Crypto Horror: 13 of the spookiest stories since the publication of the Bitcoin white paper

Exactly 15 years ago, on October 31, 2008, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper.

As Halloween approaches, we gather the most mysterious, strange and eerie stories involving the first cryptocurrency.

October 31, 2008: Not-So-Random Coincidences

Is there a hidden meaning behind publishing the white paper on Halloween? Some members of the community think so.

Leo Vis of the Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong, in his blog suggested that Nakamoto deliberately chose this date: October 31, when the Celtic tribes observed Samhain — a festival, “associated with death and renewal.”

Vis also drew a parallel between Satoshi Nakamoto and the European reformer Martin Luther, who announced his revolutionary ideas on the eve of All Saints’ Day. If Luther cast doubt on the Vatican’s authority, Nakamoto sought to diminish the authority of central banks.

Additionally, on October 31, 1996, the National Security Agency (NSA) submitted a proposal to the law firm Fried Frank LLC, which specialises in antitrust law and competition, for the deployment of anonymous electronic cash.

In the document titled “How to Create a Mint: Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Money”, it described how public-key cryptography could be used to create digital currency, and mentioned the problem double-spending, which would be solved in Bitcoin more than a decade later.

Was the NSA involved in the creation of Bitcoin? Or was the fact that both proposals for digital money were published on Halloween just a coincidence?

The eerie version of involvement by intelligence agencies in the launch of Bitcoin continues to haunt community members.

January 3, 2009: A God Complex

It is widely known that on this day Nakamoto launched the mainnet of the first cryptocurrency, mining the genesis block with a reward of 50 BTC. Interestingly, the output of this transaction is not included in the set of UTXO and the first coins cannot be spent. It remains unclear whether this was intentional or an oversight.

The next block was mined on January 9, i.e., six days later (not ten minutes). The mining-difficulty adjustment mechanism that maintains a ten-minute interval fires every two weeks.

The community has proposed many theories about such an unconventional timing. One theory suggests Nakamoto was merely testing the network’s stability. The most intriguing and slightly eerie theory posits that he intended to recreate the six days God took to create the world.

August 15, 2010: The Sinister Twins

In block #74,638, there was something unusual. The first to notice were Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik, commenting on two “fairly strange” outputs of 92.2 billion BTC.

Since the total supply is capped at 21 million BTC, such an addition of 184 billion coins was, to put it mildly, a problem. A BitcoinTalk user explained the gist of the error:

“Inputs are normally equal to outputs of a transaction. An exception is when a fee is charged for the transaction. The network allows anyone to voluntarily pay any amount as a fee. Therefore, when the amount was negative, the difference with the inputs looked like a fee. This detail escaped all checks.”

An unknown party identified the bug and exploited it to generate Bitcoin. If the attacker had aimed for a more modest sum, the vulnerability could have remained unnoticed for longer.

Within five hours of the discovery, developers published a patched client that rejected such transactions. A soft fork followed, and the 184 billion BTC transaction was removed from block #74 638.

This episode became known in history as the Value Overflow incident.

March 22, 2011: The Last Attempt

On this day, a tutorial video What is Bitcoin? was posted on the YouTube channel WeUseCoins. For its production, Stefan Thomas, former CTO of Ripple and CEO of Coil, received 7002 BTC.

However, the password sheet for the IronKey hardware wallet where the bitcoins were stored was lost several years ago. Thomas attempted to guess the password eight times but without success. The horror lies in the fact that after the tenth failed attempt, IronKey would lock the contents (~$239 million at the time of writing) forever.

Fortunately, in October, the digital-asset recovery firm Unciphered issued an open letter proposing to unlock the wallet. The firm’s staff managed to access data on a similar IronKey after “200 trillion attempts” to bypass the password limit.

March 11, 2013: A Turn for the Worse

A miner running Bitcoin 0.8.0 created a block at height #225,430 that was incompatible with earlier versions of Bitcoin. This caused a fork among participants using older software. A Bitcointalk user reported a double-spend, prompting developers to investigate the root cause.

Gavin Andresen, in BIP-50, explained that the unplanned fork arose from the transition from the Berkeley DB library to LevelDB, which did not implement identical constraints on block creation.

He urged major mining pools to downgrade from 0.8.0 to 0.7. Slush and BTCGuild promptly did so, though the move reduced their revenues. At the same time, payment processor BitPay and major exchanges paused deposits.

