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> They just don't want the public to have bitcoins.

It's a bit too late for that, given that there are 3.2 million online bitcoin wallets between just the two largest services (Coinbase.com and Blockchain.info), and about 150,000 unique bitcoin addresses are used daily ( https://blockchain.info/charts... ) Addresses are not equal to users, they hold some number of bitcoins each. Wallets hold the private keys that control addresses, and you can have multiples, but the point is lots of people already have access, and it's moving around a fair amount.

> So, how does this work?

Internally, the bitcoin software and the Block Chain ledger track integer numbers of "satoshi", the smallest unit in the system. One bitcoin is equal to 100 million satoshi, in the same way USD $1 million is equal to 100 million pennies. Back when one bitcoin was worth a few dollars, it was convenient to use that unit. Now the developers are considering jumping to a coin unit that is 100 satoshi (a millionth of a bitcoin), since dealing with fractions appears to be hard for people.

> I'd thought it was an atomic unit,

I'm afraid that's a common, but wrong impression. Satoshi are the atomic unit, i.e. the smallest unit tracked in the software and ledger.

> How do you spend a fraction of a bitcoin?

Type in the amount into the wallet software of your choice. Here, watch transactions go by: https://blockchain.info/

> Are there bitpennies?

Not with that name. Most people use bitcoins (BTC), millibitcoins (mBTC), microbitcoins (uBTC) and satoshi as units, depending on what they are dealing with.

When I see how much hardware and electricity is being wasted on these various mining processes, I can only shake my head.

I wonder if you have any idea what you are shaking you head at. Everyone who claims to be concerned about bitcoin power consumption never actually says what it is. I suspect they have never bothered to do the calculation.

It isn't hard. The mining network currently does roughly 38e15 Hashes/second. An ASIC miner (if you aren't using one of these the returns are lower than the power bills) does around 1e9 Hashes/Joule.. So the power consumption of the mining network is 38e6 Joules/second, or 38MWatts.

The world's power consumption is about 143,851 TW Hours for 2008, which works out at an average power consumption of 16,421 TWatts. From that we can deduce:

Bitcoin uses 0.0002% of the worlds energy.

The stakes are high and people will play any game to get a piece of this action.

The MT.GOX theft of 850,000 Bitcoins is 7% of the approximately 12,000,000 [1] in circulation. To put the impact of this into perspective consider that the top-50 largest holding companies have assets totaling $15,681,169,806 in thousands of dollars. Seven percent of this total is $1,097,681,886 which equates to someone stealing all of the assets for Goldman Sachs Group and Capitol One Financial Corp [2].

If this were to happen in the 'traditional' currency market the entire system would be in dire straights. Members of the Bitcoin foundation are trying to minimize the damage and dismiss this as 'bad actor' with poor security. Could it be that this is the first of major faults that will shutter this emerging virtual currency?


[1] - https://blockchain.info/charts...
[2] - https://www.ffiec.gov/nicpubwe...

The MT.GOX theft of 850,000 Bitcoins is 7% of the approximately 12,000,000 [1] in circulation.
To put the impact of this into perspective consider that the top-50 largest holding companies have assets totaling $15,681,169,806 in thousands of dollars. Seven percent of this total is $1,097,681,886 which equates to someone stealing all of the assets for Goldman Sachs Group and Capitol One Financial Corp.

If this were to happen in the 'traditional' currency market the entire system would be in dire straights. Members of the Bitcoin foundation are trying to minimize the damage and dismiss this as 'bad actor' with poor security. Could it be that this is the first of major faults that will shutter this emerging virtual currency? [1] - https://blockchain.info/charts... [2] - https://www.ffiec.gov/nicpubwe...

You might like to take a look at blockchain.info and note that just about every single transaction that's being posted right now includes a (non-mandatory) fee. It looks like your entire argument is founded upon a fallacy!

except the problem of criminals leveraging other peoples resources. When you can utilise bots to farm for you you can effectively undercut other peoples market making any legitimate miner completely unprofitable.

Said like a person who doesn't have a clue about the shear amount of resources being thrown at bitcoin mining.

Currently, the bitcoin mining network is doing 6,549,663,840,000,000 SHA-256 hashes per second. Lets say you have a botnet of 1 million Haswell's. The fastest Intel CPU there is, a Xeon, and it can't do more than 20M hashes per second. So your 1 million Haswell botnet will manage to capture 0.3% of the bitcoin networks mining power.

