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Alleged Bitcoin Creator Raided By Australian Authorities (arstechnica.com)
wbr1 writes: As reported yesterday, Wired and Gizmodo think Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Australian businessman Craig Wright
Now, Craig Wright has been raided by Australian police. Curiously, a statement from the Australian federal police said that the raids were not related to the recent Bitcoin revelation. "The AFP can confirm it has conducted search warrants to assist the Australian Taxation Office at a residence in Gordon and a business premises in Ryde, Sydney. This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin." Supposedly not related, but interesting nonetheless.
Reuters adds,"At Wright's rented home, a modest brick house in the leafy middle class suburb of Gordon, three police workers wearing white gloves could be seen searching the garage, which contained gym equipment. A man who identified himself as the owner of the house, Garry Hayres, told Reuters that Wright and his family had lived there for a year, and were due to move out on Dec. 22 to move to Britain. Hayres said that Wright had a 'substantial computer system set-up' and had attached a 'three-phase' power system to the back of the house for extra power."
Now, Craig Wright has been raided by Australian police. Curiously, a statement from the Australian federal police said that the raids were not related to the recent Bitcoin revelation. "The AFP can confirm it has conducted search warrants to assist the Australian Taxation Office at a residence in Gordon and a business premises in Ryde, Sydney. This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin." Supposedly not related, but interesting nonetheless.
Reuters adds,"At Wright's rented home, a modest brick house in the leafy middle class suburb of Gordon, three police workers wearing white gloves could be seen searching the garage, which contained gym equipment. A man who identified himself as the owner of the house, Garry Hayres, told Reuters that Wright and his family had lived there for a year, and were due to move out on Dec. 22 to move to Britain. Hayres said that Wright had a 'substantial computer system set-up' and had attached a 'three-phase' power system to the back of the house for extra power."
Imagine if the IRS suddenly found out you had four hundred million dollars' worth of undeclared capital gains.
Why are the authorities after the creator of Bitcoin?
Summation 2
Is it too late for him to get refugee tax status in Switzerland?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is not Satoshi and he was not arrested for bitcoin related tax problems. Until someone wants to sign a message with Satoshi's PGP key or his well known private BTC key, then there's no reason to believe this is anything more than a hoax/prank.
Getting "outed" as Satoshi Nakamoto is the new SWATing, I suggest we call it IRSing and it is much, much worse.
If the AUS gov does not declare it as a commodity but a currency, then it is a different picture.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Even if the government did want that desperately to raid the creator of bitcoin does anyone here believe they have the capability to organise, assemble and conduct a raid only a matter of hours after the creator of the bitcoins was supposedly "outed" in some obscure magazine? (And by obscure I mean not sanctioned by the Murdoch press).
The timing in this case clearly shows the matter is not related. There's a lot of ways to describe government agencies, police, taxation offices, and the feds in general but none of those ways include the words fast or efficient.
Well either its an ex-employee whose a master hacker... or its a parallel construction thing.
NSA will have grabbed satoshi@vistomail.com emails, the email associated with Satoshi Nakamoto.
It hands the emails to the Aussies (remember the illegal spook surveillance of Kim Dotcom of MegaUpload?).
Now how do you explain how the Aussie police have private emails from a server of an unrelated person who has committed no determinable crime? This Satoshi Nakamoto figure?..... you leak the same emails to Gizmodo and Wired anonymously, and claim you received an anonymous tipoff.
It's likely this part (From Gizmodo):
"The hacker also provided a PDF file of what appears to be an unfinished draft of a legal contract between Wright and Kleiman forming a secret Bitcoin trust in the Seychelles, a notorious tax haven in the Indian Ocean. The contract shows Dave Kleiman in receipt of 1,100,111 bitcoin, to be repaid to Craig Wright on January 1, 2020. Several reports, including an oft-cited technical analysis by Bitcoin expert Sergio Demian Lerner, estimate Satoshi Nakamoto’s legendary Bitcoin fortune at around 1 million BTC — a figure that nearly matches the amount in the Seychelles trust. It also lists five PGP keys — files that are used to establish encrypted lines of communication over email — that will be used to manage the trust. Searching for those keys in a public database reveals that one belongs to Wright, one belongs to Kleiman, and two belong to Satoshi Nakamoto."