The blockchain was finally rolled back to August 16, 2013, when block #252,451 was accepted by the main network. As with the Value Overflow incident, the Bitcoin protocol invalidated previously valid blocks.

In large part, this helped to avert a crisis that saw the price of the first cryptocurrency hit around $1,200 by the end of 2013.

February 7, 2014: The Mt. Gox Curse

The cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox halted withdrawals entirely, saying this was to obtain a “clear technical picture of currency flows.”

On February 20 the exchange’s offices moved, citing the need to ensure staff safety. Four days later Mt. Gox halted trading, and the site stopped functioning.

The resolution came on February 28: Mt. Gox’s chief executive Mark Karpeles held a press conference announcing the company’s bankruptcy. At the time the platform accounted for around 70% of Bitcoin trading volume.

May 30, 2015: A Twice-Licensed Lifetime

U.S. District Judge Catherine Forrest sentenced the founder and operator of the dark‑net marketplace Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, to a double life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

He was found guilty of organizing the trade in illegal drugs via Silk Road, conspiring to traffic drugs, hacking computer networks and money laundering, and leading a criminal enterprise.

According to Free Ross, more than 250 organisations, public figures and opinion leaders noted in favor of Ulbricht’s release. In 2019, among them was the prominent venture capitalist Tim Draper. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk stated that the founder of the dark‑net marketplace had received too harsh a sentence.

Investor Patrick Blumenthal remarked that Ulbricht received an astonishing term without committing any violent crime.

The Silk Road founder and many of his supporters argue the punishment stemmed from charges of arranging targeted killings. However, this information did not appear in the indictment, though it was raised in court.

May 4, 2016: The Craig Wright Obsession

Former Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen received an email from Robert McGarrow, a close friend of self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright:

“Everyone is on pause. Craig tried to hurt himself, he’s bleeding in the bathroom. Stefán is with him; Ramona and I are on the way. An ambulance too.”

Before this, Wright had promised to grant access to the Bitcoin holdings allegedly mined by Satoshi Nakamoto — to move the coins that he allegedly mined when confirming blocks nine.

A week later, Andresen was contacted by one of Wright’s colleagues, who said that Wright had attempted to injure his neck with a knife.

Arthur van Pelt, co‑founder of Dragon Industries, called the events staged.

July 17, 2017: The Body-Horror Moment

On this day, entrepreneur John McAfee delivered a famous, body-horror‑worthy promise — to eat his own penis if Bitcoin does not rise to $500,000 within three years. He later raised the forecast to $1 million. Fortunately, in 2020 he reversed course.

In June 2021, Spain’s Supreme Court allowed the extradition of McAfee, who was in custody in the United States. A few hours later, he was found dead in his prison cell.

The founder’s death has spawned conspiracy theories, many of which McAfee himself fuelled in posts on X.

“Know that if I hang myself, Epstein-style, it will be no fault of mine,” he wrote shortly before his death.

December 9, 2018: The Dead Man’s Coffin

In the Indian city of Jaipur, at the age of 30, Gerald Cotten, founder of Canada’s leading Bitcoin exchange QuadrigaCX, died of a heart attack — he had long suffered from Crohn’s disease.

June 5, 2019: When Death Lends a Hand

On this day, the head of Chinese analytics service BTE.TOP, Hui Yi.N, committed suicide. He had opened a short position on Bitcoin with 100x leverage and lost 2000 BTC the day before. If the partner is to be believed, the money belonged to clients, and he decided to end his life.

Later it emerged that the firm’s office closed a month before the suicide. Chinese-language WeChat users speculated that the affair might be staged. The story ends there.

September 2020: Wallet or Life

The State Police of Latvia prevented the kidnapping and murder of two people. The criminal planned to obtain cryptocurrency worth about €500,000 from them.

A resident of Riga sought to hire operatives to abduct and coerce the victim into transferring their crypto wallets.

The perpetrator also prepared torturing implements for use if the victim refused to hand over passwords.

August 8, 2023: sic transit gloria mundi

On this day disappeared 41-year-old crypto billionaire Christian Peev, who held American and Bulgarian citizenship. He was later found dead in one of his Sofia apartments, Bulgaria.

The investigation suggests the businessman was killed by a blow from a dumbbell. A man named Konstantin Subotinov helped Valchino to hide most of the body in a toilet, while the head and some bones were buried in the Vitosha National Park after the arrest.