What is the point of having a zillion magic internet moneys if you can't get yourself off the financial grid and living in a non-extradition country?
Cmon. What a bunch of jokers.
I think it's a hugely bearish case for crypto that none of the crypto guys have been able to use it to avoid authorities for more than a few weeks/months.
That's literally one of its alleged use cases. "The government can't control it".
SBF, Do Kwon, the Bitmex guys, how's that worked out for everyone?
The safemoon guys are free, Logan Paul remains free, many smalltime pump and dumpers remain free. Though this is a product of lax enforcement rather than crypto itself
Yes its really just lax enforcement at this point.
When it sporadically turns on, they net a bunch of these guys again, in waves.
The US has a very expansive view of jurisdiction when it comes to financial dealings with Americans, dealings with American companies, dealings within the US, transacting in US dollars or US dollar derivatives. Crypto largely ends up triggering 1 or more of these.
Nonetheless it does seem to be failing at its job of being immune from governments if you are still going to end up in jail / having to pay billon dollar settlements in "fiat" to avoid jail, etc.
Any financial mechanism that can move money across national boarders while evading regulatory requirements like "know your customer" seem useful for criminal activity. That's the case even if it was not a design goal.
It's telling that ransomware payments typically use crypto.
You don't think the crypto scammers believed the currency somehow made them immune to government force? That's even more delusional than the crypto bros themselves, how on earth is that "bearish for crypto"??
I think Arthur Hayes converted much to fiat > 100m usd and gave this to the US government and did never go to prison. He is the man, amongst all of them.
Arthur, my friend, where have u been?
>they certainly have not been able to make any use of them.
That cannot be said with 100% certainty since transfer of ownership doesnt require an onchain transaction and secondly, funds aside, signing with his keys (aka proof of identity) is extremely valuable to a large % of the Bitcoin whale community.
Many whales would send Satoshi millions of dollars just for the act of signing with those keys, no strings attached.
>so no, they certainly have not been able to make any use of them.
>This sounds extremely speculative.
My statement is less speculative than the parent's claim. Did Satoshi already receive 10s of billions $ of coins just for owning his keys? Yes.
Off-chain transactions and proof-of-keys based value transfer are far from exotic in the space we are discussing. Countless airdrops and fork coins have been sent to offchain wallets controlled by Satoshi using these two methods over the last 13 years.
NSA inventing crypto honestly seems like one of the less implausible conspiracies. I mean they basically compromised Tor already.
They have a vested interest in tracking decentralized communications and assets.
The pseudonymous nature coupled with its public ledger actually make it great for an NSA type entity to track fund movement by people who think they are operating in the darkness.
The US government invented and funds Tor (more or less).
Along your lines of thought I think it’s obvious “Satoshi” shows up out of nowhere, drops exquisite crypto code that provides an open network that attracts exchange of funds that largely end up being illicit, and then sits on wallets worth significant amounts of money to anyone other than the US government (current Satoshi wallet value is $42b, estimated annual NSA budget alone is $65b and all in it’s likely many multiples of that). The US government can and does spend trillions on war. If it came to that taking down bitcoin is a rounding error.
It has NSA written all over it and given what we already know of the capabilities of the NSA if it wasn’t created by them one way or another (push come to shove) the US government could shut it down at the bat of an eye.
The US Government prints money whenever it feels like it despite being $30 Trillion in debt, it's the only entity in the world that could manage to not spend it.
No that's not right. It's not that all the countless departments and agencies can go to the federal reserve or congress whenever they need more money and it will write them a check. I mean in aggregate that's vaguely how it goes, but there is never enough money to spend at any given time. If there was a gigantic cache of money, they would be unable to help themselves. Why do you think the CIA sells drugs and weapons?
It's not a couple of greedy dudes at the top running everything and telling everybody to waste money. It's systemic from top to bottom.
> That's literally one of its alleged use cases. "The government can't control it".
>
> SBF, Do Kwon, the Bitmex guys, how's that worked out for everyone?
Well the government still, so far, cannot make it so that there's more than 21 million Bitcoins.
So in that sense they cannot control Bitcoin.
Those you mentioned and the likes of Justin Sun (now charged for fraud), Mark Karpeles (from MtGox fame, who server prison time), the Quadriga guy, Crypsy, etc. have all one thing in common: they "exit scammed" / "rug pulled" / ponzi'ed and whatnots.
The government collect taxes on realized gains honest people make selling cryptocurrencies they legally bought? The government send the likes of SBF to jail.
> Well the government still, so far, cannot make it so that there's more than 21 million Bitcoins.
Of course it can. The only thing capping the supply of bitcoin is a variable in a C++ source file. The only thing preventing a modified version of that variable from being deployed as the dominant protocol on the network is countervailing hashrate. The government knows exactly where all the major bitcoin mines are, both because the power draw makes them obvious to local grid operators and the immense waste heat makes them obvious to anyone with aerial surveillance imagery. Governments have plenty of funds to spend on ASICs and cruise missiles to hard-fork the network whenever they feel like it.
At least the goldbugs are correct that there's only a finite amount of gold in the Earth's crust. Bitcoin's limits, by comparison, are entirely arbitrary.
(Of course, both of these ignore that fact that inflation is not solely caused by increases to the money supply, so it's unclear what trying to hard-cap the money supply actually achieves.)
Cutting edge ASICs production, and their associated supply chains, are in fact even more centralized then the Federal Reserves + 9 next largest central banks.
And a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
It's not about what government can do because it can literally do everything. If we are talking about USA it can literally end the world.
What's important is what the government can do cheaply, kinda quietly and without stepping on toes of the rich people. And in that book bitcoin is fairly safe so far.
It’s really not that safe.
All US needs to do is tighten the screws a bit more on US crypto exchanges (hint: like they did today).
