> There is no crypto scheme, no algorithm, no possible arrangement of private keys and Merkle trees that can escape the reality of men with guns.
On the contrary. It's the only case where maths can defend vs men with guns.
Multi sig schemes spread over different people over several continents make the "men with guns" thing very difficult. Or multisig but m-out-of-n, with a dead beat: if after x weeks you don't hear of person A, person B and C move the coins to a new sig where person A isn't involved anymore.
There are also a shitloads of things you can do with smart contracts. For example you can have a smart contract where if person A's private key doesn't sign anything for more than x weeks ("blocks"), the funds are destroyed.
There also the whole plausible deniability thing: where it's impossible to know where a hardware unlocked with a hardware wallet is the real thing or not.
$5 wrench attack, here's my real password: take the 50 millions. Oops. Decoy. On the other password there's $2bn.
"We have a seizure warrant for your cryptocurrency."
"Ho ho! Good luck, gentlemen! For, you see, I've implemented a multi-signature scheme spread over different people across several continents which requires-"
(Lol. Sorry for the empty comment, but this FTX situation is just a comedy gift that keeps on giving. I imagine in 5 years we’ll still be discovering new things to find funny about it.)
Ten years ago when my crypto was worth barely anything I had an airgapped, full disk encrypted, RasPi which required a Shamir's Secret Sharing key arrangement to unlock as my cold storage... just because it was something fun to setup.
Here a multi-billion dollar enterprise has less sophisticated OpSec. Just... wow.
It was run by a dude who plays League of Legends on conference calls and openly encourages his employees to take amphetamines to increase their job performance.
I fear if Bad Guys want money and you tell them something like, "you can't get it, it's on multisig wallets with geographically distributed individuals in control", that's still a You problem and you've only bought yourself a little time before they come back to collect, and/or break your legs if they can't collect.
I may have to file this one under, "everyone wants to be a gangster until it's time to do gangster things"
"You can beat me all day, but it's impossible for me to fulfill your demands, you'd also need to beat these other four people, and they're located all over the globe."
Someone might be quite happy to engage squads in lots of countries to kidnap and beat everyone if the payout is billions of dollars, but it's a very different problem and e.g. the Bahamas government or some local thug won't be able to do it. I have no idea how large a cartel would need to be to have reliable operatives on the ground in lots of countries, and I'd assume if you're part of a group holding the keys to those amounts of cash, you're going into lockdown when two of your associates suddenly vanish.
Sure, but that's a tall order. The US cooperating with e.g. China, Russia and the EU to get everyone? Or the US running covert ops in China, Russia and the EU to take the money themselves? Both are a very different situation than the US simply sending a cop to some address and asking the person living there to please come with them to the station.
For criminals, it'll also be a huge operation, and it'll come with insane publicity which criminals typically don't like. Who's powerful enough and willing to potentially burn their existence in entire countries for such a payout, when they make billions a year?
There might be a sweet spot where the payoff is large but the notority is low (think about one criminal organization going after the other).
Unless there are street fights, people will not care that much.
Or perhaps political opponents in unstable countries.
On the government side the USs reach is far and criminals are not always willing (or able) to go beyond it. Maybe coordinating with China won't happen, but let's say Japan, mexico and 2 EU countries is not out of the ordinary.
There are busts happening almost every year on that scale
Sometimes the men with guns are also distributed across multiple continents, and the only way to protect yourself from them entails making a deal with other men with guns.
If you’re part of a multi signature scheme and you’re hiding from US authorities in, I dunno, China or Russia or Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iran, there’s (a) not much stopping Uncle Sam’s boys from sneaking up on you anyway if they’re sufficiently motivated and (b) some local men with guns whom you might need to deal with as well.
In reality it’s probably not worth it for the US to track you down to the ends of the earth and/or get the CIA involved if you’re just trying to sneak some ill-gotten money out of the country, and it’s a lot easier for one of your multi-signature holders not to get caught than for the authorities to simultaneously catch up with a quorum. And maybe your group includes some people who really don’t mind living the rest of their lives in these types of places.
But for those of you who live within the greater American empire, the price you pay for keeping that money out of Uncle Sam’s hands is going to include keeping it out of your hands and also you go to prison if you ever get caught. Which is probably a bad deal unless you’re a drug cartel or some other group that’s already sort of priced in that outcome.
> $5 wrench attack, here's my real password: take the 50 millions. Oops. Decoy. On the other password there's $2bn.
Somehow I don't see state actors falling for that, especially when they have a rough idea of the actual numbers involved, based on the shitton of angry people, some of which are very rich and very well connected, clamouring about it.
It's a solved problem, and has been since the first bitcoin paper. That no one read that and just heard "magic internet gold I can get rich from" is their problem and not mine.
You don't get rich quick off the bitcoin protocol however so we have people run places like FTX: centralize and get the big bucks because they provide convenience. Then act surprised when it goes tits up like every other centralized system.
Same thing with people not encrypting their emails or not using tor as a bridge to the internet. In short: if you're the type of person who doesn't have their own key, yeah, prepare to get wrenched. The rest of us can manage our exposure quite easily.
> > Hur hur, street smarts better than smart smarts.
I never said that, all I said was that this is not the BGP problem, it's the $5 wrench problem.
And it's not a solved problem, governments seize crypto all the time and people get tortured for their keys regularly. Just a few days ago the US picked up 50,000BTC.
All of crypto is a get rich quick scheme, but people want their winnings denominated in fiat which is why exchanges exist. It's hard to reconcile "best performing asset in history!!" with "you can't get rich off bitcoin."
> In short: if you're the type of person who doesn't have their own key, yeah, prepare to get wrenched. The rest of us can manage our exposure quite easily.
You have this completely reversed. If you're the type of person who does have their own keys prepare to get wrenched.
It probably looks like someone showing up with a court order, but government agents with the right to use violence to enforce court orders is a large portion of what gives such orders teeth.
Of course, violence isn't the only sort of coercion... but it's part of it.
The problem I've encountered with schemes like you're describing (such as encryption schemes with decoys) is that it also makes it impossible to verify that you've given everything up.
Say you give the attacker all of your bitcoins/data, they're now incentivized to continue punishing you in perpetuity regardless, since you could have provided a decoy.
> I mean: unless the attacker knows exactly how much coins you have,
They don't need to know the exact number. They need to have a rough idea of the number. In the most likely scenario, where a state wants access, they tend to have a pretty good idea, because they get that information from investors, state agencies, banks and seized records.
Well, it was back when crypto still colloquially meant cryptography, not cryptocurrency. Of course, in this case it's the same thing because cryptocurrency uses cryptography underneath.
It's pretty much just men enforcing court orders, particularly in the Bahamas.
Side note: its interesting how "men" has gone from sometimes being gender neutral to being almost exclusively male and how "man" has gone most of the way down the same path.
On the contrary. It's the only case where maths can defend vs men with guns.
Multi sig schemes spread over different people over several continents make the "men with guns" thing very difficult. Or multisig but m-out-of-n, with a dead beat: if after x weeks you don't hear of person A, person B and C move the coins to a new sig where person A isn't involved anymore.
There are also a shitloads of things you can do with smart contracts. For example you can have a smart contract where if person A's private key doesn't sign anything for more than x weeks ("blocks"), the funds are destroyed.
There also the whole plausible deniability thing: where it's impossible to know where a hardware unlocked with a hardware wallet is the real thing or not.
$5 wrench attack, here's my real password: take the 50 millions. Oops. Decoy. On the other password there's $2bn.