (for want of a better term) social circles ex-Presidents are the reality TV celebrities, and the people who want them to turn up are rich, so they get paid a lot for the equivalent of turning on the Xmas lights.
I suspect its not really about the speech, it's about having them in the same room and giving your guests the chance at a face-to-face meeting.
Of course Obama may be more discerning with which events he attends, but the demand for people like him to turn up is certainly real.
If you are handsome you don't need to pay chicks cash for them to shop up to the dinner. Analogously if you have a close relation with a president that you could use to your advantage you don't have to pay him to show up. And if you have to pay him to show up how much of a real influence do you really have over him? How difficult is it to understand such a simple concept?
You're missing the explanation of how the non-political celebs also charging fees in the >$100k bracket "looked after" anyone.
If celebrity speakers aren't worth anywhere near that, what are banks and multinationals and industry events bribing ex-sports coaches and actors for?
And of course even the politicians get paid by a lot of entities that aren't obvious beneficiaries. Boris Johnson might be as sleazy as former PMs get, but I'm really struggling to understand any quid pro quo with the Indian newspaper or Portuguese TV channel that both paid him north of $250k for a single keynote, and I don't think he ever had much influence on insurance brokers in Colorado either
To be fair, a former PM lends a bit more credibility to an event than some random backbencher, and so you can expect that the market value of having a PM speaking at your event would be quite high.
Regardless, on those examples you gave, I don't think it was a Portuguese TV channel, I think it was a global CNN summit which happened in Lisbon (but please correct me if I'm wrong).
Also, The Hindustan Times (which is the Indian newspaper I think you're referring to) is also not exactly a small media outlet with a circulation more than double that of the Times of London (based on the most recent numbers for The Times in 2020).
Additionally, a significant number of British citizens have family ties with India, and are likely to continue to follow English language news in India, so it's not simply 'some foreign newspaper'.
I'm not disputing the fact Johnson can draw crowds to overseas media companies or that theyre big enough to afford to pay him, I'm disputing the insinuation of the exact opposite (i.e there's no reason to pay him the big bucks except bribery). From the point of view of there being no UK policy decisions the Hindustan Times' Indian media empire could feasibly have been trying to buy an ex-PM for, it's absolutely "some foreign newspaper". Its not that politicians are incorruptible, it's that people are absolutely willing to spend that much on them for non-corrupt reasons.
Some random backbencher isn't getting Johnson or Clinton sized speaking fees.
Except it's well known that there's a 'revolving door' for politicians, especially with the press. Even if there's no reason to SPECIFICALLY overpay Johnson, inflated speaking fees for former politicians helps to keep the door well greased and spinning freely.
Johnson himself started his career as a journalist.
And it's well-known celebrity speakers like Becks and BoJo are compensated very highly for speaking at events organised by entities that have nothing to gain from bribing them. This doesn't help those entities pay off their local regulators in any way; it's simply the market price they're willing to pay for the actual speech.
I'm well aware of Boris' journalistic career; I've even read some of his waffle. You share his flair for insinuation and missing the point so I wish you good luck with your own campaign to be PM ;-)
Sure, loads of quid pro quo in the entertainment industry, ask any lady who ever auditioned for Harvey Weinstein. Never denied it. What does that have to do with banks and boring corporations paying six figure speaking fees to entertainers though?
Sheesh.... almost like you don't have any arguments for what Colorado brokers have to thank a former British PM for, never mind what favours Goldman Sachs got from David Beckham or LL Cool J other than a clearly very expensive speech
You're not thinking like a hacker at all if you can't concoct theoretical ways that rich and powerful people might find themselves unexpectedly interconnected, and able to non-obviously do each other favors - perhaps even in round-robin fashion at times.
Time is a concept of human design to demarcate wealth into units to be sold to the poor through the value exchange of labor.
You’re welcome, I’m not saying you don’t need money to participate in the experience of being a human. But there is more power in our belief in their unit (as this particular experience exposes about one store of value…. It certainly says about another.