Yes, people have speculated in the past that bitcoin might be susceptible to botnets. Even if was true the vulnerability window has well and truly closed.

So if I store my dollar bills in a jar and it gets destroyed in a fire, I can go to the FDIC and get my money restored by them? No, I can't. That's because the FDIC doesn't insure dollars

Correct, but there's no incentive for a manufacturer of glass jars to build glass jars that catch fire, and it would take a remarkable amount of incompetence to do so deliberately.

However, that's not really the issue. We're not talking about bitcoins in people's wallets being stolen - it happens, but there are always going to be times it's necessary to avoid any system. What we're talking about here are interactions that involve third parties.

In the real currency world, the major institutions you deal with are banks and variants thereof. Their job is to facilitate storing and moving money around. If they're run by crooks, and you don't know this, you're in deep shit if you trust your money to them. As a result, we have this framework we call "regulation" that involves groups like the FDIC and the Federal Reserve banking system, where everything these institutions do are monitored, and if they do truly screw up, you're (normally) covered by insurance.

In the Bitcoin world, you also have to deal with third parties. Right now, everyone has to deal with exchanges at some point, because virtually nothing non-virtual can be bought using Bitcoins (cue anecdotes about Teslas bought from Craigslist - I said virtually nothing not nothing), and exchanges are one major example of a third party required to make transactions. If Bitcoin is to take off, there's a lot of evidence to suggest too that:

- People would rather use some kind of analog to a bank than manage double-top-secret malware-stealable wallets
- People would like to take loans occasionally
- People would like to use credit cards and other similar devices like they do with normal cash.

That infrastructure exists in the real money world because of demand, not because of some conspiracy by the Illuminati-run Federal Reserve central bank aliens Kennedy-killing 777-stealing 9/11 truth is out there (etc) lizard people to steal your monies.

The equivalent, in Bitcoin world, of the FDIC does not exist. It does not exist for exchanges, online Bitcoin wallet operators, or any other third parties.

Which is why we're currently reading a story about people losing their Bitcoins to yet another operator too incompetent or sleazy to operate a reliable means to store Bitcoins. And it's why we're going to continue reading this EVERY FUCKING WEEK (as we've been doing) until Bitcoin's advocates either get their act together, or realize they can't have their cake and eat it and call the whole thing off.

The main problem with Bitcoin is the deflationary nature of it long term. But the second greatest problem is that its advocates can't deal with the consequences of lack of regulation and, indeed, refuse to either propose regulation or propose an alternative that would make it safe. Most insist, instead, on blaming the victim, on having faith that the free market will somehow filter out all the bad actors (despite no evidence the bad actors won't continue to be attracted to the currency) and on having faith that bad institutions will somehow be obvious to everyone concerned.

I even, today, continue to see the lie that "everyone" "knew" about Mt. Gox and it was never highly regarded.

So just how easy is it to look up the transaction records for 200,000 bitcoins, anyhow?

Pretty easy, since a complete record of every bitcoin transaction ever is available for every user of the software. It's called the "Block Chain", where a "block" is a set of transactions that have a hash generated to validate the contents, and they are chained by also including the hash of the previous block as data in the following block. Thus any changes (data corruption or malicious) become evident by re-hashing the block and comparing it to the value stored in the next one.

The Block Chain is shared across a peer-to-peer network among running copies of the software, so that everyone gets a constantly updated copy as new blocks are added.

Your terminology is incorrect, though. Bitcoins don't have transactions. Addresses have transactions, whose amount is measured in bitcoins. But the addresses are indexed for the Block Chain data, and it is fairly trivial to look up all the transactions for a given address. There is even an online website you can look it up without having to download a full copy: https://blockchain.info/addres... (these are transactions for the address in the last part of the URL).

You just need to know the addresses associated with the "found" 200,000 BTC.

A bitcoin is a hard-to-compute number.

Bitcoins aren't numbers. If they were then you couldn't transfer fractions of a bitcoin, since each fraction would need its own unique number. They're fungible abstract units, much like dollars or euros, or even points in a game. The GP's understanding was closer to the mark. The hard-to-compute part comes in when you work toward confirming transactions by solving a block; as a reward, you're allowed to include a "coinbase" transaction in the block which credits a certain amount of freshly-minted bitcoins, plus any fees from transactions in the block, to an address of your choice. The coinbase transaction, like other transactions, is just a notation in a ledger associating a certain number of bitcoins with certain address(es).

