Most of Dread Pirate Roberts' treasure still buried, say researchers While the FBI found a Bitcoin wallet worth around $122m on the laptop belonging to a man suspected of being the “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR), two Israeli researchers believe that's only about 22 per cent of what the Silk Road kingpin would have held. Moreover, the researchers suggest a possibility that there's a link between …
Arrogance is usually the downfall of any semi successful criminal (lol and many who aren't). They start getting away with it for some time and making big bank and they get lazy, drop their guard and just assume they will never get caught because they are too smart. Kind of like politicians. Neither usually knows when to walk away while they are ahead.
From what I recall the Feds waited for him to log in and enter the decryption password and then hauled him out of his seat.
I've seen comments elsewhere that he should've taken the battery out of his laptop such that he could literally pull the plug if he felt the long arm of the law on his collar but based on reports of his arrest I'm not sure that would've helped much.
And then in the UK, you can spend some years in prison for not handing over your password.
Do we know that it wasn't encrypted? Also note that Bitcoin will report on the number of Bitcoins in a wallet even if it's encrypted, the password is just needed to retrieve them, IIRC (which isn't necessarily a flaw - since all transactions are public anyway). Though yes, if I had that much, I'd be extra paranoid and put the whole thing in another encrypted file, so people wouldn't even know I had a Bitcoin wallet on there at all, let alone how much.
So the research paper is claiming that everyone who was interested in bitcoin in the early days are all really aliases for satoshi, who then decided to transfer some coin to DPR in 2013? Sounds like people throwing names around to try and get some useless study published to me.Could the link be any weaker at all? Is it even a link?
Surely the researchers could have found some equally tenuous links for a tripple-bonus hype combo.
'Though we have no evidence to support this claim, we conclude that the wide scale cocoa and opium poppy farming are directly responsible for increased temp climate change. Furthermore, the profits from the sale of these narcotics are undeniably being used to fund international terrorism.'
the FBI found a Bitcoin wallet worth around $US122 million on the laptop
But why translate it into USD? Just name the number of bitcoins.
After all, who would say the FBI found a Deutschmark wallet worth around $US122 million on the laptop? One would just say "...so and so many Deutschmark were found ...."
"Because a value in Bitcoins means nothing to most of us"
But, given the volatility of the cyptocurrency, it's almost certainly wrong by the time of publishing. Not to mention that you're almost certainly never going to be able to convert that many Bitcoin in to real cash.
It's a pretty useless comparison, really.
In the early days (I was there too), Bitcoins were a geeky novelty, worth no more than idle gossip.
I had my PC mining for a while, but soon found my mediocre CPU was not suited for calculating hashes and gave up. I *did* request BTC 5 for free though that some fellow miner delivered to anyone who asked for it. I'm very sorry now that I lost my (then worthless) Bitcoin wallet after a number of PC moves...
It was very common in the early days to just move around "huge" sums of Bitcoins. They had no real value then and only a few very early adopters willing to sell real stuff for Bitcoins...
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