It seems pretty likely this was an intentional leak meant as a viral outrage based advertising campaign. The content is not just ridiculous but also underdeveloped for someone who actually believed it. And since I'm now reading it here on HN I suppose it worked.
It’s just not a lot of money in most cases. Often in the hundred to few thousand range. And there is usually a data sample, such as the schema and the first 100 rows, or a demo. Of course, those aren’t strict guarantees but it does make faking it all more difficult.
Escrow was pretty popular on Raidforums, high reputation forum users would not only escrow transactions directly but also do things like pseudo-publicly validate or invalidate claims by checking a sellers data or tools against their own collections (presumably the benefits of being a professional hacker escrow and seeing lots of data).
I know that’s what one would expect, but it’s not true. Many large ransomware distributors have a solid record of keeping their word and established relationships with the negotiation firms. Trustworthiness and honesty lead to more payouts and they have no interest in your data or doing you harm, just getting paid.
I don’t know the specifics of federal authority when it comes to internet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it fell under interstate commerce, which is how they justify federal drug laws.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell the full story. Features and optimizations often come with costs such as security and complexity. Not to mention many cryptocurrency projects have an embedded self-enrichment scheme for the founders and centralized decision making, making them a theoretical target for governments. Sometimes a simple, well tested solution is better than a complex one with better performance and features. After all, money should be simple and carry low technical risk.
That said, I personally think features found in some other projects are worth the costs. But I can definitely see why someone would still choose btc. Especially for a government initiative or treasury.
Ham bands are jammed with traffic? My experience is you can barely find anyone, except on repeaters, and even then it’s pretty quiet besides during scheduled check-ins in the evening (or similar events.)
I even travel with my radio. It seems to be this way across the United States. If you’d be open to sharing, I’d love to know where it’s so saturated.
That said, I don’t want commercial interests to take the amateur bands either, but I do believe they need to modernized. I think some of the space should be unallocated, and left that way, so people can experiment with minimal restriction.
Currently looks like the attacker had legitimate access to the required keys, so perhaps more of a traditional compromise rather than a cryptocurrency/contract centric one.
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.