BTC isn’t useful for someone residing in US if you can’t get your dollars into or out of it. Centralized exchanges have been the main means of that.
They could make it progressively more costly & difficult to do so or shut it down entirely.
Remember predictions markets were dubiously illegal right up until they got shutdown.
Average Joe consumer and businesses aren’t going to go to the hassle of wallet setup to trade BTC for goods & services, so again it leaves speculation and exiting to USD as the main things to do with a BTC holding.
Hashrate doesn't matter if nodes don't accept their blocks. So while you're right that a powerful government could severely strike Bitcoin by taking down miners, they can't force the community to accept invalid blocks, no matter how much hash power they could amass.
Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it.
> Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it.
The economic costs of performing such an attack is extremely expensive: It's why despite the "Oh, they can just double-spend & make it go to 0" rhetoric, this attack is too costly to launch against BTC - The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of *valid* blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars.
> > The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of valid blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars.
> You say “on the order of billions of dollars” like that’s a lot of money. For significant national governments, it is not.
It isn't, especially with a country that has access to their own effectively bottomless currency like the USD. However, such an expenditure on such a large scale would be noticeable in terms of power draw & cutting-edge ASIC/silicon manufacturing purchases, the latter of which is currently booked to the brim by Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and others.
You realize that the US government has many supercomputer clusters it owns directly to support its own data collection and analysis needs right? If the US decided BTC was a meaningful security threat, they have a lot of power they can bring to bear and anyone thinking otherwise is fooling themselves. This is the country that deployed a very sophisticated worldwide Trojan to make an attack on a nuclear reactor in a hostile country. The key here is if they can take over a huge swath of available worldwide compute no problem, they wouldn’t even need to touch their sufficient in house and commercial compute resources available to them.
Bitcoin proponents love to pretend it’s undefeatable and confuse IT in government with offensive capabilities. They also liked to think it was anonymous until researchers put in a modicum of effort to show how it’s not. They get the strategy of the attack fundamentally wrong. They think it’s to take over Bitcoin. It’s not. Driving value to zero is sufficient. And that is a much different case (making transactions take longer and longer, disrupting on-ramps and off-ramps, doing hostile take overs of data centers running mining operations, perhaps in conjunction with other governments, having spies infiltrate these groups, etc etc etc). As the xkcd joke goes, your super duper cryptography is no match for a guy with a $5 wrench.
> You realize that the US government has many supercomputer clusters it owns directly to support its own data collection and analysis needs right? If the US decided BTC was a meaningful security threat, they have a lot of power they can bring to bear and anyone thinking otherwise is fooling themselves.
While the US government does have supercomputer clusters, mining-wise they're orders of magnitudes less performant per compute instance than a dedicated ASIC mining rig. Since the target's Bitcoin:
The supercomputer clusters are assumed to run top of the line gear, let's say 10 Tesla A100s. A recent Hashcat benchmark puts a Tesla A100's SHA256 performance at about 35 GH/s.
It would take 700 10xTesla A100 servers to beat one S19. In order to beat a single instance of an S19, the government can do any of the following:
1) Directly beat them with more servers: Not feasible. To get that many compute servers would require putting a lot of orders through the whole computing industry, which would take years to fully roll out.
2) Directly beat them with ASICs: Feasible, but hard to keep a secret. Miners are sensitive to big entrants buying up everything, and it'll be made apparent in mining forums that something's up.
3) Make it illegal by banning PoW: That's currently happening right now with some states. What we're seeing now is a move to friendlier states, or a move out of the country, primarily the former in the public eye.
> This is the country that deployed a very sophisticated worldwide Trojan to make an attack on a nuclear reactor in a hostile country. The key here is if they can take over a huge swath of available worldwide compute no problem, they wouldn’t even need to touch their sufficient in house and commercial compute resources available to them.
It should be noted that the event in question specifically targeted Windows systems & the PLC systems attached to them, and it was only successful because of lax security procedures with regards to USB flash drives that allowed them to gain access into the air-gapped systems & run their payloads.
The type of sophisticated attack being outlined here would at the very least involve the unpatched vulnerabilities of:
- Windows
- Linux (& all of its distros)
- Hypervisors
- IoT device firmwares
- Anything that AWS/Azure/Google Cloud uses
- Router firmwares
- Android
- iOS
- ALL of the OSes for the various XBoxes & PSXes
Each of which will require their own customized payloads, exploitable vulnerabilities, & custom compilation of the necessary software to perform the attack. These vulnerabilities also need to be persistent & non-traceable, which is increasingly becoming rarer in the long term (even though there may be bumps along the way sometimes). If no C&C systems are in place, then this widespread outbreak would require all of the systems mentioned above to run at a predefined timestamp. Otherwise, the traffic to/from the C&C systems would be noticeable by the public.
Even if all of that were to align perfectly, they'd still need to beat the ASIC miners mentioned above, and as shown by the RTX 4090's listed performance, it'd take 7000 Tesla A100s to beat ONE Bitmain Antminer S19 XP Hyd (255Th).
(It should be noted that A LOT of devices listed above are MUCH less performant than 1 Tesla A100 in terms of SHA256 hash computes.)
Simply put: It's not worth the time to create such a series of exploits when the resulting compute has a fraction of the compute power of an ASIC.
Consequentially, that means that the target of focus should be on ASIC miners themselves. However, there're several obstacles there as well:
1) Most miners (especially large miners) are mostly running the same Linux servers to control the ASIC miners. That means that the miners share the same exploit surface as AWS/Azure/Google Cloud/anyone using Linux, and benefit from the same security patches they're getting.
2) Limited surface area: ASIC miners are designed to have the bare minimum functionality to perform their sole job: compute SHA256 hashes. The consequential area of attack is limited & can be made impossible to attack with such restrictions on what the ASIC miner accepts.
3) The large miners have proper firewalls & networks in place to isolate each ASIC miner from each other via vLANs, making proliferation across the system harder to perform & easier to detect.