A very similar thing used to happen with people accidentally using a QR code linking to a popular blog post or something explaining QR codes ("PLEASE INSERT QR CODE HERE --ed.").
Somewhat hilariously, even Google's (discontinued) Titan security key had this type of blunder in its Bluetooth software: It was using the example key from the Bluetooth specifications for all keys, making them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks [1].
Shared security parameters work just fine for some applications; we use them all the time in ECC, for example. Obviously avoiding them is preferable, but isn't always possible. But importantly, using shared parameters is required by some protocols.
On the other hand, using somebody else's URL, email address etc. or symmetric encryption key by mistake and assuming it'll work for you as well is just that: A mistake.
It's not unheard of for funds to be missent to an address that was in the senders clipboard for some other reason, though the amount is more remarkable.
It's also not particularly remarkable to send small amounts to that address-- its been done many times-- and it's not unheard of for people to make errors in the amounts they pay.
Worth sticking these here, for ease of reading on mobile if nothing else
> This could possibly have some connection to my involuntary hobby-horse.
> Recent leaked emails[1] show that Calvin Ayre-- the billionaire rube that has been funding Craig Wright's litigation-- believes that Wright actually controls early addresses in the blockchain, consistent with Wright's initial claims but contradicting Wright's more recent claims in court (that he "stomped the hard drives"). Calvin believes Wright can only win the lawsuit against Bitcoin devs by using these early keys and has been pressuring Wright to do so. I'd agree that at this point it would be his only path to even have a chance of winning, and even that would be far from certian given the extraordinary level of obvious forgeries.
> On December 20th the UK courts increased the security Wright owes the Bitcoin devs for trial from £100k to £900k. The remaining amount not already paid was due today. (We won't know for a few days if the payment to the court cleared). At the time of the transfer 26.91679286 was worth about £920k.
> Up thread it's noted that the source of the funds has heavy BRC-20 activity and I've been told that Ayre has been significantly funding BRC-20 activity.
> I wouldn't expect Wright to make the payment out of funds newly received from Ayre, but rather to make them out of float used to pay his legal representation going forward, and then get a top-up payment from Ayre. Wouldn't it be funny if Ayre paid Satoshi's address as part of an effort to force Wright to use it? It would be clever on his part: If he believes Wright will lose unless he uses the address then funding him via an address he can't use won't make things worse and it might save Ayre money if Wright's inability to pay terminates the case early. It would be a genuinely good idea, given Ayre's beliefs. (a better idea would be to wake up and stop being ripped off, but that would have happened long ago if it were going to happen)
> Another related explanation is that someone may have set this address as their primary address on a service, either as a joke or because they were LARPing as Satoshi-- and then they either accidentally withdrew to it or got kicked off the platform and automatically had their funds sent there. Who do we know LARPs as Satoshi and may have needed to access another 26.9-ish Bitcoin today?? Tongue
> History may not repeat but it does rhyme. During the large ATO investigation into Wright, Wright sent some amount of bitcoin equal to his tax-ID to some high value address he was (falsely) claiming to own-- so he could then point to his tax ID on the blockexplorer page as evidence that he owned the address. The tax office didn't fall for it, but I could easily see some people falling for it. 26.9 BTC is a lot of money but relative to the amount Wright is spending on litigation it's not that substantial, it wouldn't be impossible for that manic to think he could get some benefit in court by throwing coins away at Satoshi's address.
> All in all it's probably more likely that someone had the genesis address in their clipboard for some reason, but I wouldn't find any of the above too shocking and they are fun to consider.
I doubt this was accident. There are plausible reasons someone might want to burn crypto. Smart contracts often send coins to 0x0 to destroy them for a variety of reasons. On Ethereum the 0x0 address holds many millions in ETH and various other assets; it's built into the design of some tokens to make deflationary assets.
Not saying that it will work. Just that somebody thinks it will.
