You're being downvoted but imprisoning OxyMonster for selling things to willing customers will have almost 0 effect on the opioid markets. It's a costly symbolic gesture that will affect nobody but him and his family.
I think many times these arrests are meant to be a demonstration that law enforcement is doing their job. I imagine even the arresting agents realize this guy is a drop in the ocean and his customers will quickly flock to his replacement.
Similar to those folks who work in a corporate environment who complete a document that they know will be jettisoned into a corporate black hole but checks off a requirement.
Sure, but "doing their job" is a bullshit excuse for taking somebody's life away. Honestly it's worse IMO. They know it accomplishes nothing except making them look a tiny bit better to their bosses. Destroying a person's life for career advancement is quite different than making a worthless gdoc that nobody will read.
There are a million other things he could have sold online that wouldn't have resulted in 20 years in jail. Whether you agree with the illegal status of drugs or not, if someone choose to subvert the law, you can't expect law enforcement not to prosecute.
You should expect that they will, in the same way you should expect a serial killer to murder people, but they're still garbage that wouldn't thrive in a just world. You're absolutely correct that you should always expect people to sell you out for a little selfish comfort because most of them are trash.
> if someone choose to subvert the law, you can't expect law enforcement not to prosecute.
Sure, that's fine.
But it also obfuscates the more important point: I can expect (and I do expect) that a reasonable, mature society stop this idiotic practice in the first place.
Refusing to learn from the failures of drug prohibition throughout history is one thing, but continuing a current and clearly failed experiment for an entire century is flabbergasting and childish.
Who will be the last person who's life is ruined for no reason? Will it be this dude? Or someone in the same position tomorrow?
> I can't have sympathy for someone who was selling opioids to addicts, exacerbating a terrible epidemic.
That's a philosophical question about how much people own their own lives versus how much you should be able to dictate their lives for your own selfish sense of peace of mind. We're not going to change anyone's minds on that in HN comments.
> The feds didn't do that, his own actions did that.
The "feds" did do that, in response to his actions, because people like you manadte via votes that they do that.
The real question here is: will this act (or generally, all of the actions taken by the state pursuant to enforcing prohibition) help anyone? Will it reduce death, disease, crime, misery, addiction?
That is entirely the point. This guy made a conscious decision to feel in drugs he knew we illegal and harmful. I have zero sympathy for him. He knew exactly what he was doing, and what the consequences were. He did this to himself
As often is the case when debating with you, it's hard to understand the actual difference of viewpoint.
It seems like you just value revenge and compliance over a functioning civil society.
If you can't point to a tangible reduction in death, disease, misery, or addiction from these sorts of state actions, then I just don't see that you have a point to make at all.
People downvote for the stupidest reasons anymore. It will be the death of good, well thought out but not conformist commentary and become a boring monoculture, just like everywhere else. I'm getting in the habit of looking for stupid downvotes and upvote. I wager at least 2 for this comment.
>People downvote for the stupidest reasons anymore. It will be the death of good, well thought out but not conformist commentary and become a boring monoculture, just like everywhere else. I'm getting in the habit of looking for stupid downvotes and upvote. I wager at least 2 for this comment.
I got 4 downvotes for this. It's sad that just 4 people can ruin one of the last places to have a good conversation on the internet. Perhaps a reconsideration of how the karma system works is in order, in order to save meaningful dialog. Off the top of my head, I would suggest any downvote also removes a karma point from the down voter. Instead of risking karma for taking a considerate but unpopular position, people willing to quell thought and ideas should be risking their own karma. I believe suppressing ideas and thought is far worse than presenting an unpopular idea and therefore should be at a much higher cost.
That almost 0 effect is what practical every form of enforcement against smuggling is going to be. A person not declaring items being brought into the country is very unlikely to have a effect on the federal budget, or any effect of on a legal market, and yet practical all border controls has someone employed to check for undeclared items.
Using technology to subvert the State is a large cat and mouse game and the first mice are bound to make mistakes. It's the risk of jumping in before having a better grasp of the underlying technology that you rely on for security. Eventually the market will move nearly completely to more private currencies but the "game" will continue. Some people like to focus on the "high reward" part of "high risk/high reward" a lot more than the "high risk" part.
Yes, absolutely. Unfortunately the majority of people don't fully understand what the system is and how it works. Sound bites and misinformation are regurgitated and spread like the plague while solid understanding requires a lot of work exploration.
>US authorities arrested Vallerius in September last year, at the Atlanta airport after he arrived in the US to attend and participate in the World Beard and Mustache Championships that was being held in Austin, Texas.