> Bitcoin proponents love to pretend it’s undefeatable and confuse IT in government with offensive capabilities.
See outlined offensive strategies above, & the realities of achieving such a target.
> They also liked to think it was anonymous until researchers put in a modicum of effort to show how it’s not.
The privacy issue was noted in Satoshi's whitepaper [0]:
[0]> The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of individual trades, the "tape", is made public, but without telling who the parties were.
[0]> Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner.
> They get the strategy of the attack fundamentally wrong. They think it’s to take over Bitcoin. It’s not. Driving value to zero is sufficient. And that is a much different case (making transactions take longer and longer, disrupting on-ramps and off-ramps, doing hostile take overs of data centers running mining operations, perhaps in conjunction with other governments, having spies infiltrate these groups, etc etc etc).
That case is definitely different, which is why it's separate from the attacks mentioned above. What's mentioned here is a fiat attack, wherein the cutoff of exchanges in/out of BTC is targeted, with varied results. The solution for this is the proliferation of BTC in place of USD for international settlements, which involves outreach into receptive governments that want an alternative system in case of problems with the existing western fiat regime.
> As the xkcd joke goes, your super duper cryptography is no match for a guy with a $5 wrench.
The axiom for this is that the person can be affected by a $5 wrench in the first place, which is not assured. It also assumes that the person being targeted has sole control over a given system, which is also not 100% assured.
So isn’t this just regular money with a bunch of extra steps?
Sure the government can’t print bitcoin anymore than you or I can but.. the no devaluation angle is kind of meh in the face of its volatility and number of high profile frauds. No one should be sitting with a million dollars in the bank. Dollar denominated assets are a better inflation hedge than BTC.
As we saw from the SVB weekend of tweets, none of the VCs who were going to reinvent the banking system with crypto actually understood how the existing one works, so...
What is this world coming to when Crypto renegades can no longer flee to Montenegro using falsified documents? This must somehow be seen as yet another nail in the coffin of Big centralized fiat currency. /s
Fun fact: Montenegro has the longest serving head of state in Europe, Mile Djukanovic, probably making even Lukashenko of Belorus jealous. But don't worry, despite widespread accusations and suspicions of corruption, nepotism, and even drug trafficking, he is our ally... and hence not a dictator
His party didn't win the most votes in the 2020 elections, though, so he's currently only the President. The president is, like in many other European countries, not very powerful. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_%C4%90ukanovi%C4%87
Usually, in a system with both, the Prime Minister is head of government (which is more powerful) and the President is head of state which typically has ceremonial precedence but less practical power.
There's considerable variations, though, and some starkly exceptional Presidential systems that have an official called a Prime Minister (having both is more typical of a parliamentary republic).
1. Presidential republics - President is both head of state and head of government. No Prime Minister. Examples: US, most Latin American countries
2. Parliamentary republics - President is head of state, Prime Minister is head of government. President is mostly a symbolic figurehead with little real power; if they have any real power at all, it is generally only exercisable in times of constitutional crisis. Examples: Ireland, Malta, Germany, Austria, Israel
3. Semi-presidential republics. President is head of state, Prime Minister is head of government. Both have real substantive powers. Often, the PM is in charge of domestic policy, the President is in charge of military and foreign affairs. Examples: France, Russia, Finland (traditionally at least, it has been becoming more parliamentary)
Montenegro is officially considered parliamentary not semipresidential. However, the boundary between the two is not always clearcut - there is a near infinity of ways to divide power between a President and PM, and some parliamentary republics have much more powerful presidents than others
There are also oddball republics which don’t fit into any of those categories, like Switzerland (collective head of state) or San Marino (two equal heads of state at the same time)
> A head of state (or chief of state) is the public persona who officially embodies a state[1] in its unity and legitimacy. Depending on the country's form of government and separation of powers, the head of state may be a ceremonial figurehead or concurrently the head of government and more [...]
Yep they're not the same, but usually the head of government is the head of state in presidential systems.
[edit] In fact... "President is a common title for the head of state in most republics. The president of a nation is, generally speaking, the head of the government and the fundamental leader of the country or the ceremonial head of state." [1]
I didn’t say anyone was wrong, it was just an observation. Either way the only delta is that I would consider the head of state more important/powerful than the head of government who is more active. Just a perspective thing.
Russia post-2000 is another example, though in that case it is probably more accurate to say power is mostly concentrated in Putin whether he is PM or President, not a particular office.
> despite widespread accusations and suspicions of corruption, nepotism, and even drug trafficking, he is our ally... and hence not a dictator
Being a dictator means [1] to have absolute power. There are dictators that are friendly with the west and others that are not so much. Use of the term is orthogonal to whether or not a given country is an ally (other than that word choice can have ramifications)
Montenegro is regarded by a number of rankings [2] as being a hybrid regime, i.e. somewhere in between authoritarian and democratic. The results of the 2020 election [3] match that.
The point that the parent was making was that "dictator" has a very negative connotation, and the cynical take is that if the West likes you, they wouldn't call you something negative, even when that's what you are. So he's wink "not a dictator" wink.
Right, but the point of the comment you answered to, is that this cynical take does not work if Montenegro does not actually happen to be a dictatorship, friendly to the west or not.
Note that I have absolutely no idea whether Montenegro is or isn't a dictatorship, but the intention of all commenters here was clear.
finally ! also interesting tidbit from the montenegro article do kwon after saying was not on the lam from leo was traveling with falsified documents. montenegro waiting for interpol/s.korea to confirm do's identity
Wrong country to hide. Montenegro is a Nato member, and a US ally, and will do whatever the US say.
Dritan Abazovic (the prime minister) is himself half Albanian, half Montenegrin, and he is very pro western. You can't hide in pro US countries.
He should have maybe taken a train to Serbia (not a US ally), then a plane to Russia and hide there.
