[xrd]

A fun aside: this person obviously created a bunch of new Bitcoin accounts to hide their activity.

It makes you think that if you were able to surreptitiously add malicious side channel software into a popular npm package that you wouldn't just need to hunt for crypto wallets with balances.

You could also probably find a market for crypto wallets with small balances or zero balances. The history and date of creation would be the value to some.

This openai employee should have gone on the dark web to buy older addresses to cloak their activity.

It's sad to say that almost all crypto use cases point to fraud. I'm excited about crypto and there is some fascinating research around anonymous transactions (like zcash). But, that real utility is always overshadowed by the actions of charlatans or worse.

[ruined]

you can't "change the password" on a wallet, so a "used" wallet is highly unattractive. anything you put in it could be taken by the original keyholder who sold it to you.

[JasonADrury]

Oh but you can. You can swap out the seed and generate any new addresses using that.

Yes, the old addresses will be compromised. That's fine. The point is that nobody can tell that you aren't actually using the same keys to generate new addresses anymore.

[asah]

just move it to a new wallet

[0x3f]

I don't really understand. You can create wallets at will. What would be the value of one that someone else happened to create?

[xrd]

If it has a small transaction history it obscure the owners intentions. An address created right before a wager is obviously for one purpose.

[TZubiri]

Aged accounts, shell companies, it's a market

[MarceliusK]

What investigators often look for isn't just wallet age, but funding patterns, timing, and linkages between wallets

[dontknowbtc]

> created a bunch of new Bitcoin accounts to hide their activity

tell me you don’t understand crypto without telling me you don’t understand crypto.