I watched somebody loose a fortune when the covid supply chain shock was first predictable. He got killed on the timing. The rationality of markets is highly overrated. And this is far from rational.
No it isn't. The 50 bitcoin created by block zero are unspendable (because by intention or error the software never passed block 0 through the validation logic that would enter those coins into required data structures).
But any other payment made to that address/pubkey are perfectly spendable by whomever has the matching private key.
Though that misunderstanding is somewhat common, so it's not impossible that the payee believed that they were sending the coins to an unspendable address.
Mostly because I think that the person(s) behind the name just plain lost the wallet at some point.
There's also the myth and legend of The Satoshi Wallet. People have software checking it automatically and _any_ transfers out would be stuff of legends immediately. Any major transfers would cause panic - the founder is leaving, what's happening?!
This is the absolute of virtuality - everything is letters and numbers on a screen, but you still don’t have any spoon, Neo, because there is no spoon at all.
Yep, fingers are fat for sure, but the sense is different, it's a kind of fat greasy meat fingers.
It's pretty much a rounding error even just compared to the amounts he's spent suing volunteer open source developers.
My far out speculation post notes that the amount is close to the amount of additional security he was required to put up in one of his lawsuits against me on the same date as the transaction.
How easy is it to fat finger a million dollar transaction like this?
Let’s say somebody had Satoshi’s wallet address on their clipboard, tried to copy their own, failed, Satoshi’s was still on the clipboard, then they proceeded with the transaction.
Wouldn’t they at least look at the first few and last few chars of the address before hitting submit?
Also this transaction seems to have been sent out at 9am GMT.
> Wouldn’t they at least look at the first few and last few chars of the address before hitting submit?
The addresses 'look' like line noise, and usually one looks a lot like another. Should they have compared carefully, especially considering the value? Sure. But errors happen.
A good workflow for high value transactions lets you preform the transaction and pass it around for validation before signing it (or after signing it but before sending it)-- but virtually no wallets enable such a workflow. So, sadly, many high value transactions are handled without meaningful review.
Other ways it could happen due to error:
Perhaps someone intended to send 26.9 BTC to "Genesis Trading" and they tasked the most unfortunate of interns to carry it out. They googled "Genesis wallet address", and the google blurb for that query gives _this address_ (I checked).
Or...
A party intended to send a test transaction to that address with a tiny amount (there are many such payments). But they are using some awful tool that makes them manually manage the payment, change, and fees amounts and they manage to pay the amount that should have been change to the destination and send the amount they intended to pay as fees. (The transaction has no change)
Or,
Imagine a backend system is pulling addresses out of a database which has them in the same order they're in the blockchain. Unlike a bitcoin node, this system indexes the genesis block so the very first address in it is this address. In that environment multiple failure modes could result in selecting this address. I don't think this one is that credible because indexing addresses by observation in the chain doesn't make a lot of sense for sending.
> A party intended to send a test transaction to that address with a tiny amount (there are many such payments). But they are using some awful tool that makes them manually manage the payment, change, and fees amounts and they manage to pay the amount that should have been change to the destination and send the amount they intended to pay as fees. (The transaction has no change)
Hehe, reminds me of the Fat finger trade when a stock trader wanted to buy 100,000 units, but there was a built in multiplier (factor 1000) in his trading tool that resulted in a 100,000,000 units order worth a whopping $10.8bn. But that error only created a damage of $300,000 for the bank.
Now they instead gave the opportunity for other bitcoin holders to do good with the /dev/null'ed coins.
It's like giving up quota in a shared storage system for all others (in proportion to their quotas). And not like e.g. throwing away food or destructing buildings.
But the point is that you can do far more good by sending the money to some of the people who need it most, those in the lowest economic positions.
Rather than effectively sending it to the "average" Bitcoin user, which is definitely not in the lowest economic position -- and whatever the average Bitcoin holder spends on charity, it's only a small percent.
This is why Bill Gates spends his money on the Gates Foundation where it's designed to help those who need it most, rather than lighting all his money on fire so that the deflationary impact will help everyone in proportion to their savings.
