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).

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.

Re:Ghost transactions

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't traffic analysis easily cancel out normal 1:1 transactions? You gonna have to go the extra mile if you really want to stop traffic analysis. And why would you do that? Paper currency is still way better for anonymous transactions.

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?

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.

Iran/Contra 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the FBI busts the Silk Road and confiscates a few million USD bit coins. But a most of them are missing. Or are they? Chances are, the NSA got to them before the FBI did. They have the computing power, the skill, and the viruses. And there's on controlling legal authority, either. How many bit coins have they stolen? But why stop there? Chances are they've hacked into the federal reserve computers, too. Sequestration? Government shutdown? Not when the Ben Bernanke's printing press leads straight into your wallet.

a skeptic says "wow bitcoin is serious ". Hope thi

[raymorris]

I've poo-pooed Bitcoin before. If it's now at the point where there are $150 million transactions, that's significant. I sure hope the operators of that exchange don't disappear with the money, get hacked, or any of the other nastiness that seems to happen every couple of weeks. A $150 million heist would be a big deal, and damn few internet-connected systems are secure enough to thwart even moderately skilled crackers. For example, a certain national agency I'm familiar with that does cyber-security training is wide open to SQL injection and other attacks. I sure hope these bitcoin exchanges have better security than the agencies that set security standards have. If not, somebody's going to steal $150 million in bitcoins any day now, and that'll be a big deal.

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

[DamnStupidElf]

Financial markets like MtGox could easily maintain fractional reserves because many account-holders don't withdraw their entire balance of bitcoins every night. There is plenty of opportunity for the exchange to do whatever they want with a portion of the deposits. In essence "mtgox bitcoins" are already a fiat currency that are payable in real bitcoins upon request. They just haven't started paying out at less than 1 bitcoin per mtgox bitcoin yet, like half of the other bitcoin exchanges/banks/whatever have when they got hacked.

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

[kumanopuusan]

To the average consumer who isn't necessarily aware of being tracked or of the fees paid to payment processors, it probably seems just like a credit card payment. To the person or business on the other end of the transaction, however, the two couldn't be more different. There's no approval process to accept bitcoin, there's no third party to charge processing fees and there are no disputed charges. In a lot of ways, it is more like cash.

Beyond all of that, bitcoin is more interesting as a demonstration of what is possible and an indicator what will soon be possible. It's shown that individuals can cooperate for their own benefit at a global scale, without the need for government intervention. Maybe it's naive to expect that technology can effect substantial change in global politics, but you can't blame people for being excited about the potential to reduce the power of nationalist governments that wage wars and build prisons, and reduce the harm done by stupid, wasteful and corrupt politicians.