Exactly 15 years ago, on October 31, 2008, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper.
On the eve of Halloween, we have collected the most mysterious, strange and frightening stories involving the first cryptocurrency.
October 31, 2008: non-random accidents
Is there some hidden meaning to publishing a white paper on Halloween? Some community members believe so.
Leo Weese from the Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong on his blog suggestedthat Nakamoto deliberately chose this date: on October 31, the Celtic tribes celebrated Samhain, a holiday “associated with death and renewal.”
Wise also drew parallels between Satoshi Nakamoto and the mastermind of the European Reformation, Martin Luther, who announced his revolutionary ideas on All Hallows’ Eve. If Luther questioned power of the Vatican, Nakamoto tried to reduce the authority of central banks.
In addition, on October 31, 1996, the antitrust and competition law firm Fried Frank LLC received a proposal from the National Security Agency (NSA) to introduce anonymous electronic cash.
The document, titled “How to Create a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Digital Money,” described how public key cryptography could be used to create a digital currency, and also mentioned the double-spending problem that Bitcoin would solve more than a decade later.
Was the NSA involved in the creation of Bitcoin? Or is the fact that both digital money proposals were unveiled on Halloween just a coincidence?
The creepy version of the involvement of special services in the launch of Bitcoin still haunts community members.
January 3, 2009: who thinks he is God
It is well known that on this day Satoshi Nakamoto launched the main network 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 UTXO set and the first digital gold coins cannot be spent. It is still unclear whether this was intentional or an oversight.
Most notably, next block was mined on January 9, that is, a full six days (not 10 minutes) after the first one. The algorithm, which adjusts mining difficulty to maintain a 10-minute interval, runs every two weeks.
The community has come up with many theories about the choice of such non-standard timing. According to one of them, Nakamoto was simply checking the stability of the network. The most interesting and a little creepy theory is that he wanted to recreate the story of the six days it took God to create the world.
August 15, 2010: Evil Twins
In block #74 638 there was something unusual. Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik was the first to notice this. commented two “rather strange” transaction outputs of 92.2 billion BTC.
The total emission volume should not exceed 21 million BTC, so adding 184 billion coins became a serious problem, to put it mildly. Bitcointalk user like this explained essence of the error:
“Typically, the inputs equal the outputs of a transaction. The exception is when a transaction fee is charged. The network allows anyone to voluntarily pay any amount for a commission. Therefore, when the amount was negative, the difference with the input looked like a commission. This moment eluded all checks.”
An unknown person discovered a bug and used it to generate bitcoins. If attackers had targeted a more modest amount, the vulnerability might have gone undetected longer.
Within five hours of discovering the bug, the developers published an updated client that rejected such transactions. The network underwent a soft fork and a transaction of 184 billion BTC was removed from block #74,638.
This episode went down in history as value overflow (“excess value”).
March 22, 2011: last attempt
On this day, an educational video was published on the WeUseCoins YouTube channel What is Bitcoin?. For its creation, Stefan Thomas, former technical director of Ripple and CEO of Coil, received 7002 BTC.
However, he lost the password sheet for the IronKey hardware wallet where the bitcoins were stored several years ago. Thomas tried to guess the password eight times, but was unsuccessful. The horror of the situation is that after the tenth unsuccessful attempt, IronKey will block the content (~$239 million at the time of writing) forever.
Luckily, in October, digital asset recovery company Unciphered offered to unlock Thomas’ wallet in an open letter. The firm’s employees were able to access data on a similar IronKey after “200 trillion attempts” to bypass the limit on the number of incorrect passwords.
March 11, 2013: Wrong turn
A miner running Bitcoin version 0.8.0 created a block at height #225,430, which is incompatible with previous versions of Bitcoin. This resulted in a fork with members of earlier versions. Bitcointalk user reported double spendingwhich prompted the developers to search for the root cause.