Ps. For some reason criminals think small countries are safe, but capturing criminals like this, that are most wanted by the US, is a huge political win for the small countries, (brownie points with the US) and they will do whatever it takes to get them.
Best countries to hide are larger countries that are not fully US aligned (think Brazil), or US hostile (Russia, etc)
The main reason why you shouldn't hide in Montenegro is that everyone knows everyone. You can be found in 5 min if there's a political will.
When Covid started, it was brought to Montenegro by a tourist group which went to Spain. Very soon everyone knew by name who was in that group. Even worse, when Covid spread a bit, government published names of all people who were in self-isolation. Highly unconstitutional, yet highly effective in a relativelly small comunity. With this and other strict measures Montenegro managed to be Covid free in summer 2020 - possibly the only country in Europe at a time. Of course, it quickly fell apart as soon as strict measures were lifted.
So this is why you shouldn't hide in small countries. Only way to hide is to buy your stay there and I assume it can't be cheap if you're really wanted.
I would not be surprised to see an indictment being unsealed within the next few days. You can bet most of these crypto criminals are under US indictment if they defrauded Americans. They're just sealed until they are arrested somewhere.
For example, on Jan 7 the operator of "Bitzlato" flew to Miami. He was arrested and DOJ unsealed his indictment the following day.
It's interesting to me that this is the current lay of the land. I've been to MNE many, many times and in my day it was a common belief that it was a favorite haunt for wealthy individuals who weren't able to get into the EU proper (and places like Monaco, Cannes, etc.)
Do those people think that Montenegro won't give them to US? I've seen a few mentions of Montenegro in some American TV shows and they always say "The X has escaped to Montenegro...", "Montenegro doesn't have extradition treaty with US...". That's not true, and it was never true. Montenegro just can't sue them in Montenegrin court, because of the treaty that Montenegro can sue American citizens in American courts.
Even when they were joint state with Serbia they would have been covered by 1899 extradition treaty with US (see Artukovic case which was applied retroactively for crimes on territory not under Serbian jurisdiction in 1899, even if you reject that it would be 1918-2006)
"SEC investigations are civil, not criminal. The SEC can charge individuals and entities for violating the federal securities laws and seek remedies such as monetary penalties, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, injunctions, and restrictions on an individual’s ability to work in the securities industry or to serve as an officer or director of a public company, but the SEC cannot put people in jail. Enforcement may refer potential criminal cases to criminal law enforcement authorities for investigation or coordinate SEC investigations with criminal investigations involving the same conduct. If a person is convicted of a criminal violation of the securities laws, a court may sentence that person to serve time in jail."
Keep up, What we actually do when travelling is use a Tornado Mixer. We slice ourselves into thousands of pieces and those pieces are semi-randomly mixed with the pieces of other crypto heroes, who travel by different routes. Only after reaching our final destination are we un-mixed, and sometimes not even that.
By the way, I love having one brown arm and one pink arm.
Even better, now nobody knows which parts of you are criminal and which parts of you are innocent, so no doubt you get treated like an angel by everyone!
He’ll be watching his back in prison, he’s got access to billions of dollars — or, at least, is perceived to. He has wronged a lot of people, too. Also, prison is a one way street: if he stays on the run, and some day things do get to the point where he would feel safer in prison, he could hand himself in. Once he’s in prison, he has no choice left.
The South Korean justice system is notoriously lenient on white-collar crime, and it's exceedingly rare even for violent criminals to be murdered in a Korean prison. The popular perception is that you can spend a couple of years in prison and enjoy your ill-gotten gains for the rest of your life with no further repercussions, provided you've hidden your money well enough. Guess what, the whole point of crypto is that it's easy to hide.
A few years ago, a man named Son Jung-woo was arrested for running what was the largest child porn site in the world back then. His sentence? 18 months. The U.S. wanted to put him away for life, but the Korean courts would not deport him.
I'm sure Do Kwon would rather hand himself in to the Korean authorities than risk going to prison in any other country.
>A few years ago, a man named Son Jung-woo was arrested for running what was the largest child porn site in the world back then. His sentence? 18 months. The U.S. wanted to put him away for life, but the Korean courts would not deport him.
This was the subject of the "Welcome to Video" episode of Darknet Diaries[1]. IIRC, he couldn't be extradited to the US because he was facing a lawsuit in Korea, one filed by his own father seemingly for precisely this side effect.
Compared to bank accounts, real estate, and offshore corporations, it is certainly easier to hide your crypto (or rather, hide the fact that it's your crypto) if you know what you're doing. Heck, even the word "crypto" means "hidden".
Do Kwon might not be any good at sneaking though airports, but he certainly knows his way around the crypto scene. He has had plenty of time to launder his coins. In fact, he's probably had more time to plan and execute an exit scheme than any of the other crooks who got busted lately. So I wouldn't underestimate how well he has hidden his embezzled billions.
And what’s the main use of cash from the perspective of the US government? And what makes cash have value? And what has been the history of money thus far that has led to this junction?
Hacker News is especially hostile toward crypto. Most likely, people here won’t even bother to engage in an honest conversation. “It’s a scam, it’s for crime” is the consensus. It’s frustrating when you’re surrounded by “confident idiots”, people who are uneducated about a topic that portray confidence. As I’ve gotten older, I just care less about educating people for free.
Bitcoin is going nowhere. Time itself will teach the naysayers. HN will be angry, in denial, etc as the trend of bitcoin adoption plays out. But they can’t be so ignorant as to stop it. In other words, their education is not required.
If the purpose of the confiscation is simply to freeze the funds, it seems many agencies can do so. If they're patient enough, they'll eventually catch the owner when the funds move.
The courts for the most part. Or at least that is the public perception.
