On the day of the presidential election in the United States, bitcoins were set in motion on one of the largest wallets. Five hours ago, someone sent 69,370 BTC that hasn’t moved since October 2013.
A few hours ago, the Whale Alert service reported a large transaction from the address 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx, widely known among crypto enthusiasts and hackers. About two years ago, a wallet.dat file appeared on the darknet, presumably containing keys to this address, but no one was able to crack the password.
Today, first 1 BTC was withdrawn from this wallet, and a few minutes later – the entire remaining amount, which at the current exchange rate is close to $ 950 million. Also, the same amount of Bitcoin Cash was withdrawn from it, and soon they will probably be followed by coins from other forks that are worth something.
Such total devastation speaks precisely of hacking the wallet, and not of transferring to another storage at the initiative of the owner. After all, no matter how complex the password from wallet.dat, sooner or later it can be brute-force – it is much easier than picking up the private key from the address “from scratch”. Such a huge “bonus” justifies any cost of computing resources.
Until today, this address was the fourth in the list in terms of the amount of stored bitcoins. Now this place of honor has passed to the recipient address, and this is the address of the new bech32 format, or native SegWit. The owners of both addresses are unknown.
A large amount of bitcoins (69,471 BTC) was transferred to the original address on October 4, 2013 – three days before the arrest of Silk Road administrator Ross Ulbricht. Therefore, many consider this wallet owned by Silk Road. Since then, this address has been diligently dusty with microtransactions, but to date, the only outgoing transaction from it in the amount of 101 BTC occurred on April 23, 2015. This is an argument against the version of the wallet belonging to Ulbricht, since he was already in prison at that time.
Whale Alert suggests that this wallet is linked to the MtGOX exchange that burst in 2014. Other versions will inevitably arise, but the real owners of both the old and the new addresses may forever remain unknown.
