AI translated#Bitcoin

69,370 BTC moved from one of the wealthiest wallets. Hackers had been trying to crack it for years.

04.11.2020 ForkLog

An unknown user withdrew 69,370 BTC from a wallet that hackers had been trying to crack for several years. At the time of writing, the recipient address является the fourth-largest holder of Bitcoin in the world.

🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 69,369 #BTC (955,011,610 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

Tx: https://t.co/0JMCKt0mEP

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) November 3, 2020

The withdrawal was carried out in two transactions — one for 1 BTC and another for 69,369 BTC (approximately $960 million at the time of writing). Later вывели also 69,370 BCH.

The wallet.dat file was being sold on several hacker forums, although there is still no guarantee that it contained Bitcoins. Perhaps the wallet owner simply transferred the coins to a secure address.

Bitcoin Core contributor Matt Ward noted five hours before the transfer that the probability of correctly guessing the private key was negligible.

Odds of guessing a bank PIN: 1/10,000.

Odds of guessing a #bitcoin private key: 1/10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

— Matt Ward ⚡️ (@CoinCornerMatt) November 3, 2020

As noted by the Telegram channel Goldfoundinshit, forums claimed that the wallet was linked to Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison.

WhaleBot Alerts noted that this wallet may be linked to the collapsed Mt.Gox exchange.

Update: Elliptic found that on May 6, 2012 these coins left the Silk Road wallet. The recipient address then lay dormant for almost a year, after which they were transferred to a wallet where they remained until November 3, 2020. It was not until 2015 that 101 BTC were sent from the address to the BTC-e exchange, which was subsequently shut down by American authorities as part of investigations into a large-money-laundering scheme.

Nearly $1 billion in #bitcoin from the Silk Road dark market is on the move today, for the first time since 2015. This has serious #compliance consequences for exchanges and other #crypto businesses.
Read our analysis here: https://t.co/IvQxaI66ch

— elliptic (@elliptic) November 4, 2020

It is believed that Silk Road earned 614 000 BTC in fees, though at the time of the founder’s arrest Ulbricht seized only 174 000 BTC. According to Elliptic, Ulbricht sold at least part of the remaining coins to cover operating expenses. This means that the Silk Road coins are in circulation.