The sentencing guidelines maintained by the courts have all sorts of criteria for reducing the sentence that can be compounded to skew the result heavily towards the low end of the legally mandated range, and many times even below the legal minimum. For example, people who were drunk when they committed crimes often get away with lower sentences because "they probably weren't aware of what they were doing." Bonus points if you have a wife and kids to feed, pay a token amount to your victims as compensation, get your mom to write a letter to the judge, and/or act like you're sorry on your day in court. Some of these criteria have good reasons, but allow them to be compounded and that's how you end up with "you're guilty of raping your coworker, but you may go home."
So why didn’t he hand himself in? He’s been on the run since last year, he has had numerous opportunities to hand himself in before being arrested in Montenegro.
He probably believed he could have his cake and eat it too. Turns out he's not as clever as he thought. Now the only thing he has some amount of control over is which jurisdiction he will be handed over to.
Any jurisdiction that has filed charges against him and has an extradition agreement with Montenegro. His country of citizenship probably has priority, though.
If he doesn't want to be extradited, he can delay the process for quite a while like Julian Assange did.
Korean prisons make US prisons look like the Ritz Carlton.
This may have changed since I lived there in the early 2000s, but they shave your head and make you perform hard labor for 12 hours a day, usually farming to raise most of the food that you will eat while incarcerated.
In the South Korean Army, seniors beat juniors with impunity and abuse them so brazenly that US soldiers get briefings to "mind your own business" when they arrive and again before any joint operations with the ROKA-- and the prisons are worse. My roommate when I lived there was a KATUSA, a Korean soldier who spoke English who was embedded in the US Army, and he was happy every single day because every Korean male has to be in the army and "in the US army they don't beat the shit out of you".
In the US a fraudster like Kwon will go to a facility like FCI Otisville.
You can see the prisoners toiling in the fields along every road a prison is located at, and there were several along the routes I drove weekly.
The US-Korean SOFA (status of forces agreement) was amended in the mid-2000s to segregate US military personnel in Korean prisons from the general population and:
1. Allow them to bathe at least once every five days
2. Prevent forced labor requirements from exceeding 12 hours per day
3. Provide food prepared to the standard of the US military in lieu of Korean food
4. Provide undergarments like underwear and socks to supplement their prison-issued smocks
Prior to this change labor often exceeded 12 hours per day, the physically larger US personnel were collapsing due to malnutrition, bathing was not permitted, nor were socks and underwear.
When I was there, pre-SOFA amendment the briefings were very detailed about the conditions under which prisoners lived as part of a "scared straight" initiative-- "Don't fuck up or you'll wish you were in Leavenworth, here is the shit, with photos, of what South Korean prisoners go through."
A British consulate guide notes the meagre diet and harsh conditions prisoners operate under.
>Meals are adequate, but very Spartan. British Nationals sometimes cannot fully adjust to the Korean diet. Funds from the prison work programme can be used to buy a small quantity of supplemental foods.
>The Korean authorities do not tolerate dissent from prisoners (e.g. assaulting or talking back to guards, or for refusing to co-operate or follow instructions). Their methods for handling dissent can be harsh, and on occasion has resulted in physical abuse. Such abuse is unacceptable, and we will take it up with the Korean authorities on your behalf if you so wish. You may also raise it with the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).
This sounds like Hollywood reality for white collar.
Here is actual reality:
> "Hey Do, I just want to let you know, jail is not that bad," Shkreli said. "So don't fret – I hope it doesn't happen. If it does happen ... it's not that bad."
The lesson learned from Ross Ulbricht is that there's a good chance it's Leavenworth for non-violent internet crime.
Edit: per usual folks come out of the woodwork to accuse Ross of murder-for-hire despite the fact he was not convicted of any murder related charge, only generic conspiracies for which the overt act could have been a number of options (such as drug distribution). The jury never specifically said the overt act they convicted the conspiracy was murder for hire, yet the judge sentenced him as if he were guilty of that.
Ross literally hired hitmen to kill someone who owed him money.
The fact that he didn’t know it was an undercover agent (pro tip if you hire a hit man and you aren’t customarily in ‘that life’ you are always hiring an undercover agent) is irrelevant.
He still required and received ‘proof’ of the deed, a photo of the aftermath, staged of course.
He was even cold blooded with the ‘collateral damage’ of the intended victims family being home when the hit was to go down.
All this was taken into account at sentencing.
The attempt to whitewash Ross into a sympathetic internet hero figure like Aaron Swartz is transparent and wrong.
I think the people constantly repeating this line don't understand how prosecutions actually work. Since all crimes have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to get a conviction, and some take more work/paper trail to do this than others, if someone is up on a bunch of charges, prosecutors will order them by easiest-to-hardest to prove, and then if the easiest ones are sufficient to put the person away for life, they'll focus on those and discard the rest.
This happens all the time. It is not unique to Ulbricht, and does not really imply anything about whether the contract killing request did or didn't happen.
Ross was convicted on the generic conspiracy (which does not depend on violent acts) and then sentenced on preponderance of the evidence of the individual possible overt act that one of the conspiracy acts was murder for hire. Not sentenced based on beyond reasonable doubt he did the murder for hire.
The fact is the way "prosecution actually works" is you accuse someone of a generic conspiracy, show some element of the conspiracy was beyond a reasonable doubt true (like drug distribution), and then go to sentencing considering any element by preponderance of the evidence. It's a chilling short-circuiting of justice. Ross wasn't convicted of violent acts beyond a reasonable doubt, he was convicted of a continuing criminal enterprise where a judge thought it was more likely than not involved murder-for-hire.
But that's exactly the point: Ulbricht was not convicted of a violent crime (regardless of what people here believe or don't believe he actually did), and yet he was sentenced as if he had been.
That is literally the only point the ancestor poster was making: that if you have the means to run, it might not be so cushy a plan to turn yourself in for a non-violent crime, if you're assuming you'll get a sentence of less than 10 years at a reasonably safe low-security prison.