And is facing a life sentence.
Dont travel to such countries. Never ever period.
Crossing a border is a big decision, no matter how cheap the tickets are. I dont get people who keep doing this, its not like those are split second decisions.
Why in your right mind would you do this without carefully considering what the effects of you being in that country might be. I had female friends talking about going to holiday in Dubai, another friend with a Turkish passport visited his family in the south east recently.
Overconfidence is one of OPSECs biggest vulnerabilities. He was much safer in France but clearly felt he was completely under the radar. Using LocalBitcoin accounts directly is a big sign that he didn't fully understand how deeply he was in a mess.
Not just then. Your local laws and rights dont mean shit in your holiday destination. This should be the very first question you ask yourself when traveling.
There's also pot legalization differences between states, combined with Federal concerns.
Go to Colorado and buy some edibles, you're fine. Carry some over the border into Kansas, and not only are you breaking Kansas law, but if caught they may hand you over to the Feds and penalties may be severe. (Crossing a state border makes it a Federal issue.)
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's a federal issue and can be enforced even if you don't cross state lines. There's a drug case where Scalia seemingly ignored his previous opinion about what can be regulated as "interstate commerce" that I remember.
True, I'm sure there's something they can get you on without crossing state lines, but in a legal-pot state at least the local cops probably won't turn you in.
Not at all. Its advocating to think about your own actions. If you make a reasonable calculation to travel to Somalia, it might be a wonderful experience with limited risk,just think before you act.
Who hopefully keep in mind the consequences.
You (hopefully) wouldnt travel to Somalia, the fact that other countries arent in headlines doesnt mean they are a safe destination.
.. but it's also possible to become an accidental tourist in someone else's civil war. Or, in the case of this guy, forget that committing crimes internationally can make you wanted in the US.
I just recently learned about the parole system in the US, do I understand it correctly, that he wouldnt be allowed to leave the country until the 20 years are up?
Most likely yes that is correct. I'm not a lawyer but I think it's _possible_ a judge could allow them to leave the country but I doubt they frequently do allow that. Often they're restricted much more precisely than nationwide.
How does it work outside the US? Is there no parole or do they typically allow you to leave the country?
No, they won't extend the initial sentence unless he commits another crime (then it's technically a different sentence). The worst that can happen is you get denied parole all the way up to your full initial sentence and then you're let out.
> I had female friends talking about going to holiday in Dubai
You get a 1-dimensional perspective every time something local goes wrong and is masqueraded as international news. Its like if a civil rights violation from one US city on any given day was elevated to the world stage. It would sound like much more of a nightmare than anything going on in the UAE.
Most females I've talked to absolutely love Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Even people that have moved there.
The best analogy to the experience is Disney World. Lots of thrills, and adult sexual behavior is stifled, except for minor infractions instead of simply thrown out of the park you'll be thrown in a horrible prison.
The fact of the matter is that you're not one of the slaves. That side of things won't be your experience.
You hope you don't get sexually assaulted and judicially victim blamed, and thats the same anywhere.
Its like if a civil rights violation from one US city on any given day was elevated to the world stage. It would sound like much more of a nightmare than anything going on in the UAE.
Dubai is not safe for anyone to visit. You can have a microscopic spec of cannabis on your shoe or three poppy seeds and you get years in jail. That's not at all like everywhere else. In fact, it's laws like these that typically get places labeled uncivilized and barbaric. In Dubai's case I think the slavery, oppression of women, and other laws typically fulfill that label even better. No place with such laws is a place I would visit or encourage anyone to visit. Who knows what other stupid laws they will try to enforce on unsuspecting travelers who don't even know they are in violation?
> Crossing a border is a big decision, no matter how cheap the tickets are.
While generally I agree with you, some are trivial. Especially where the EU has gone to great effort to make them trivial to cross. Or where they are fractal and run through houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau
It's completely trivial to cross between states inside the US, but if the next state over legalizes marijuana, and you take a road trip to bring back some weed and edibles, by crossing state lines your road trip may become a Federal drug trafficking offense, with severe penalties if caught.
Even the easiest border crossing can carry significant risks depending on the context.
I have FileVault turned on in OSX. But I noticed that, since the latest version, if I open my laptop within some interval, it doesn't even make me type my password again.
And sometimes I've even opened my laptop many hours later and it inexplicably bypasses the login. Just seems so precarious.