To answer the GP's question, all Bitcoin transactions are public, but only in terms of the addresses, not real-world identities. If Mt. Gox were to publish the public part of the address the coins were in before they were "misplaced" then anyone could look that address up in the block chain and see which address(es) they were transferred to. Of course, that could just be another address belonging to Mt. Gox. There's no way to prove that they don't have the private key.

Bitcoin is completely traceable, every transaction is recorded in the transaction log which is 100% available to anyone who wants it (it comes with the main client).

http://blockchain.info/charts

So, why isn't anyone tracing the stolen bitcoins? crowd-source, pay a knowledgeable programmer already.

The wallet numbers where even supplied, there should be a honorable blocking system put in place by all exchanges and banks to refuse transactions from those wallets and downstream wallets from them.

500 BTC to 1NDkevapt4SWYFEmquCDBSf7DLMTNVggdu and the rest through 1QFcC5JitGwpFKqRDd9QNH3eGN56dCNgy6?

500 BTC to 1NDkevapt4SWYFEmquCDBSf7DLMTNVggdu and the rest through 1QFcC5JitGwpFKqRDd9QNH3eGN56dCNgy6?

1) bitcoin value goes up and down, so does everything else. Live with it or dont use it.

Not everything goes up and down at the rate of bitcoin. Over the past year, the exchange rate of a bitcoin has ranged from $36 to $1151. If we consider BTC the "currency" and a single USD the "commodities basket", that gives us a deflation rate of 96%! Even if you look at today's exchange rate of ~$650, it still gives us a deflation rate of 94.5%. Never in the history of the United States has deflation gone higher than 20%. Deflation is generally considered a very bad thing in economics, and it usually coincides with a major recession.

2) Storing your bitcoins on a server owned by someone else is like giving your cash to someone you dont know. Maybe it will still be there, maybe it wont.

I just gave my entire pay check to someone I don't know! I don't know the teller at my local bank! HOLY CRAP! I should run over there to make sure that my money is still there!!! Oh, right, that's what this whole FDIC thing is meant to prevent; I like the regulation of my bank. It means that I don't have to hoard my cash and hire an armed guard to protect it while I work.

As many have stated, BTC is an investment, and a speculative one at that. A currency, it is not.

My understanding, which is admittedly pretty shallow regarding BTC, is that essentially the attackers created 2 transactions, but that Mt Gox saw one. The 2 transactions used the same transaction ID, which is the only thing that Mt Gox used to uniquely identify a transaction, when they should have been using more information (to, from, timestamp, amount, etc).

Basically, the attacker would send say 1000 BTC, and then show another transaction with the same ID where they receive 1000 BTC. The first transaction wouldn't actually be valid, but Mt Gox would still send them the 1000 BTC.

If you want to see the actual transactions, check here. First, notice these are still going on today. The stats on top show that that address has received a total of over 788,558 BTC, and the current balance is 0 (they moved it). In the list of transactions you can see one transaction where they send BTC to a lot of addresses, followed by a transaction where they receive BTC from one or a small number of other accounts. Basically, those requests where they receive money shouldn't have happened, but Mt. Gox allowed it. The fact that transactions are still happening means that Mt. Gox is not the only victim.

Someone figured out that there are wallets or exchanges that are not verifying transactions correctly, and they are exploiting that to steal the coins.

Perhaps - at the present, it is 14 GB (source: https://blockchain.info/charts...)
BUT, to have a bitcoin wallet and participate in bitcoin commerce, it's not required to have a local copy of the blockchain.
Further, if you look at the original whitepaper ( https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd... ) you'll see section 7 has an explanation of how sufficiently old transactions COULD be removed from the blockchain without corrupting the hash of each bitcoin.

You're close. There's no difficulty decoding the blockchain. The transactions are a public ledger. Have a look: https://blockchain.info/tree/1...

It's not anonymous - it's pseudonymous. Your address is your pseudonym. It can be linked to you in many ways:

When you buy something the seller knows who you are (they have your mailing address, your IP address, etc), and they know your Bitcoin address (the transaction is public information). Anyone watching your address will also see the transaction. If the address you sent coins to is a known address the investigator can then go to that seller and request your identity (via subpoena, violence, bribery, etc).

