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.

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ruined 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		just move it to a new wallet

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MarceliusK 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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0x3f 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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xrd 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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0x3f 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Right but if you have the forethought to go buy such a wallet, you could just make one yourself in advance and create a transaction history.

Although I would argue that even this doesn't have much value. It's not a big problem that people know "there exists an insider at OpenAI". There are plenty of employees there that shield you from being discovered.

In fact it would be so difficult to find this person among them, assuming the most basic opsec, that I'm highly skeptical they actually fired anyone. I would sooner assume this is just an announcement designed to discourage the behavior, since no specifics are provided.

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xrd 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You are giving a lot of credit to this criminal. I really doubt they thought about this long in advance of the crime. Are you suggesting they got hired at openai so they could make calculated wagers at Kalshi? This was more likely a crime made impulsively.

	▲	0x3f 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		First of all I'm not sure what they did is criminal. And it would have been Polymarket. Nonetheless, you can just be a pre-existing OpenAI employee. As long as you take basic precautions, they (as in, OpenAI), are not going to be able to find out it was you.

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TZubiri 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Aged accounts, shell companies, it's a market

	▲	0x3f 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not in this context it's not. Companies can't create Polymarket accounts. Polymarket accounts are just email addresses or alternatively crypto wallets. And there's no purpose I can imagine to aging them.

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dontknowbtc 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.