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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Bitcoin continues to be useless for organized crime due to the transparency and permanence of the blockchain . There is no way to cash out even if the transactions are anonymous and not tied to a person.

Just atomic swap to monero and back.

Coin tumblers. Not perfect, but scrambles the chain of custody.

The amount of research done beforehand by the actors in this case seems remarkably low.

It is worryingly low.

Trailer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4yzcg2rtMnI

Netflix made a documentary about the dorky crypto couple who stole 4 billions in Bitcoin. They couldn’t figure out in 6 years (hack in 2016, in custody in 2022) how to wash the wealth.

Washing that level of wealth is essentially impossible unless you've got Cartel or country-level infrastructure behind you. It's 'dog caught the milk truck' levels of issue for most people. Your most reasonable path would be to use mixers (and have to be third-party decentralized which are more rare than you'd think) and slowly chip it out and hope nobody unscrambles it since you then become a massive target for both the original owners of the funds and interested second parties of various levels of legitimacy and violence.

I think this is a bit of an oversimplification as somebody who works in the space, but definitely people outside of the space overexaggerate how easy it is to utilize for those activities.

It seems like the cashing out part is where people get caught

Depends how vigorous you are with it. There's plenty of ways of mixing if you take it slow and steady but if you've hit a 9-figure hack you're probably better off just taking the 10% bounty as 'clean money'

It would seem that is a bad idea because now you've admitted to it after going through with the crime . It's like writing a confession letter and hoping nothing happens. The pure white hat way is to just disclose privately and hope you get some remittance or there is a bounty program. most do

Enough crypto/defi exploits where you won't necessarily get that great a bounty from whitehat and whilst the money that you'd pull out isn't necessarily 'clean' as you'd want it to be it also isn't necessarily theft to do the exploit.

Like any bearer asset, it doesn't magically obviate the need to launder the source of funds. People will also ask questions if you show up to a bank with bars of gold and no explanation as to where they come from.

Even with privacycoins, it's accounting that gets you busted in the end. That's how they got Capone after all.

If the feds determined the coins were procured illegally, any attempt at obfuscation becomes laundering ,even before it gets to the cash-out phase.

Of course, but you have to find those first.

All the recent darknet busts I know of are either down to some human element flipping or stupid accounting from the bad guys. Like actually having similar amounts as inputs and outputs.

It's (almost) never fancy cryptographic acumen, just boring police work. Even Ross just got social engineered.

When you read about Ross he failed on so many levels. Just the most basic opsec. I guess it worked out in the end . Pardon + huge donation + stash. The vast majority of peopel in his situation will not be pardoned.

There's an interesting lesson in there about ideological commitment as prison insurance. I'm sure Nelson Mandela would agree. If Ross wasn't an agorist, he'd still be rotting in jail right now.

Even Ross just got social engineered.

Nah, Ross was straight up retarded and ordered fake ids from Canada to his actual home address

Seems like it works OK for organized crime based out of countries antagonistic to the West.

Said organised crime is getting away with it because it is 'patriotic' and not cooperating with foreign agents. The minute Russia would find some gangsters working for the CIA, that's the minute they'd get arrested in an excessively violent manner by the ministry of interior troops. (who, in Russia, operate attack helicopters, tanks and artillery)

Yeah but you always run the risk of being captured anyway. See what happened to El Chapo. There are no safe countries from the reach of the US anymore except perhaps North Korea.

Russia is crappier than the US or Mexico, but it's not that bad as to be NK.

There was that guy who bought a bunch of boxes of magic cards using bitcoin gained from some sort of criminal activity. The guy selling the magic cards was not a crypto-savvy guy. (And then the criminal sold the magic cards.)

I saw that. It's amazing how much MTG cards have appreciated over the past 25 years that the market can absorb such a large transaction. It's like an asset class in and of itself. someone should make a MTG card ETF or an ETF of MTG and Pokémon.

And set up an online exchange to trade it. Maybe they could call it MTGOX, has a nice ring to it. ;-)

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