When you transmit the transaction it's first received by a few network nodes. If the investigator is running one of those nodes they see your IP. They won't know for certain it's you (perhaps you were just relaying a transaction), but it's still a short list to check. If it's the NSA or anyone else who can monitor your internet connection directly, they can easily discover that the transaction originated from you because no one sent it to you first.

People use mixing services to help obscure the origin of their coins. It makes it harder, but it's still possible to perform statistical analysis. For a simple example: https://blockchain.info/taint/... . The investigator can find some addresses which correlate with yours. Even if they don't find YOU they might find someone you do business with, then coerce them into giving up your identity.

It's a lot like cash. You can pass it around freely, but every dollar bill has a serial number. You can spend it with relative anonymity, but it will be scanned whenever it passes through a bank. If someone is looking for certain serial numbers then they can easily find the bank your merchant uses; then stake out the merchant; then find you.

You're close. There's no difficulty decoding the blockchain. The transactions are a public ledger. Have a look: https://blockchain.info/tree/1...

It's not anonymous - it's pseudonymous. Your address is your pseudonym. It can be linked to you in many ways:

When you buy something the seller knows who you are (they have your mailing address, your IP address, etc), and they know your Bitcoin address (the transaction is public information). Anyone watching your address will also see the transaction. If the address you sent coins to is a known address the investigator can then go to that seller and request your identity (via subpoena, violence, bribery, etc).

When you transmit the transaction it's first received by a few network nodes. If the investigator is running one of those nodes they see your IP. They won't know for certain it's you (perhaps you were just relaying a transaction), but it's still a short list to check. If it's the NSA or anyone else who can monitor your internet connection directly, they can easily discover that the transaction originated from you because no one sent it to you first.

People use mixing services to help obscure the origin of their coins. It makes it harder, but it's still possible to perform statistical analysis. For a simple example: https://blockchain.info/taint/... . The investigator can find some addresses which correlate with yours. Even if they don't find YOU they might find someone you do business with, then coerce them into giving up your identity.

It's a lot like cash. You can pass it around freely, but every dollar bill has a serial number. You can spend it with relative anonymity, but it will be scanned whenever it passes through a bank. If someone is looking for certain serial numbers then they can easily find the bank your merchant uses; then stake out the merchant; then find you.

Here's a good explanation:
http://blog.blockchain.info/20...

Slashdot is broken. It won't let me post because it thinks I just posted, and it won't tell me how long to wait. For the past 5 minutes it has said it's been 3 minutes since my last post. Maybe it's some kind of space-time warp.

At 10:35AM you will post a copy of a 10BTC number on the gang's Facebook page, and the clock is counting. They need to be paid and gone as soon as possible, because by 10:40AM they will get caught.

Target will know about the double-spend attempt long before 10:40AM. The transactions might not make it into a block for about 10 minutes on average, but unconfirmed transactions are still broadcast to the entire network within a few seconds. When you go to double-spend the 10 BTC, Target can look at the unconfirmed transaction list and see that the transaction you're providing overlaps with another transaction entered a few seconds ago. By the time you'd reached the door they'd know something is up, since this sort of thing rarely occurs by accident. Even better, their payment processor could make you wait 5-10 seconds after broadcasting the new transaction to see if any conflicts show up before considering the transaction successful.

Check out this page sometime. It includes a live stream of new transactions as they're received by the site. Even including latency from their server to my PC, the latest transactions are only a few seconds old.

Serious double-spend attacks depend on having control over enough of the miner network to ensure your preferred transaction (to yourself, generally) is included in the next block without broadcasting it to everyone first, or somehow disrupting the communication between Bitcoin nodes. Or a naive payment processor, of course, but I hardly think Target is likely to make that mistake.

> How would they pull off such an attack

Pools issue only the "Merkle root" of the transactions in the block - effectively the header, which the individual miners then search for a sufficiently low hash for. The pool operator can insert transactions into the block and the miners would not know.

Part of the reason to use the Merkle root is that is independent of the number of transactions. Otherwise hashing would slow down as the network carried more transactions, you have a bigger block of data to pass around to the miners, and for them to crunch hash attempts on. You can see the Merkle root on the list of hashes of a recent block: https://blockchain.info/block-index/457566/000000000000000047665cb7d4db93f66bbdd969f42578588363e8e77e22e31f

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10479/what-is-the-merkle-root

Deflation is bad because SMART people stop buying things that will be cheaper tomorrow

The data shows this is not the case. https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions http://blog.bitpay.com/2013/12/bitpay-drives-explosive-growth-in.html

Payment exchangers like bitpay who facilitate merchant processing show the highest amount of purchasing activity of actual goods during periods where bitcoin is rapidly rising in value. This contradicts claims made from economists who support inflationary models who predict that deflation will encourage hoarding and thus drive down spending. While individuals using deflationary currency may be more likely to save and spend their money on items that they really need(One would think these are good behaviors, right?), they still feel the wealth effect of their new found savings and therefore are more likely to spend and be generous during times where bitcoin is rapidly appreciating with planned deflation.