Because it make a bunch of early adopters rich. Crypto Mining tends to be a ponzi ish scheme you mine the first realy easy ones then get people to spread the word as it gets harder. It is successful as people have been using it where CC are no longer taken (or they incorrectly think it can not be traced back to them when using a CC to purchase BC) so internet gambling sites, the silk road / it's successors, and the sex trade (advertising) seem to be the primary users.
I made a decent amount from early sites giving out 1 BC for signing up/GPU mining one a card I already hard and when not paying incrementally for power and cashing out when a BC was over 1k. Right now mining your have to have very cheap power and dedicated hardware to hope to make money at it. I know a few people throwing ASIC rigs into section 8 housing since they get power at a flat rate around here in exchange for putting in a big AC unit and paying the AC upcharge to the occupants.
No sir I dont like it.
The potential mining aspect doesn't make much sense. Why would you go to great expense to try and mine bitcoins if you already have over a million of them? Or is anonymity that important to him that he doesn't dare spend the bitcoins associated with Satoshi Nakamoto?
Better known as 318230.
For the same reason that an arbitrary number in a bank's computer is thought of as "money". As soon as people start to believe in it, it is worth something.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
and had attached a 'three-phase' power system to the back of the house for extra power.
In the US, three-phase electric service would be very unusual in a residence. Is this something Australian, or did some details get mixed up along the way?
Why does *anything* have 'value' ?
It can be either:
- intrinsic (like metals or silicon because of how they can be used)
- extrinsic (because of greed of an artificial market, like diamonds)
The medium is irrelevant -- be it physical or digital. Why do you think some people pay hundreds of dollars for a digital weapon? Because they have more money then time and want it "now."
Never underestimate the price some people put on greed.
--
~2022 The greatest discovery: First Contact
~2024 The greatest tragedy: World War 3
= "three-phase".
Most likely it was just some sort of backup power system like a NOC battery bank and/or generator.
There's really no explanation as it applies to bitcoin that makes sense for the literal use.
> Alleged Bitcoin Creator Raided By Australian Authorities
This is very good news for all ransomware computer malware victims, whose precious data files were encrypted!
The Bitcoin source code can now go to the FBI and hopefully to anti-virus vendors like F-Secure or Kaspersky Lab. They will find out the backdoor which the altruistic inventor hid elliptically. This will make it possible to immediately short-circuit the entire Bitcoin economy by procedurally generating and disclosing all the possible bitcoins (including already mined and unmined coins) without burning GP-GPU cards and possibly even generate 137 valid, yet hither-to unknown isomers for each possible coin. Thus, the hacker gang criminals will be remotely stripped of their ill-gotten spoils.
Furthermore, the backdoor will allow easier tracing of online bitcoin transactions. This will lead police to the hacker gangs' doors, so their computers can be seized and the plethora of ransomware cipher keypairs recovered. This will give renewed access to previously unrecoverable files of Cryptowall, etc. ransomware victims. There will be street parades with floats and people will admit again that gold is valuable - just as Jesus taught that people sell everything to buy the parcel where they found a pot with non-bit coins hidden inside.
The value of anything is how much other people think it's worth. A friend made a fortune importing Pokemon cards for sale to retailers even though he (and I) thought they were the stupidest things. They are just a few cents of cardboard with ink printed on them. But arrange that ink in a certain way so a bunch of people (rightly or wrongly) think it's valuable, and suddenly they're worth several dollars.
So even if you think bitcoins are stupid (I do), that doesn't mean they're worthless. They're worth what someone else is willing to pay for them, which is quite a lot.
On a more abstract level, that enough people value bitcoins enough to raise it to its current price does indicate substantial discontent with traditional financial systems. That's a real problem irrespective of whether or not bitcoins make sense.