By the standard that someone would need it more, vast majority of consumer spending is a lot more wasteful than just burning money.
I don't think it's clear whether the world would have been better or worse off if Gates would have just burned (or preferably /dev/null'ed) all his money.
> By the standard that someone would need it more, vast majority of consumer spending is a lot more wasteful than just burning money.
No, because burning money is simply deflation, and existing money will continue to follow the same patterns of consumer spending.
The idea that consumer spending is worse than burning money doesn't make any sense -- they're the same.
That's the whole point of why targeted giving to charity is better. That's why the Gates Foundation is a million times better than burning money. The Gates Foudation isn't going to "consumer spending" -- it's helping those most in need, like people who would die from malaria otherwise.
Burning money is same as having cash that you never spend. Never eating those extra calories or burning those extra gallons. Calories or gallons somebody else could use if needed, or that could be left to ground if not needed. Sounds almost the opposite to waste to me.
Gates (Foundation) allocates labor and material resources with its money. If it didn't, that labor and material resources would be allocated differently. E.g. central banks could print equivalent amount of money and it could be spent through governments to let's say malaria aid.
Money isn't a resource. Spending money dictates how resources are allocated. Assuming Gates Foundation is million times better than burning money assumes that Gates is million times better allocating resources than "non-Gates" would be.
I'm sure Gates isn't a million times better at this. I'm not sure at all he's even better than "non-Gates".
I am sure that no democratically unaccountable person should have that much power over how resources are allocated.
> Assuming Gates Foundation is million times better than burning money assumes that Gates is million times better allocating resources than "non-Gates" would be. I'm sure Gates isn't a million times better at this. I'm not sure at all he's even better than "non-Gates".
But I think it's actually pretty clear that it is a million times better. I think it's extremely clear that saving somebody's life, who would otherwise have been killed by malaria, is a million times better than somebody eating a nicer meal at a restaurant, or buying a nicer chair, or whatever.
Yes, governments could be funding more malaria aid but they haven't been. The point is that the Gates foundation identifies areas where there hasn't been enough help and goes and provides that.
I honestly am pretty blown away by your assertion that you're not even sure whether the Gates Foundation does any good at all. Your logic seems to question whether charities do anything at all and whether they should even exist, and I don't think you're going to find a lot of people on your side there.
> But I think it's actually pretty clear that it is a million times better. I think it's extremely clear that saving somebody's life, who would otherwise have been killed by malaria, is a million times better than somebody eating a nicer meal at a restaurant, or buying a nicer chair, or whatever.
I agree that society and resource allocation should be structured towards such that so much of it doesn't go to this kind of pointless crap. Heavily progressive taxation for all income and international redistribution would be a good start. But people seem to care more about their chairs than poor people suffering.
> I honestly am pretty blown away by your assertion that you're not even sure whether the Gates Foundation does any good at all. Your logic seems to question whether charities do anything at all and whether they should even exist, and I don't think you're going to find a lot of people on your side there.
Gates Foundation probably does some good. But so do e.g. UNICEF, WHO, public universities etc.
In general I find that, at least large scale, charity is a clear sign of a failed economic system. And promoting more charity tends to make the systemic problems worse.
I may be in the minority, but I'm definitely not alone in this. Philantrophy is oligarchy.
Maybe the transactor didn't deem that they should have the power to decide what's "a lot more good"?
There are a lot of "charities" that IMHO do mostly "bad". Also charity itself is problematic: should those with money get to decide how and what problems are focused on?
All charities do if you open a Fidelity Charitable account and fund it with Bitcoin. :)
In the US it is tax adventitious to donate appreciated assets, including Bitcoin. (or even especially bitcoin as few other assets have appreciated as much)
It's often not highly promoted-- usually posed on an 'other ways to give' catch-all as it appears to have a slightly negative effect on conversion rates (I've heard there is some evidence that accepting bitcoin sends prospective donors off on a rabbit hole of learning about Bitcoin).