Perhaps Smart people actually occasionally need to buy things when they need them?

I expect their percentage to drop to 30% in the next month.

Yup, and it is already almost there. List of major pools

Yes, it's even labeled:

https://blockchain.info/address/1F1tAaz5x1HUXrCNLbtMDqcw6o5GNn4xqX

And since it's a known address, people are pranking it by sending tiny amounts with messages attached.

Delete the wallet.

Doing so wouldn't actually destroy the bitcoins. Bitcoins are NOT in wallets. They're on bitcoin addresses. All a wallet really is, is a collection of public keys (bitcoin addresses) and their corresponding private keys. The bitcoin address (the public key) is known, so if someone could create the matching private key, they could transfer the bitcoins.

Not saying it would be easy to create that private key or anything like that (NOT AT ALL!), but if you had that private key, you could transfer the bitcoins even without that exact wallet. You would have both the public key (we all already have that) with the bitcoins and the matching private key for that public key and that's pretty much all you need to make a wallet.

That's actually true for every bitcoin address with some bitcoins on it, so if someone wants to try something like that, it would be even more cool, if they made a private key matching one of Satoshi Nakamotos initial bitcoin addresses. Imagine what would happen, if those bitcoins were suddenly transferred. People would think Satoshi were back and I'm pretty sure that's one of the signs of the apocalypse.

He's handing out the public and private keys to bitcoin adresses with bitcoins stored in them. They are fancy paper wallets.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? I think that might be the big one. Remember he/they own almost 3/4's of all the bitcoins mined

There are over 12 million Bitcoins in circulation. The estimates I have found for Nakamoto indicate about 1 million Bitcoins., though others have come up with as much as 1.5 million. Either way, that's obviously far from three quarters.

As for your first question, an interesting recent theory is Nick Szabo.

Network Transaction fees. http://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees

It hasn't existed yet even for five years.

This bears repeating. Even if BitCoin had shown remarkable stability over this period, it would still not be enough.

Secondly, BitCoin has failed dramatically to demonstrate said stability. It's shown just the opposite.

> "It is well documented in the bitcoin blockchain that Satoshi Nakamoto famously gave away most of the early bitcoins to encourage adaptation."

Actually, it is easy to prove this is false. Look up any random block number below 25,000, which is in the first 6 months of bitcoin's existence. For example:

https://blockchain.info/block-index/20000 (vary the number 20000 up and down to see other blocks)

Follow the "newly generated coins" transaction (the first one in the block) to the destination address, and notice the coins have never moved. They were not given to anyone.

Your citation on bitcoin scalability ignores the problem raised.

The block chain is already encroaching on 12GB and is demonstrating exponential growth potential.

That's a huge problem! When you extrapolate out 10 years that becomes about 4,500 TB.

Source: From link above I used 360MB from Sept-2011 and 9.5GB from Sept-2013 and came up with a growth rate of 1.63647152
I took that and applied it to a 10 year span.

Admittedly this is pretty simplistic modeling but it serves to prove the point that the block chain will rapidly become a massive burden to store, forcing people to either invest in personal data centers or to use bitcoin "banks" such as the ones we frequently hear about shutting down and taking the bitcoins with them.

The facts are that bitcoin will fail, it is a technological and mathematical certainty unless we see some massive gains in low-cost storage and processing technology within the next few years.

This is what makes money laundering possible...BitCoin is not like this

It can be. Services exist that allow you to put your bitcoins in, have them mixed repeatedly with other users bitcoins, and get back different bitcoins. Silk Road had this feature built in, the user didn't have to ask for or configure it.

what IP address owned that wallet at the time

What is the IP address of a piece of paper?

4100 stolen, not sure how many they had. The current total number of bitcoin in circulation almost 1.2 millions each at about $ 300 piece. number of bitcoin in circulation price chart

DPR's bitcoins were moved to a new wallet by the FBI to prevent that from happening already.

https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH?offset=400&filter=0

Checking if they're already used is ... not just a standard feature of every bitcoin wallet, but the way it works practically necessitates that.

