195K Bitcoin Transaction

First time accepted submitter saidi writes "The Washington Post reports that yesterday a truly massive Bitcoin transaction occurred, from the article: 'In this particular transaction, bitcoins from 15 different Bitcoin addresses were consolidated and sent to address 12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8. The size of the transaction? 194,993 bitcoins. Given that one bitcoin is worth around $800 right now, the transaction is valued at more than $150 million.'" A researcher did a bit of digging, and it appears that this was the Bitstamp exchange moving their balance around (business appears brisk).

Comments

Ghost transactions

[girlintraining]

This is an excellent example of traffic analysis and how you can leak your identity based just on the nature of the transaction. It makes me wonder why bitcoin users do not routinely engage in 1:1 transactions simply to frustrate traffic analysis.

Re:Ghost transactions

[Anonymous Coward]

Was this transaction really intended to be secret? "Leaking" the identity seems like a positive PR move for the exchange --- "look how much BTC we handle, and how hot bitcoin transactions are!". Normal sized transactions are already obfuscated by the traffic of normal sized transactions. How many users have $1e8 bitcoin balances to shuffle around just to provide "cover" for this size of transaction --- as though doing so would improve their ability to keep a low profile?

Re:Ghost transactions

[Trepidity]

Even more than not designed to be anonymous, it's specifically designed to have a global, completely public transaction ledger. That is more or less the core of the design. How do you have "accounts" without a central server keeping track of them? The Bitcoin solution is a public ledger that all clients agree on. This public ledger then has an update mechanism designed in a way that's intended to make it so you can add transactions to the public register iff you have the private key of the account the transaction is "from".

Of course, you can try to keep your RL identity from being associated with a particular account number, but Bitcoin's design makes no specific effort to help you do so: the transaction graph is public, for anyone to do any kind of analysis they want.

Re:Ghost transactions

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean "hardly anyone" noticed? It made a Washington Post article, plus a front-page Slashdot story. I'm pretty sure that anyone who anyone might worry about noticing has noticed aplenty (obviously, this transaction was not trying to avoid notice).

For Big Cash transactions, there are of course monetary vehicles in larger than $100 denominations --- all sorts of bonds/cheques/etc. that are good for deposit by bearer at any of the major financial institutions for the convenience of their mafia customers. Cash money laundering, or electronic equivalents like the several billion dollars worth of South American narco-cartel money that Chase Bank assisted in moving around, is still an option in wide use.

Re:I think I will stop reading slashdot.......

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, Slashdot and http://phys.org/ are by far, my favorite websites for interesting stories news.
However, I am getting tired of fucking bitcoin stories. Enough is enough.

You don't have to read the summary. You don't have to click on the links. You don't have to post annoying comments. In fact, I think slashdot will be better if you do stop "reading" it.

But, yeah, I'll give you that there are way too many bitcoin stories...

Re:I think I will stop reading slashdot.......

[Pseudonym Authority]

No, I cannot allow that. Even if you leave Slashdot for whatever shitty site that is, I will come to your house, put a gun to your head, and force you to read Bitcoin stories much like Unknown Lamer does here. You must read them. This is not an option. If you had a choice, there would be some sort of summary on the front page with a link instead of how it is now where every bitcoin story locks your browser and won't let you navigate away unless you post.

Um, this isn't as amazing as some might think...

[JohnA]

This is simply good stewardship. One of the largest exchanges (actually not, Bitstamp, rather another ahem Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange site) had a rush of buy orders, so they decided to redeem an address they kept in cold, offline storage to meet demand.

This is a good thing(tm), as it means that there isn't any fractional deposit factoring going on.

Re:Can someone explain bitcoin banks to me?

[tftp]

Why are people trusting their coins to a bank?

Well, here are the reasons that we have to keep national currencies in the bank:

1) Because it's hard to guard your cash all day and all night.
2) Because the bank pays you interest.
3) Because the bank gives you the ability to send and receive money using checks, transfers, money orders, cards.

All these reasons (except #2) are valid in case of BTC. The more backups of your wallet you make, the more likely it is that one of them gets exposed to a thief. The fewer backups you make, the more likely it is that you will lose your wallet forever. A bank does not keep your money in a wallet, though they have deposit boxes for other items. If you deposit your BTC into an account, the record states that the bank owes you so many BTC. You have a copy of all transfers of that money, in or out. Loss of wallet is immaterial. Theft of wallet is immaterial. If the paper says you have 10 BTC in your account, that's what you will get. If someone sends you 20 BTC, you do not need to fiddle with blockchain and confirmations - as soon as your bank says you have the money, you have the money. The bank isolates the customer from the technicalities of running BTC clients. Add credit cards and checkbooks, and you can pay with BTC just as you pay with USD or GBP. Credit cards will be swept instantly (and not in 15 minutes.) The latter is, actually, very important because the raw BTC is ill-suited for small, numerous transactions that have to complete within seconds.