This is pretty much a proof of burn, it proves that X person has no longer access to these coins.

There must be something going on behind the scenes.

Now let's imagine the victim tells the hacker they are not willing to negotiate and hope that law enforcement will catch the hackers like they did in the Bitfinex case. The hacker could destroy some coins every X days to make it clear to the victim that this is not a good idea.

This is just a wild scenario. But had I been the Bitfinex hacker I would have done crazy things such as sending blacklisted coins in small amounts to many random addresses, those of exchanges, developers, non-profits, Satoshi Nakamoto etc.. Just to create chaos as it would have caused those people a lot of trouble and would have forced some kind of resolution.

Back in the early days of Bitcoin... Zhou-tong, after robbing his own business (Bitcoinica) blind, did something kind of like what you were suggesting -- raining down coins on random people and creating general chaos. I think it was more mania and panic rather than a well considered strategy.

I think in general you don't see stuff like that through a mix of (1) it's less easy than you think, and (2) thoughtful people don't become serious thieves in the first place, it's not worth it.

Not sure how the binance source address plays into this theory though.

Since we can track bitcoin perfectly, it's hard to argue people who have the exact stolen item shouldn't be required to return it.

Fungibility is just a social convention. Anything we can tell apart we can decide to treat non-fungibly, and we can tell bitcoin apart.

If it's things we can't tell apart (say, liters of oil in the same tank), we are pretty much forced to treat them fungibly. I say pretty much, because there are such things as LIFO and FIFO accounting conventions - sometimes we do our damndest to tell apart things that can't really be told apart.

But if we can tell them apart, it's up to us. We have decided to treat money (incl. physical bills) as fungible in most contexts. With laws.

Even with laws there are limits: If someone wants to pay a debt to me, and offer to settle with a 200 NOK bill, it would be illegal for me to refuse, even if I knew this bill had been stolen from me earlier that night.

But if it was a $10 bill, or a bitcoin, it would be perfectly legal for me to refuse. With crypto tokens in general, there's to my knowledge no government on earth stopping me from declaring that I will take payment in bitcoin minted only on Thursdays.

No, the fungibility of money is law, established by legal precedent. Specifically the case of Crawfurd v The Royal Bank (1749).

> On 30 July 1748, an Edinburgh lawyer named Hew Crawfurd mailed two £20 notes to the merchant William Lang in Glasgow, but the letter was lost. Prior to sending them, Crawfurd had meticulously signed his name on the banknotes and recorded their serial numbers, so he notified the Bank of Scotland and advertised his predicament in several newspapers. One of the notes was never found, but the other note turned up at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Crawfurd requested the Royal Bank to open a multiplepoinding action with respect to the note, but the Bank refused. Thus he brought suit in the Court of Sessions against the Royal Bank.

> Both banks were alarmed by his action, as an adverse finding would subject banknotes to infirmities of title like any other property, which would threaten the idea of paper money as a common circulating currency. Despite their generally poor relations with each other at the time, they agreed to cooperate and jointly defend the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawfurd_v_The_Royal_Bank

Laws ARE a kind of social convention. And to the degree that the fungibility of "money" is law, law also decides what counts as "money", and there's no reason why they (yes, they, not it - law is actually people) should let your crypto-token of choice count as money for legal fungibility purposes.

I doubt this is just some hackers.

I think the hacked whale account makes most sense to me tho

If the media takes notice and talks about bitcoin, couldn’t that make more people buy and thus drive up the price?

I’m willing to admit that it is a bit 6 dimensional chess explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump

The P&Ds are common with thinly traded premined coins.

The altcoins have done a fair job of sweeping people with zero scruples away from Bitcoin. I'd be quite surprised if this were someone trying to drive up the price of Bitcoin.

Now I'm not saying that the OPs theory about this being a pump and dump is likely correct. But I don't think it is any more speculative than the other ideas offered here (jilted ex / copy&paste error / testing code that mistakenly shipped / etc)

And they're also talking about parties controlling 1000 BTC levels... which, while an astounding amount of money, are still small compared to the markets.

I can't say it's impossible, but I'd rate most of the other speculation above it.

Then again, nothing stops someone from trying something that won't work...

If this is a pump and dump scheme (and that's a big "if") then they would need an order of magnitude more than 27BTC (ie the amount they sent to this wallet) for this to work.

Now my wife’s musings about crypto dog yesterday are far more meaningful.

I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it's not unusual for pump-and-dump schemes to involve burning a lot of value to trigger the pump they're trying to profit off of. You need to treat the bit they're planning on dumping as separate from whatever capital they're prepared to invest to make the pump happen.

For someone to have done this accidentally and not bothered to double-check, it seems to me they would need to have fat-fingered both the address and the amount. This person is typing with hams.

Plus that wealth is generating more wealth. Logically, a multi-billionaire wouldn’t care.

https://forum.osmosis.zone/t/refund-dydx-user-funds-lost-fro...

You're obviously working under the assumption that the sender is someone for whom one more or one less MUSD makes any kind of difference to his everyday life.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/884

https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id

If that's a governmental agency, it's perhaps to

- crowdfund the development of multiple technologies

- harden the security by allowing people to make money (to attract evil entities)

- mainstream the idea of a digital wallet/identity

The "bottom up" psyop

But if an agency has access to that wallet, then any transactions would be visible to everybody. Activity on Satoshi's wallet after all this time would shake up the Bitcoin world pretty hard.

I don't know how sudden activity on this known-inactive wallet would accomplish any of those things.

And if the Fed had it, why would they sit on it and not say anything? the whole point of the Fed is stability, and sitting on unstable currency -- which would get even move volatile if people found out about their hidden supply -- would be a waste of time.

nothing but conspiracy mongering bunkum here

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies...

Many reason to believe the NSA would be behind the digital crypto currency fad, they need the tech, and it needs to be as secure as possible

To me this sounds more plausible than the "a random dude from SF" theory

I think Satoshi coming back from the dead would totally tank the price, as he owns something like 5% of all BTC ever mined (~$43b).