15 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 26.5 ms ] thread
Dont we know this by now?
This seems to be inaccurate. The twins could choose to simply sell the private key in a private transaction. Assuming they didn't create one wallet with 50,000 bitcoin, they could even sell portions. This gets them paid AND puts the onus for moving the coins to a new address on the new owner. They could exit in 5 minutes if another billionaire wanted their coins bad enough.
> simply sell the private key in a private transaction

Then why not sell it three times to three separate parties? And also keep a copy of the key and engage in some spending from the wallet themselves?

I'm not saying that these particular people would engage in such trickery. But I would be very wary of any proposition to sell me bitcoins in an out-of-band transaction of this kind.

Winklevosses
Didn't you see "The Social Network?" Winklevi! ;-)
Touche (with an accent aigu) -- I had forgotten that. But I knew SOME kind of plural was called for.
I don't get why people downvote corrections to the title.
"Typical trading volumes across the major exchanges are only about $2 billion globally"

Sounds like they could just sell ~$20M everyday, which would account for only 1% of the daily trading volume. After ~50 days, they would have cashed out $1B.

That depends on how much of the daily trading volume is wash trading. Bitfinex can just decide to give a couple accounts a pile of USDT on margin and self-trade to stir up a sense of FOMO and convince folks to buy in. It's pretty much free to do if you run the exchange.