And in this particular case, the interesting point is: even if the prosecution didn't believe they could get a conviction for possible murder-for-hire charges, they somehow still got the desired final outcome: a sentence seemingly harsher than what would fit the crime he actually was convicted of.
(Then again, if your "only" crimes are non-violent/white-collar, maybe it is safe to assume you'll get a cushy prison sentence.)
Because the other stuff he did was also enough to put him away forever.
The better question is: "Why are people so insistant on whitewashing him?" Do they not think that hiring a contract killer is, like, no big deal? Do they regularly pretend to hire them? Are they just closing ranks around him because they think he's part of their in-tribe?
I think the point is that justice shouldn't be arbitrary like that.
If you are convicted of certain crimes, your sentence -- even within the range appropriate for those crimes -- should not take into account other crimes that the person was suspected of committing, but it couldn't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
That's the entire point of evidentiary standards: in the first place, it's to avoid putting people in jail at all if we can't prove they did it to a particular level of confidence. But we should also not be inflating sentences (again, even if the end result is still within the guided range for the convicted crimes) just because we think they did other, worse things too.
Maybe Ulbrict did deserve a much longer sentence. But the prosecution apparently could not prove the more serious crimes. His sentence should not be influenced by things the prosecution could not prove. I'm sure there are other defendants who were convicted of crimes, but suspected of worse crimes that they didn't actually commit in reality. Maybe Ulbricht got what he deserved, but these other people got worse than they deserved.
> Do they not think that hiring a contract killer is, like, no big deal?
To sum up: what people think about this is entirely irrelevant. He was not convicted for hiring a contract killer, so that should have zero bearing on his sentence. Even if his sentence was in the range appropriate for what he was convicted for, it's a range, and if his sentence was pushed higher in that range because of other things the judge believed he did, that's not justice.
> not evidence he was convicted of anything but non-violent internet crime
I'm not sure where one is supposed to find sympathy for someone convicted of a crime, and looking likely to have attempted violent crimes, having their sentence strengthened on the latter's basis (within the confines of the primary sentence's guidelines).
Should Al Capone have been treated like a usual tax dodger? Of course not. He's a high risk to others in his prison as well as to society. We don't require beyond reasonable doubt for sentencing because it doesn't make sense.
If you're convicted of crime X, you should be sentenced base on crime X, not on what other things everyone believes you actually did, but for which sufficient evidence can't be found to convict.
You seem to be advocating for a legal system where it's fine to punish people for things they haven't actually been convicted of doing. Regardless of what we may think of Al Capone, or "know" that he did, I think I would much rather let an Al-Capone-type off with the comparatively light sentence of a tax-dodger, than risk a harsh sentence for someone who didn't do the unproven things that people nevertheless "know" they did. Because of course that will happen.
The genius of many conspiracy charges is the crime is basically "did bad stuff" where "bad stuff" is anything from drug distribution to murder.
So whether ross killed or distributed the drugs, he was guilty of X.
The genius of the conspiracy charge is the jury can be convinced of drug distribution but not the murder. And the judge could be convinced it was murder and not distribution. But they both fall under "bad stuff" so the judge isn't even wrong when they sentence him for "bad stuff" as murder is "bad stuff."
The fact that the elements of bad stuff for the judge is different than elements of bad stuff for the jury is almost an after thought. And hey, you can't say he didn't do bad stuff.
Taken this to the extreme, I wonder if someday they will have a crime that is just called "felony." The jury just has to be convinced you smoked a left handed cigarette, at which point obviously you're guilty of "felony." Then the judge can promptly forget about the cigarette and decide on preponderance of the evidence just what elemenst of "felony" you comitted and sentence that based on what she thinks is more likely than not.
Should Al Capone have been treated like a usual tax dodger?
Of course. Al Capone being cited so often is precisely why I believe he should have been treated like a usual tax dodger for the tax crimes and treated like a murderer for any murder convictions. I would much rather Al Capone go free than short-circuit justice in this way.
I'm failing to see the short circuiting. Tax dodging sentencing guidelines have a range. Capone was sentenced within that range. Same as Ulbricht. We don't re-hear a trial in front of a jury every time someone is sentenced because the jury has already rendered the verdict.
Sentencing is a complicated subject which balances not only justice, but also the safety of the prisoner and their fellow prisoners.
Do you truly see nothing wrong with creating a generic conspiracy charge, showing beyond a reasonable doubt that some element of that conspiracy was true, and then saying "sentence him for any element the judge finds true by preponderance of the evidence, no matter if that was the element(s) on which the jury convicted him."
I can't say I'm thrilled that the standard is guilty beyond reasonable doubt, unless we find you guilty of some other element, in which case murder-for-hire magically becomes preponderance of evidence. I will say the justice system and society agrees with you, so I acknowledge this is one of those times I just have to sit here with a profound sadness about something over which I have little control.
> the standard is guilty beyond reasonable of a doubt, unless we find you guilty of some other element, in which case murder-for-hire magically becomes preponderance of evidence
You're dodging the fact that the sentence was given for the convicted crime within that crime's sentencing guidelines. Juries don't give sentences, judges do. What if not looking at additional factors do you think the judge is supposed to be doing?
If the crimes Ulbricht had been convicted of had a 10-year maximum, and the judge sentenced him to more on the basis of a preponderance of evidence, I'd see your point. But that isn't what happened.
But I think the people in this subthread believe that the judge's possible belief that Ulbricht had committed other, violent crimes influenced his sentencing decision.
That is, in the absence of suspicion of other crimes, he would have gotten a much less severe sentence.
I get that judges have to use all sorts of discretion when doing sentencing, and despite the "points system" around that, still have some leeway. My view is that judges should not be looking at other crimes that they may believe the defendant has committed -- even if they were not charged or not convicted -- and include that information in their sentencing decisions. I can't say for certain, of course, that's what happened here.