...that a person who might be paranoid or greedy enough to try to cut the government out of his money, enough to try to invent a currency of his own, would also have tax issues with the government.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that out!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And anonymous VPNs, and donations to unpopular political entities like Wikileaks.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I think they have value for EXACTLY the reason of your last statement. They solve a real problem, that of who can control your money.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I'm not sure either amounts to much, guess can go look at the block chain and find out. Wikileaks looks like a few k but I've not analyzed the 1k or so transactions to their donation address. Picking one random gambling site looks like more than a half million BTC have gone through at .5% in favor of the house that's sill 2.5k or so.
No sir I dont like it.
I can't say how it works where you are but in the US money has value because if you don't accept it as payment you'll find yourself in legal trouble. The government swinging its hammer is a persuasive force.
That's not quite true. The US government does not force anyone to accept dollars as payments. If you want to open a barter shop and trade goats as your only form of "payment," you can do so.
What the government does say is the following:
(1) US money (dollars) is "legal tender" for all debts. That means if you already owe something to someone, legally you can repay that debt in dollars, and they must accept it. If you go to a store, you generally don't "owe debt" in advance. If you want to acquire goods from the store, you'll have to agree to the terms of their payment contract, whatever they are. Most contracts are implicitly created by exchange of dollars, but if your store has a contract that says, "I'll give you this slaughtered and processed cow in exchange for five goats," that's perfectly valid. If you don't show up with the goats, and the guy gives you the cow anyway, then you now are "in debt," and legally the guy must accept a dollar valuation of his payment if he sues you in court.
But you can't compel him to give you the cow in the first place just by offering the amount of dollars that "five goats" should be worth.
(2) Taxation laws still apply, though. If you start entering into such contracts on a large scale and making "profits" (even in goats), you'll still owe the government taxes on your gains. And the government generally doesn't accept goats as payment for taxes. So the real reason most businesses are forced to deal in cash is because they ultimately must pay taxes in cash. Even if they wanted to use a barter system to deal with everyday transactions, eventually they need to get their hands on some significant dollars to pay the taxes.
From a practical standpoint, any large-scale business that tried to operate without cash transactions would be flagged for close monitoring by the IRS, and unless you had detailed documentation of the valuation of assets you were trading in lieu of cash, you'd end up with tax penalties or in prison for tax fraud.
That's the real reason most businesses deal in cash in the US. And thus the real reason the US currency has (a certain minimum) value has fundamentally to do with taxation policies.
To start: Fun. Then ease of use with the Silk Road. Now greed and willful ignorance.
Because honestly, Bitcoin doesn't work on any useful scale (3 transactions per second, maximum, globally!). And it doesn't do anything that needs doing - we have gift cards and wiring money. And what it does do, it does in such a difficult manner the average person could never use it, so it's easy to send your bitcoins to the wrong address and never see them again, or lose your 'wallet' and never see them again, or put them in an exchange and never see them again (non reversible transactions)...
But if you're stupid (or at least greedier than you are smart), or you're a scam artist looking to take advantage of those who are... it's still a pretty neat tool.
and how is this different from the value of a specific green piece of paper we all agree has Value.
but is basically just fancy paper?
paper a bunch of people this is valuable.
that said, i hate buying pokemon cards for my son. he gets so excited about them and thinks they are so valuable because this one is a Mega or this one is an Ultra. Its just ink saying that. how does that provide value.
same can be said though for baseball cards, stamps, ART!, really so much in our economy.....
The value of anything is how much other people think it's worth.
Wrong - you are conflating the ideas of value and price. Many people pay exorbitant prices for things with little value, or very little for things of high value. Toilet paper for example really doesn't cost that much but it sure has a huge value for you.
Value varies across people. Perhaps the pokemon cards enable one person to enjoy their time and be part of a certain social group, to another their just pieces of cardboard. Price can change due to a multitude of factors, and the value to a person is just one of those factors.
I have a Bitcoin App! Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Hopefully it will make your head explode.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......