Anyway, they've already moved the bitcoins to an address they control, so there's no chance of someone else moving the bitcoins first before them. https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH?offset=400&filter=0

As the link in the summary shows: https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH

The bitcoins are still in the FBI seizure account. Not only that, entrepreneurs are sending small amounts to the account, with advertising attached, for online casinos, or cursing out the FBI. I find that amusing. If you scroll down past the tiny (0.0001 BTC) transactions, you will see the big transfers in for 324 BTC at a time. On a phone that spells out "FBI", so that is pretty clear who is doing the transfers.

Here is one of the transactions.

You can see that the fee paid was 0.

You can see their account here.

Why speculate when the evidence is all public and easy to find?

Here is one of the transactions.

You can see that the fee paid was 0.

You can see their account here.

Why speculate when the evidence is all public and easy to find?

... and it specifically says in realtime how many you own.

Realtime [sic]? Nope. A confirmation takes ~5-10 minutes.

6 confirmations (often required by exchanges/merchants) can take an hour or so.

Are you sure YOU know how bitcoins work?

I'm waiting for a big-name, trusted bank, insurance company, or sovereign state to print "Bitcoin Certificates" that are designed to be used as spending money (i.e. not just as a stuff-in-the-mattress currency) backed by BC, similar to the Gold and Silver certificates of days gone by.

Why bother, when the actual bitcoins are both easier to transfer and easier to secure than any paper certificate? What would the selling point be?

This has been attempted before, several times, with Bitbills, Casascius coins, and even print-your-own paper wallets. While the goal is generally to enable offline person-to-person transfers, my impression is that these are used more for "cold storage" than as cash-analogues. For actually transferring funds around, even face-to-face, a smartphone app is far more convenient.

http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size

looks unsustainable to me

from:
http://blockchain.info/charts

http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size

looks unsustainable to me

from:
http://blockchain.info/charts

Most US and Canadian dollars and euros and yen are just numbers in a computer. Why do we need bitcoin, you can only buy trendy overpriced crap from a relatively few places with it. and its value recently is volatile as hell Fuck bitcoins.

The point is that each individual bitcoin can be traced from the first work unit where it was "mined" and be followed to every transaction where it was used

This just isn't true. Person A sends me X bitcoins to a disposable receiving wallet. Person B sends me Y bitcoins to another disposable receiving wallet. When I spend (X+Y) * 0.7 bitcoins, the blockchain sees them "sent" from my main wallet, with no inherent connection to the disposable wallets. You can trace as far as main wallet->receiving wallet they were sent to, but no further. You had it correct in your first paragraph, but lost in in the second.

https://blockchain.info/wallet/bitcoin-faq

Actually, I didn't see the second link. After following the four links [1] [2] [3] [4] on that page (starting right under the picture) it might be that the tumbler system was exactly what they traced. I'm still trying to make heads or tails of these links in combination with this transaction provided above which seems to show the DEA account (1ETD...) sending money.

Actually, I didn't see the second link. After following the four links [1] [2] [3] [4] on that page (starting right under the picture) it might be that the tumbler system was exactly what they traced. I'm still trying to make heads or tails of these links in combination with this transaction provided above which seems to show the DEA account (1ETD...) sending money.

Actually, I didn't see the second link. After following the four links [1] [2] [3] [4] on that page (starting right under the picture) it might be that the tumbler system was exactly what they traced. I'm still trying to make heads or tails of these links in combination with this transaction provided above which seems to show the DEA account (1ETD...) sending money.

Actually, I didn't see the second link. After following the four links [1] [2] [3] [4] on that page (starting right under the picture) it might be that the tumbler system was exactly what they traced. I'm still trying to make heads or tails of these links in combination with this transaction provided above which seems to show the DEA account (1ETD...) sending money.

Actually, I didn't see the second link. After following the four links [1] [2] [3] [4] on that page (starting right under the picture) it might be that the tumbler system was exactly what they traced. I'm still trying to make heads or tails of these links in combination with this transaction provided above which seems to show the DEA account (1ETD...) sending money.

Most likely it was a sting operation and he sent the funds to an address the DEA had created. There was a transaction for that amount on the day they were "seized" linked to his account. If they seized the wallet on his computer I imagine it would have been more than that.