[eigenvalue]

Sounds like a great idea for a service that manages this automatically for users (but using a more reasonable amount of BTC, like 0.01 BTC or ~$300 worth-- it has to be enough to be worth stealing I suppose!). Then it would automatically do the monitoring of that address and send the user the alert that they should change all their passwords when the coins move. If it happens to just that one account, then its likely the user's account was hacked. If it happens to a bunch of accounts at the same time, it's more likely that the password manager service was hacked. Like a canary with a bounty attached to it.

[sigmar]

Just spitballing on the idea of this being a service- Wonder if it would work for the canary-creator to also have a bot that watches the btc mem pool, and if it sees the .5 btc from this address being spent, it front-runs it with a transactions that has a much high transaction fee and directs the funds to a new safe wallet. Probably some risk of the bot failing to front-run, but otherwise it would have all the benefits of a $15k canary without the downside of losing all of the money.

[eigenvalue]

Interesting idea. Would also be cool to try to trace back the IP of the first node that announced the transaction to the network so you could try to figure out who the thief is (assuming they aren't using a VPN).

[nvy]

This exact service exists, and has been featured on HN at least once!