I read how the FBI(?) faked a scene (a fight?) near the Silk Road creator so that they could nab his laptop while it was open. Well, I chuckle at how unnecessary that would be for my laptop: just walk up and open it. The piece of shit probably won't even make you log in.
All in all, this is just another case where authorities have proven once
more that Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency isn't really anonymous
as it was advertised for the past decade.
Wait who advertised that ? I have always read that bitcoin was pseudonymous (not anonymous) and with public record of all transactions and wallets
Unfortunately it's a common misconception. Many people with a surge knowledge if the technology believe it's anonymous. It seems like that the guy himself believed it was anonymous.
"wait, my employer isn't automatically withholding the earnings from this money, I've never been in this situation before, does nobody know that I have some money now, so therefore I don't have to pay taxes!"
pretty much everyone in cryptocurrency, whether they thought a little harder about it or not
Bitcoin isn’t really pseudonymous either (not by design) it only has one type of transaction that is always public and there is no inherent deniability as far as wallet ownership goes.
There are some currencies that attempt at providing anonymity or at least deniability but those also haven’t been tested yet either against capable forensic adversaries.
I know it has its own smart contract scripting but that isn’t used, there are only public transactions there, anonymous transactions, multi addresses and multi key wallets etc aren’t built in so there is no plausible deniability.
Isn't it pseudonymous? You use addresses to send and receive money, not your real identity. And anyone can generate addresses in a vacuum. Combine that with a VPN or some network routing, and its basically a mountain of work to trace any address or transaction to a person.
It does not offer inherent plausible deniability and only relies on the relative anonymity of your internet connection to hide your identity.
Look at the difference between Bitcoin and say Monero when it comes to anonymity.
My point isn’t about something being easy or hard but rather if the anonymity comes from the design of Bitcoin or is it circumstantial to how you use it and it’s essentially only the latter.
The network was never designed to be anonymous and there isn’t any way to “hide” transactions or to deny your association with a wallet or an address if they trace the IP to you or you end up holding the private key it’s game over and nothing Bitcoin does impacts on the difficulty of this task.
your name on the network is your wallet address, and not your own, actual name. hence psuedonymous. you’re inventing some bizarre definition of the word.
Why isn’t it right? By this point they had a very reasonable suspicion that he was the criminal they were looking for based on his bitcoin addresses and then further confirmed by analyzing the writing style. That certainly seems like a good enough reason to search someone’s laptop.
Even with all the mistakes that he made, I think he would have easily walked had he not done the thing that sealed his fate: bringing his hot "work" laptop (possibly unencrypted or otherwise compromised) with him to the US.
All his other mistakes put together were not enough for the feds to hang him since there is plausible deniability:
The "writing style analysis" may seem advanced but in practice is laughable in terms of false positives.
Being in a possession of a bitcoin address that received payments from a drug trafficker isn't enough evidence to convict. But of course allowing the feds to go through his laptop where he had the trafficking signing keys and other credentials can not be explained away :-0
I don’t understand the sentiment of these comments. This isn’t an impressive example of mass blockchain-and-IP-address correlation and collection - this is an embarrassing example of an inexperienced user publically posting wallet IDs directly linked to his Localbitcoins account.
This is as much “tracing” as it would take to look up a license plate. Add to that a lack of full disk encryption and international travel...
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101 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadSimilar to those folks who work in a corporate environment who complete a document that they know will be jettisoned into a corporate black hole but checks off a requirement.
There are a million other things he could have sold online that wouldn't have resulted in 20 years in jail. Whether you agree with the illegal status of drugs or not, if someone choose to subvert the law, you can't expect law enforcement not to prosecute.
Sure, that's fine.
But it also obfuscates the more important point: I can expect (and I do expect) that a reasonable, mature society stop this idiotic practice in the first place.
Refusing to learn from the failures of drug prohibition throughout history is one thing, but continuing a current and clearly failed experiment for an entire century is flabbergasting and childish.
Who will be the last person who's life is ruined for no reason? Will it be this dude? Or someone in the same position tomorrow?
I can't have sympathy for someone who was selling opioids to addicts, exacerbating a terrible epidemic.
"Destroying a person's life"
The feds didn't do that, his own actions did that.
That's a philosophical question about how much people own their own lives versus how much you should be able to dictate their lives for your own selfish sense of peace of mind. We're not going to change anyone's minds on that in HN comments.
> The feds didn't do that, his own actions did that.
The "feds" did do that, in response to his actions, because people like you manadte via votes that they do that.
Forget this guy for a second.
