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A comment on FBI struggles to seize 600,000 Bitcoins from alleged Silk Road founder. Parent comment

Re:FBI struggles to seize 600,000 Bitcoins from alleged Silk... by lmkg on Monday October 07, 2013 @07:54PM (#6512120)
Your wording implies you're already aware of this, but I'll say it anyways:

Survivor Bias.

The criminals that do all of the obvious smart things are much less likely to get arrested. The ones that do get arrested, are disproportionately the ones that did something not-smart. The the larger the quantity and (not-)quality of their mis-steps, the more likely they are to be the one you read about for being arrested.

Living in SF seems like a fairly reasonable mistake--it's simple confidence that you won't be caught.

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Re:FBI struggles to seize 600,000 Bitcoins from alleged Silk... by Natsu on Monday October 07, 2013 @09:59PM (#6512559)
Criminals face the same sort of issue DRM makers do: they only need to make one big mistake.

Some of their mistakes may go unnoticed for a long period of time, but in the long run, just one mistake is all it takes for everything to come undone.

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Re:FBI struggles to seize 600,000 Bitcoins from alleged Silk... by MichaelGG on Monday October 07, 2013 @10:38PM (#6512695)
DRM is fundamentally impossible on client-controlled devices. Being a criminal is not fundamentally impossible, nor is not being caught.
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Re:FBI struggles to seize 600,000 Bitcoins from alleged Silk... by Natsu on Monday October 07, 2013 @10:42PM (#6512709)
While I agree that perfect DRM is fundamentally impossible, I have no evidence of perfect criminals either.
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Re:FBI struggles to seize 600,000 Bitcoins from alleged Silk... by malka on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @05:10AM (#6513725)
well, since they were not caught, you never heard of them.
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Re:FBI struggles to seize 600,000 Bitcoins from alleged Silk... by dragonwriter on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @10:33AM (#6515209)
The ones that aren't caught are almost certainly not perfect criminals, either, they're just lucky criminals whose errors happen to have intersected with the gaps in imperfect law enforcement.
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