Robin Hood Hacker Donates $11,000 of Stolen Bitcoin to Help Fight ISIS (newsweek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A Kurdish region of Syria that borders territory held by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has received an $11,000 donation in allegedly stolen bitcoin from a vigilante hacker. (paywalled, alternate source) The pseudonymous Phineas Fisher donated 25 bitcoins to a crowdfunding campaign set up by members of the Rojava region's economic committee, described by Fisher as "one of the most inspiring revolutionary projects in the world." Fisher claims that the bitcoin donation, recorded publicly on the blockchain ledger and listed on the crowdfunding campaign page, came from hacking into a bank. "The money did come from robbing a bank," Fisher said. "Bank robbing is more viable than ever, it's just done differently these days."Phisher adds: "Unfortunately, our world is backwards. You get rich by doing bad things and go to jail for doing good."

Comments

No, it is NOT fuzzy

[ClickOnThis]

Stolen property is stolen property. You can't un-steal it by giving it to a cause, no matter how worthy.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, it's 2016 and people still believe this bullshit?

Over half of the subprime mortgages were created by non-bank entities that the government did not regulate (like General Motors, who had sunk a ton of money into a website you might have heard of called "ditech.com" ... any wonder why they needed a bailout when the other car companies didn't?). Further, even with the anti-redlining rules in place, the regulations that the government had still mandated that some level of due diligence was required. The undocumented NINJA loans were completely noncompliant with even the reduced requirements for subprime loans. Banks created those loans themselves all on their own initiative because they believed that they could get them rated AAA++++ and sold on to other suckers without being left holding the bag.

If you want someone to blame for the mess, then if Moodys, SnP, and the rest had actually reviewed the documentation (or lack thereof) and rated these loans junk, Fannie and Freddie wouldn't have bought any of them to back their prime mortgage insurance. Of course, neither would anyone else, and the banks would have quickly stopped creating these instruments when they ended up without any suckers to sell them to.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[AlphaBro]

I can't even read this crap, I just see word salad with "republican" sprinkled about. This is not a partisan issue. Do you understand that?

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[AlphaBro]

Found the communist.

Good things?

[goobie123]

"Phisher adds: "Unfortunately, our world is backwards. You get rich by doing bad things and go to jail for doing good."

I had never heard of theft being called 'doing good' before.

Re:Good things?

[bluefoxlucid]

People have no sense of economics. The guys who did the (crappy) movie, In Time, kind of got it right, but not in any serious way: you steal from the banks, the banks start charging everyone a shitload. In the movie, they framed it the same way as all normal people think: the banks charged more because they're assholes.

In reality, the cost of production is, essentially, wage-labor time. Wage-labor time includes overhead that's diffused through production (e.g. the CEO doesn't do a damned thing to make hamburgers, but hamburgers carry the partial cost of his salary; I often have to point out this is like $20 or $200 per employee per year, except a Chipotle where their overpaid executive is making $3,400 per employee per year), and *risk* is overhead. Risk has to cover losses sustained in the long-term of operating by amortizing them, charging more than costs in near-term good times and less than costs in near-term bad times. In other words: you charge an extra million dollars per year because, once every 10 years, you experience an average $10 million loss; when you get hit with those, you don't raise prices, because you *already* raised prices.

Our society protects corporations perhaps a little... inefficiently. The basic concept of protecting corporations--from robbery, vandalism, and other risks--is *not* inefficient: if people spent their time stealing from the big bad businesses and passing it out to their friends, we'd have operating cost increases, and thus the price of goods would increase, effectively transferring money from the consumer base to whoever Robin Hood deems worthy. Businesses who don't carry out this transfer go out of business, because eventually they turn negative profits and carry negative assets and have no money to continue operating.

I've had people argue at length that it should be a crime to rob "normal people" because people like us (the guy was middle-class) need our money to get by. He was mad that the police shot someone who was trying to rob a rich guy, and arguing that it's okay for you and me and him to shoot someone who breaks into our homes and steals our shit, because it's wrong to steal from regular folks, but okay to steal from the rich. People see businesses and rich individuals as endless sources of income and, frankly, as a symbol of unfairness, and so they think all kinds of weird shit about that, and then get mad when wage increases turn into price increases.

Re:Good things?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you are trying to intellectualize something that is governed by much more obvious behavior. If Wendy's sells hamburgers for 2$ versus McDonald's 1$ because they are trying to recoup losses from internal theft, then they aren't going to sell ANY hamburgers. Prices of goods are governed by what people are willing to pay, not what they are forced to pay.

I'm going to steal some of your bitcoin

[nhat11]

and force you to donate to something good, I'm doing a good job right?

Re:I'm going to steal some of your bitcoin

[Paco103]

That's the governments job. They call it taxes.