If this was an actual transfer of ownership of Bitcoin at all near that value, this would trigger money-transfer reporting requirements under the laws of most countries,[1] especially if this was an international transfer of ownership. I see that all the other comments here are speculating about what exactly happened here, and one astute comment before this one pointed out that the actual owner of the Bitcoin may still be the same individual person both before and after this blockchain transfer. It will be interesting to see how the regulatory environment keeps up with the implementation of Bitcoin, which so far is a very tiny percentage of the world economy.
There were also statements in some previous comments that this transfer was made for free. It is true enough that a Bitcoin transfer doesn't inherently incur a processing charge from a merchant payment processor, but as merchants learned back in the Middle Ages when charging interest was formally illegal, the price of a transaction can hide financing and processing costs. We don't know what was agreed with whom by whom to make this transfer happen. The transfer may have occurred at a higher than list price for something that was bought, to make up for the ongoing inconvenience of receiving a payment using the new Bitcoin payment mechanism.
If this were a transfer of ownership, it would trigger the reporting requirements of any country that has reporting laws. The odds are overwhelming that it is not a transfer of ownership, but if it is, here are some guesses:
1) The feds have finally cracked wallet(s) used by Silk Road, or he managed to give his keys to someone (he had a bail hearing today - it's an odd coincidence);
2) Drug cartels are now accepting BTC for major payments; or
3) Macau-based junket operators, that provide casino credit to Chinese gamblers because they cannot easily move money out of China, have begun accepting it for payment.
Personally, I think it was just one of the exchanges moving some money internally.
Given the transfer of ownership could just as well have occurred by transferring the private key of the address, these requirements are going to get pretty hard to enforce.
I think that scenario is pretty unlikely for large exchanges.
If someone gave me a copy of a private key, corresponding to some bitcoins, I wouldn't consider it payment, as they still have the private key as well (meaning they could still spend the bitcoins at any time).
Can you tell the difference between a secure hardware token and a fake secure hardware token?
I suppose if you try to extract the secret key and the token destroys it, it's pretty secure. Of course, you just lost all your money. I can't think of a non-destructive test.
For example Trezor hardware wallet ( http://www.bitcointrezor.com/ ) generates its private key when it is first initialized. This way, the key never exists outside of the wallet.
Not sure that solves he upthread probem. If I give you a Treznor hardware wallet containing a private key to $150million worth of bitcoins - would you trust me not to have anther copy of that key? Or would you transfer them immediately to a wallet with a private key I could never possibly have known?
It might be harder for authorities to monitor bitcoin transactions. But, as the very fact that this HN article exists illustrates, the blockchain is a public record that's available for anyone to monitor, analyze, cross-reference with other sources of data, etc. Particularly for large movements like this, I'm inclined to say that it would be downright foolhardy to assume that BTC transactions are anonymous.
It might be foolhardy to assume that BTC transactions are anonymous, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be EXTREMELY EXTREMELY EXTREMELY difficult to figure out who was involved.
Here’s who (probably) did that massive $150,000,000 Bitcoin transaction (washingtonpost.com)
From the article: "Who was responsible for the transaction? I asked Sarah Meiklejohn, a computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego, for her thoughts. She's the author of a recent paper demonstrating that sophisticated analysis can reveal a lot of information about who is responsible for Bitcoin transactions. She has combined a large database of Bitcoin addresses tagged with their likely owners."
Case in point: Supposedly the money from a lot of cases of major Bitcoin theft is still sitting in the same wallets. Implication: The thieves are having a hard time figuring out how to spend the money without outing themselves.
There were also statements in some previous comments that this transfer was made for free. It is true enough that a Bitcoin transfer doesn't inherently incur a processing charge from a merchant payment processor, but as merchants learned back in the Middle Ages when charging interest was formally illegal, the price of a transaction can hide financing and processing costs. We don't know what was agreed with whom by whom to make this transfer happen. The transfer may have occurred at a higher than list price for something that was bought, to make up for the ongoing inconvenience of receiving a payment using the new Bitcoin payment mechanism.
[1] One example, among many: http://www.consumerfinance.gov/remittances-transfer-rule-ame...