Regardless what your views on Bitcoin are, accepting donations of appreciated assets just makes a lot of sense from a tax optimization perspective: The donor gets a write-off of the current market value, while the (nonprofit) charity can sell the appreciated assets without incurring capital gains or income tax.
At least that’s the case for stock donations in the US.
If you burn currency it's not wasted, it deflates the remaining currency in proportion, so in effect it's gifting to other holders. Assuming it's never used after this.
My theory its a big "thank you" - Its actually not that stupid or weird if the sender does not care about the money. Maybe an early bitcoin adopter that hodled, and is now a multi-millionaire. If I was that person, I would feel a need to say "thank you" to the person that made this possible. If Satoshi is alive - no matter if he can access the wallet or not, he definitely would see this a thank you and a way of appreciation. If he is dead, well, at last the public can see that there are people that cleary valued his work - something like a monument. Plus, by burning the bitcoin, value should increase for everyone hodling, so a shout-out to the peers.
And yes, one could argue why not give away this incredible amount of money to charity. But then I ask myself why do I go out to a restaurant and order ribeye steak and an IPA on Saturday, instead of having spaghetti at home and give the 50$ to the next homeless person.
Plot twist: Satoshi sends the money back from the wallet (or to charity) to express disagreement as he is not owed a thank you. Boy that would be a funny day if that happened.
The most likely explanation is that this is a sacrifice (from Merriam-Webster: “to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy especially for an ideal, belief, or end).
Idealists will have an easier time understanding what motivates such actions.
You have to be a special kind of nihilistic idealist to do this. Instead of actually making a similar “sacrifice” to accomplish something at least marginally useful..
For the KLF being a dada/situationist act came first, and making techno came a distant second. It wasn't a completely random unexpected gesture, like the one in the OP.
Under the standard assumption that those coins will not reenter circulation, this act made everyone elses bitcoins very slightly more valuable.
If that were the sender's goal it perhaps could have better been accomplished by provably burning the coins instead. So I'm dubious of that. I think it's either an accident or a publicity stunt or a very bizarre sideeffect of some deep bitcoin inside baseball.
"Wallet" is kind of the wrong term to use. The address is associated with the genesis block (block 0) and is unspendable per the consensus rules. (edit: I'm wrong on that last point, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block)
No it isn't. The 50 bitcoin created by block zero are unspendable (because by intention or error the software never passed block 0 through the validation logic that would enter those coins into required data structures).
But any other payment made to that address/pubkey are perfectly spendable by whomever has the matching private key.
Though that misunderstanding is somewhat common, so it's not impossible that the payee believed that they were sending the coins to an unspendable address.
Dead wallet means the private key to it is likely lost so nobody has access to it. Though there's always a chance someone actually still has it, so you can never say with certainty that a wallet is dead.
As for supply limitation, the current market cap of BTC is USD 860B, so this is 0.0001%.
> What means dead wallet? Might it be artificial supply limitation?
There are a number of addies with Bitcoins stored on them that are extremely unlikely (probability so tiny it's just zero for all intents and purposes) to be accessible:
This one for example (with a current balance of around $1.2k):
I don't think your second question makes sense. (Overall BTC supply? 1 million is a microscopic fraction of what's in circulation. 1 billion would be a little bit more interesting)
What if Satoshi is alive and well; is actually a person and not some government agency;and wants this deposit to be a show of good Faith that BTC is it's finally becoming the new third leg of currency The digital gold that backs all crypto?
Is bitcoin still a thing? Is the fad over already? Has anyone found any use for it except making money exploiting people's greed with the promise that you will get rich just buying a digital token?
Yes, anyone who is rich and want an asset that can't be taken from them by goverment. Apparently also people in countries without easy access to bank accounts.
Not sure who actually profits from this, but I assume it would be someone holding a lot more than that and looking to offload.
EDIT: Deleted a mysterious appearance of the word "sometime" (...did Satoshi put it there?)