Maybe in Ulbrict's case, justice actually was served. Maybe he did those other things, and in a perfect world, sufficient evidence would have been found, and he would have been convicted of more serious charges. But we don't live in that perfect world, and for every Ulbricht who gets this "correct" treatment, there are certainly several others who get an overly-harsh sentence (still within guidelines, but harsher than is warranted) because people believe they did other stuff that couldn't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
> Tax dodging sentencing guidelines have a range. Capone was sentenced within that range.
Presumably the implication here is that he was sentenced at the high end of that range. Was his sentence appropriate for the severity of his tax dodge, or was it pushed to the higher end of the range because of his other crimes, that he was never convicted of?
Just like most habitual criminals, even serial murderers — focusing limited resources on the easier-to-convict and sufficient-jail-time crimes. Nothing says they have to prosecute every single crime. So, yes, just because it isn't prosecuted, doesn't mean there wasn't a crime committed, it just didn't result in a conviction.
They already got a life in prison and forfeiting $183,961,921 [0]. They don't need more, and there are other criminals to prosecute.
Bigly difference between a few years at camp jail vs. life or decade + at medium or worse facility. Significant white collar fraud that entails a longer than 10 year sentence would likely be served at a medium, not a camp, due to flight risk. I think Do Kwan would get the latter (assuming he is extradited to US, charged, sentenced, etc.).
I suspect that a lot of decent people go to jail nowadays. That would explain why jails aren't so bad and why different facilities are so inconsistent. I can imagine a day when good people will be in jail and bad people will be outside running them. I think in some countries, this is not far from reality.
> Have you ever been in a jail cell? Almost every day in the US you see someone who decides to go out with guns blazing rather than go back.
... what? Who are these people going out in a blaze of glory rather than returning to prison?
Considering there are millions of ex-cons, many who will be repeat offenders, we should be seeing many more of these people going out "guns blazing" rather than returning to prison, yeah? Or did you pull this fun fact from a viewing of The Town?
I'm honestly shocked I'm forced to even cite that this happens. Although I suppose if someone has lived in America and made it to adulthood without acknowledging the stories they aren't going to be convinced.
Shootings in my local news basically fall into two categories, drug related disputes on the bad side of town, or people shooting at police when they show up.
This returns a decent number of relevant and recent results:
That only tells us about when it does happen. We also need to know how many times it doesn't happen. If we see 250 suspects per year shooting at cops when served a warrant, but 50,000 surrendering relatively peacefully, then I don't know that we have a big problem.
Sure, 250 per year might support the statement "Almost every day in the US you see someone who decides to go out with guns blazing rather than go back", but that doesn't mean it's common.
Put another way, 250 people doing this per year could be considered "almost every day", but I'm not sure 250 people in a country of more than 350M doing something exceedingly, dangerously irrational is cause for concern, or even more than a shrug.
Also: your search result page doesn't say what you think it does. I clicked through a few of them, and many of them just talk about warrants in general (even search warrants, not arrest warrants) where no shooting occurred at all. On one of them I noticed that the word "shot" appeared in the "related stories" links at the bottom, in a case that had nothing to do with an arrest warrant or police.
That doesn’t make them any less true? I think you’re confusing selection bias with the fact that something happened.
Say a news outlet says “X happened and it’s bad”. Another news outlet says “X happened and it’s good.” Both have their respective slant. Fine. But BOTH say X happened. Stuff that’s not newsworthy doesn’t go into news. You can’t just dismiss facts with prejudice as in “Don’t look up”.
The thing is that "warrant served without gunfire" doesn't get clicks, so it doesn't get reported. Looking at news sites tells you nothing at all about the relative prevalence of those two cases.
The relative prevalence is irrelevant. The claim was about shootings by felons on parole preferring to be killed by police rather than going back to jail. That claim was used to support the hypothesis that jails are horrible. The claim was not A is more common than B.
Reporting outlier anecdotes is more profitable than reporting systematic data analysis.
Outliers are true in the sense of factual, but false in the sense of accurate. The "Don't Look Up" metaphor applied here would be that the media is telling you to look, when reality is that you shouldn't.
> Justin Sun and Do Kwon are the worst of the space...
Among the worst, I would say; the other three top spots go to Sam Bankman Fried of FTX, Changpeng Zhao of Binance, and whatever specter is running Tether.
Michael Saylor , Cathie Wood, Balaji, and Chamath, should also be included. The people with huge platforms who promote crypto are as culpable as the exchanges that sell it.
lol, trust me, I've been following very closely too since about 2017. I think these folks are S tier. Not that there's not a ton more. It's hard to point to someone who did more damage to the space than Kwon in terms of sheer notional value and confidence destruction. I mostly follow this space for the drama and crime so I'm pretty up to date on the, er, personalities involved.
Of course, I've dug through the history. There's some really good stuff in the early days, the pirateat40 / Trendon Shavers scam is a classic. I wasn't there for it, of course, before my time. Learning about the history of the space is super fun though, especially when it has the collective memory of a goldfish :)
Yes. Add to your list the seizure of Signature Bank, and this week’s rumors of Operation Choke Point 2.0 focused on keeping commercial banks out of crypto
Boggles the mind that people are actually taking people like Nic Carter and Barney Frank at face value (that latter one is particularly egregious considering he's literally a former director of the bank) when they say that the FDIC seized a bank with $110 billion in holdings solely to target $4 billion in crypto. Believe it or not, the Fed doesn't care enough about crypto to start a regional banking crisis and blow up hundreds of billions of dollars.
Even better; New York State absolutely has no reason to set off a regional banking crisis and shut down a bank with $110 billion in deposits over $4 billion in crypto.
The dinosaurs at the FED feel just the same as all those on this site that blather on bitterly about crypto waiting for it die. I can’t wait to read the salty howling at end of the year when crypto is at an all time high.