The real question here is: will this act (or generally, all of the actions taken by the state pursuant to enforcing prohibition) help anyone? Will it reduce death, disease, crime, misery, addiction?
It seems like you just value revenge and compliance over a functioning civil society.
If you can't point to a tangible reduction in death, disease, misery, or addiction from these sorts of state actions, then I just don't see that you have a point to make at all.
I got 4 downvotes for this. It's sad that just 4 people can ruin one of the last places to have a good conversation on the internet. Perhaps a reconsideration of how the karma system works is in order, in order to save meaningful dialog. Off the top of my head, I would suggest any downvote also removes a karma point from the down voter. Instead of risking karma for taking a considerate but unpopular position, people willing to quell thought and ideas should be risking their own karma. I believe suppressing ideas and thought is far worse than presenting an unpopular idea and therefore should be at a much higher cost.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2569919
And is facing a life sentence.
Dont travel to such countries. Never ever period.
Crossing a border is a big decision, no matter how cheap the tickets are. I dont get people who keep doing this, its not like those are split second decisions.
Why in your right mind would you do this without carefully considering what the effects of you being in that country might be. I had female friends talking about going to holiday in Dubai, another friend with a Turkish passport visited his family in the south east recently.
Think for a moment for gods sake.
Go to Colorado and buy some edibles, you're fine. Carry some over the border into Kansas, and not only are you breaking Kansas law, but if caught they may hand you over to the Feds and penalties may be severe. (Crossing a state border makes it a Federal issue.)
More specifically, and more commonly, if you have or will break local laws in a country, be careful of visiting there.
In some locations, that means don't be gay, or don't be a women out of a specific outfit, etc.
.. but it's also possible to become an accidental tourist in someone else's civil war. Or, in the case of this guy, forget that committing crimes internationally can make you wanted in the US.
How does it work outside the US? Is there no parole or do they typically allow you to leave the country?
Edit: said bail instead of parole
If you have a life sentence you're not eligible.
You get a 1-dimensional perspective every time something local goes wrong and is masqueraded as international news. Its like if a civil rights violation from one US city on any given day was elevated to the world stage. It would sound like much more of a nightmare than anything going on in the UAE.
Most females I've talked to absolutely love Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Even people that have moved there.
The best analogy to the experience is Disney World. Lots of thrills, and adult sexual behavior is stifled, except for minor infractions instead of simply thrown out of the park you'll be thrown in a horrible prison.
The fact of the matter is that you're not one of the slaves. That side of things won't be your experience.
You hope you don't get sexually assaulted and judicially victim blamed, and thats the same anywhere.
#notevenmost
https://newsone.com/409392/brit-jailed-in-dubai-for-4-years-...
Wouldn't the proper thing to take away is, "don't become a drug kingpin"?
While generally I agree with you, some are trivial. Especially where the EU has gone to great effort to make them trivial to cross. Or where they are fractal and run through houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau
Even the easiest border crossing can carry significant risks depending on the context.
I have FileVault turned on in OSX. But I noticed that, since the latest version, if I open my laptop within some interval, it doesn't even make me type my password again.
And sometimes I've even opened my laptop many hours later and it inexplicably bypasses the login. Just seems so precarious.
I read how the FBI(?) faked a scene (a fight?) near the Silk Road creator so that they could nab his laptop while it was open. Well, I chuckle at how unnecessary that would be for my laptop: just walk up and open it. The piece of shit probably won't even make you log in.
pretty much everyone in cryptocurrency, whether they thought a little harder about it or not
There are some currencies that attempt at providing anonymity or at least deniability but those also haven’t been tested yet either against capable forensic adversaries.
Look at the difference between Bitcoin and say Monero when it comes to anonymity.
My point isn’t about something being easy or hard but rather if the anonymity comes from the design of Bitcoin or is it circumstantial to how you use it and it’s essentially only the latter.
The network was never designed to be anonymous and there isn’t any way to “hide” transactions or to deny your association with a wallet or an address if they trace the IP to you or you end up holding the private key it’s game over and nothing Bitcoin does impacts on the difficulty of this task.
All his other mistakes put together were not enough for the feds to hang him since there is plausible deniability:
The "writing style analysis" may seem advanced but in practice is laughable in terms of false positives.
Being in a possession of a bitcoin address that received payments from a drug trafficker isn't enough evidence to convict. But of course allowing the feds to go through his laptop where he had the trafficking signing keys and other credentials can not be explained away :-0
This is as much “tracing” as it would take to look up a license plate. Add to that a lack of full disk encryption and international travel...
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.