Someone took $ 1 billion in bitcoin from a wallet that hadn't been used for 5 years

The transaction with 69,369 BTC—at the time of publication of this article, $1,033,931,071—was carried out in the last 24 hours. Alon Gal,

The co-founder of technology security firm Hudson Rock was one of the first to tweet about the deal.

“Unbelievable,” he wrote.“Someone was able to hack the password of the Bitcoin wallet I reported on just recently and spent the $1,000,000,000 that was there!” Gal also stated that it remains unclear whether the person responsible for this transfer was the original owner of the wallet or someone who managed to crack the password.

Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientistAn employee of the blockchain analysis company Elliptic said on Twitter that the Bitcoin wallet is the fourth largest in the world. He believes the funds came from sales of illegal goods on Silk Road, an underground market that sold drugs, contract killings and other illegal goods and services before it collapsed in 2013. 

According to Robinson, when Bitcoin in 2013were withdrawn from Silk Road, their value was approximately $350,000. Over the years, the skyrocketing price of Bitcoin has caused its value to skyrocket to more than $955 million. The account has remained dormant since 2015, when someone transferred 101 BTC in BTC-E. This is a now closed online platform for trading fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies in real time, aimed primarily at Russian-speaking users. The founder of BTC-E was arrested in 2017 on charges of laundering $4 billion worth of Bitcoin.

Who "cleaned out" the bitcoin wallet so farremains a mystery. Perhaps it was either someone associated with the founder of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, or one of the users of the online criminal market. But there is another possibility: in an article published two months ago by Vice, it was said that hackers traded an encrypted wallet on forums and underground marketplaces in the hope of recovering cryptocurrency, which at that time was worth about $ 690 million.

Many believed that the chances of a successful hackthe password to unlock the wallet is very small. Passwords are usually long and the encryption is very complex. Moreover, you can never be sure that the transmitted wallet.dat file is a real Bitcoin wallet or just a fake.

For now, the quasi-anonymous nature of Bitcoin transactions obscures the identity of the person or party who transferred more than $1 billion worth of digital currency. 

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