You’re correct that this community will be salty as bitcoin reaches value milestones such as $100,000/coin. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of laughing at their misery. But it would be much much more enjoyable for me to see bitcoin “click” for them.
It takes the effort of thinking deeply about what money is, where it came from, how it’s used geo-politically, how it’s used against populations, etc. it’s a lot of effort, honestly.
But let’s not cheer on bitcoin’s USD value. The real victory is when it’s detached and we stop comparing bitcoin to garbage fiat.
"Everything But the Crypto: Flagstar Scoops Up Failed Signature Bank. While the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) denied reports that any buyer of Signature Bank would need to divest its crypto business, the buyer, New York Community Bancorp-owned Flagstar Bank, did anyway."
Flagstar decided ‘shit no, I’m not going to take over a book of shitty crypto assets valued at god knows what they could be a massive liability’.
The key validator here is that they also dumped a heap of mortgages and loans that they considered toxic. The value of these other assets that Flagstar decided to not write into their purchase agreement was $60 billion under current accounting.
They just decided that the crypto is no good. Along with 60 bn worth of other stuff. And they can stick that with the FDIC to deal with.
Justin Sun is a free man, and its possible he will remain free if he complies (pays a big fine). SEC charging someone with fraud is not the same as the feds indicting him.
I bet someone sold him a bridge(we brought off customs and you will sail through) for a big sum. Of course he cannot verify till he got there to see himself.
tl;dr they arrested Ignatova's head of compliance for OneCoin
I hope this woman has knowledge of the whereabouts of Ignatova. Disgusting that you can get away with running a billion dollar ponzi, and get away with the loot too.
I mean to be fair, if you’re going to do a Ponzi, you better make sure it pays you at least a billion dollars because you are definitely going to (a) be unable to access some probably very large portion of it, and (b) have to go completely off the grid. If your Ponzi pays out like 100k, you’re going straight to jail.
The grapevine is of the opinion that Ignatova has spent the last few years on the bottom of the sea, so that'd definitely be a plausible explanation as to how she's not been captured yet.
Not really. If someone lays low and uses new IDs they can hide for a very long time, decades sometimes. A good rule of thumb is to avoid areas where there are police/checkpoints, like airports.
Weev went to transnistria, stayed the 1 year it takes to get the passport, and then somehow is living in Ukraine off that passport despite the fact it isn't even recognized by Ukraine. There's also several other 'microstates' that recognize Transnistria's passport, so presumably once you have it you can stay in one of those places. If a fugitive doesn't mind living in a bumfuck mountain or desert with nothing but a cow and a woman they'll probably be fine.
I don't know. You could ask him. Look up @rabite. The dude is exiled from the banking system so I doubt he'd be too eager to give up his properties in Ukraine.
Transnistria is a sliver of Moldova that declared itself independent after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It's one of the tiny unrecognized statelets that's almost entirely propped up by the Russian government as a way of maintaining frozen conflicts.
(I really do mean sliver: it's 20 miles wide at its widest point; even The Gambia--a country which exists along the shores of the river of the same name--manages to get wider).
The conflict gained a resurgence of relevance in the past year after the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine, over fears that the Russian military might attempt to launch an invasion axis from Transnistria, or at least seek to establish a continuous corridor from Transnistria to Russia. And even more recently, the Moldovan governmental instability has also fueled fears that Russia might try to use Transnistria as leverage in Moldova.
It's a mess that's not important enough for anyone to fix. An international incident that has been frozen in time. One of the last surviving fragments of the cold war. Neighbouring countries recognize its documents because not doing so would be even more of a goddamn headache.
If he flew from Serbia to Montenegro it would have just been completely dumb, crossing the land border would have been much safer for him. I suspect he was trying to leave for somewhere very far away but his Passport did not fool the airport staff
Istanbul might not be an awful shout tbh, though if I was wanted internationally and I'd successfully entered somewhere Montenegro I'd probably sit tight for a while. It's a small country, but it's quite nice and you could probably fly under the radar for a while if you kept your nose clean.
The question is why he wouldn't cross the land border and then fly from there. Customs is rarely checking passports as thoroughly on the way out as on the way in. The thinking was probably the risk was the same since he was entering the airport anyway, but failed to account for risk of having passport checked in then out instead of just out.
Only thing about a land border between Serbia and Montenegro is that they might get even more suspicious than an airport about WhyTF a random Korean is there.
Problem is leaving at the airport, if they check and see your entry isn’t registered anywhere. Still could work if you plan on staying forever, hiking out, or flying private because only normies can do bad things and need to have their movements subject to scrutiny.
I have a feeling most of the way it happens is someone just says they are going to a border town and just ... don't stop. IF the pilot doesn't care about losing his license (i.e. they're being paid Do Kwon kind of money) and those on the flight manifest aren't returning, doesn't seem like there's much they'd be able to do.
It's always greed and hubris that does these people in. Who in their right mind would get on an international flight with an Interpol arrest warrant? He could have disappeared off to the countryside and lived in obscurity, but no. He went to Montenegro.
Same people who run these kind of scams are often narcissistic. They are “so smart” they got away with the first crime, they believe they have a magic touch and can get away with anything.
Plus these are not the type of people who would enjoy being disconnected from high society, they need external validation.
> I read it as suggesting that Do Kwon’s decision to take up residence there contributed to the corruption theory
"A place with so much corruption" reads to me as a statement of fact, not perception. (Montenegro clocks in between China and Jamaica on the latter [1].)
Cmon. What a bunch of jokers.
I think it's a hugely bearish case for crypto that none of the crypto guys have been able to use it to avoid authorities for more than a few weeks/months.
That's literally one of its alleged use cases. "The government can't control it".
SBF, Do Kwon, the Bitmex guys, how's that worked out for everyone?