If you ran a Bitcoin related service before the thing hit $100 you prolly ought to be somewhat concerned and/or prepared

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.thedrinkingrecord.com/2014/08/25/a-law-enforcement-encounter-if-you-ran-a-bitcoin-related-service-before-the-thing-hit-100-you-prolly-ought-to-be-somewhat-concerned-andor-prepared/ 

A Law Enforcement Encounter: If you ran a Bitcoin related service before the
thing hit $100 you prolly ought to be somewhat concerned and/or prepared

Posted on August 25, 2014

So this afternoon I was roused from my day slumber by vigorous knocking at my
front door. Under the impression the two gentlemen at my door step might be
some sort of process servers or collections agents visiting about my
substantial student loan debt I begrudgingly inquire as to what is going on.
They inquire as to who I am, and I inquire as to who they are. 1 When they
show badges I offer confirmation that I am indeed the person referred to
frequently by the slave name2 they used.

Their inquiry was laser focused on any information I might have about
connections between BTCPak  and The Silk Road3 of which I have none that
can't be discovered by scraping public information off of the public web.
BTCPak was this thing that accepted Bitcoin and provided prepaid codes you
could load on to shitty Debit cards. I was new and didn't know any better so
I had some of the most costly eatings and drinkings of my life. BTCPak was
one of the more expensive ways to turn Bitcoin into US Dollars, but its
advantage was it was fast and had a great reputation for working. If there
weren't any codes to be had, the site wouldn't take Bitcoin. If you sent it
Bitcoin it gave you the code in six confirmations.  There was no market I
knew of to feed the codes the other direction.  The entire venture didn't
even really seem to be a business. It just seemed to be a machine DBordello
built to acquire Bitcoin in an automated fashion which as far as I can tell
was turned off, because the future he was buying all of the cheap coins for
finally arrived.

A notable thing that kept coming up was an incredulity on the part of the
investigators was that there was much of anything happening in early Bitcoin
that wasn't shady and related to Black Market drugs. In reality a lot of
stuff was happening on the plaintext Internet without the slightest shade of
illegality. I mentioned the Devcoin4 thing that was my first source of any
actual amount of Bitcoin. Devcoin was/is this arrangement where by dumping
text into a wiki you earned coins on an altchain. You could then take the
coins to this shitty exchange called Vircurex where you could dump them for
BTC. As astounding as it seems at the time when I started doing this devcoin
thing dumping a few thousand words in their wiki was probably worth a two
digit number of BTC in the first month I got paid. Fuck me for having been so
shortsighted and having not quite stumbled into what actual people were
writing about Bitcoin. As astoundingly stupid as the premise sounds much of
early Bitcoin involved people throwing coins around for appallingly,
dumbfoundingly, stupid reasons in the name of "supporting Bitcoin" and
"getting the ecosystem moving." Many stupid and lucrative things were scams
of the Pirateat40 and GLBSE sort,5 I instead did the writing for Devcoins
thing because I like sleeping soundly at night.

What you, dear reader can take from this encounter is that if you were
involved with Bitcoin before Coindesk6 became a thing and live in the United
States, you too might be questioned by agents of two separate federal law
enforcement agencies at the same time. If they are asking about BTCPak now,
who knows how long the backlog of sites and ventures they are working through
is. It's something to prepare for.  When the agents suggested that I probably
never expected they'd find me, they seemed a little shock when I replied that
I kind of expected this attention eventually. I don't exactly keep the
connections between my self and my slave name incredibly well guarded
secrets, at least not on the scale of Silk Road users and administrators.

This old Boy Scout would like to remind everyone of the motto: "Be Prepared".

The reason for this is in my jurisdiction failure to identify yourself in a
law enforcement encounter is a crime  of questionable constitutional
provenance, while having a conversation with a debt collector or process
server that consists of nothing on your part other than intoning "Fuck You" a
myriad of different was is great justice for all and legally sound.  ↩

This odd thing happens when use a screen name  long enough and act with
established, credible pseudononymity in a space long enough, especially one
with such an effective Web of Trust surrounding it. The layperson Toby gets
asked about the learned amateur Bingo's hobby and suddenly you find yourself
in an IRL encounter where you feel like you are wearing a person suit.
Welcome to the future, its a weird fucking place.  ↩

That thing I've avoided and wrote about on this blog before.   ↩

Even though devcoin has dropped twenty times in value from ~200 satoshis per
to ~10 satoshis per now, holding it would still have booked a dollar
denominated gain over the time. But no, holding Devcoin would be stupid.  ↩

Well so it would have seemed at least to the people running them. Running
such a thing though doesn't fit my acceptable risk profile in the same way
The Silk Road never fit my acceptable risk profile.  ↩

Yes, the FBI agent name dropped Coindesk as a thing he reads as well as
admitting to having a small amount of Bitcoin.  ↩

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