Gavin Andresen c BIP-50 reported that the unplanned fork occurred due to a transition from the Berkeley DB library to Level DB, which did not implement the same restrictions on block creation.
He suggested that large mining pools switch from version 0.8.0 to 0.7. Slush and BTCGuild quickly downgraded, although this action resulted in the loss of a significant portion of revenue. At the same time, payment provider BitPay and major exchanges suspended deposits.
The blockchain was finally rolled back only on August 16, 2013, when block #252,451 was accepted by the main network. As with value overflow, the Bitcoin protocol invalidated previously valid blocks.
Largely thanks to the prevention of the crisis, the price of the first cryptocurrency at the end of 2013 reached another maximum of about $1,200.
February 7, 2014: Curse of Mt.Gox
Cryptocurrency exchange Mt.Gox completely stopped the conclusions, explaining this with the intention of obtaining a “clear technical picture of currency processes.”
On February 20, the exchange office moved to another location, citing the need to ensure the safety of employees. Four days later, Mt.Gox stopped trading and the platform’s website stopped working.
The denouement came on February 28: the head of the exchange, Mark Karpeles, convened a press conference at which he announced the bankruptcy of Mt.Gox. At the time, the platform accounted for about 70% of total Bitcoin trading volume.
30 May 2015: Twice lifer
US District Judge Catherine Forest sentenced Silk Road darknet marketplace founder and owner Ross Ulbricht to double life in prison without the possibility of parole.
He was found guilty of organizing the trafficking of illegal drugs through the Silk Road, conspiracy to transport drugs, hacking computer networks and money laundering, as well as leading a criminal organization.
According to the Free Ross website, more than 250 organizations, famous people and opinion leaders spoke out for the release of Ulbricht. In 2019, the famous venture investor Tim Draper was among them. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, said that the creator of the darknet market was given too harsh a sentence.
Investor Patrick Blumenthal noted that Ulbricht received a shocking sentence without committing a single violent crime.
The founder of Silk Road and many of his supporters are confident that the reason for such a serious sentence was the charges of organizing a contract killing. However, this information was not included in the indictment, although it was announced in court.
May 4, 2016: Craig Wright’s obsession
Former Bitcoin Core developer Gavin Andresen received an email from Robert McGregor, a close friend of self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright:
“Everything is on pause. Craig attempted self-harm and is bleeding to death in the toilet. Stefan is with him, Ramona and I are on our way. The ambulance too.”
Before this, Wright promised to confirm access to the bitcoins owned by Satoshi Nakamoto – to move the coins that he allegedly mined when confirming transactions in the ninth block.
A week later, Andresen received a call from one of Wright’s colleagues saying that he had stabbed himself in the neck.
Arthur van Pelt, co-founder of Dragon Industries, who studied the court materials, called the incident a staging.
July 17, 2017: self-mutilator
On this very day Entrepreneur John McAfee famously made a body horror promise to eat his penis if Bitcoin didn’t reach $500,000 in three years. He later increased his forecast to $1 million. Fortunately, in 2020 he retracted his words.
In June 2021, the Spanish Supreme Court allowed the extradition of the imprisoned McAfee to the United States. A few hours later he was found dead in his prison cell.
The death of the entrepreneur is surrounded by conspiracy theories, many of which were spawned by McAfee himself with his posts in X.
See more
I am content in here. I have friends.
The food is good. All is well.
Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) October 15, 2020
“Know that if I hang myself like Epstein, it will not be my fault,” he wrote shortly before his death.
December 9, 2018: Dead Man’s Chest
In the Indian city of Jaipur, Gerald Cotten, the founder of Canada’s leading bitcoin exchange QuadrigaCX, died at the age of 30. The cause of death was cardiac arrest – he had suffered from Crohn’s disease for a long time.
Cotten was the only holder of private keys to the platform’s cold wallets with $137 million in assets. At least that’s what the official version says.
June 5, 2019: when death offers a shoulder
On this day, the head of the Chinese analytical service BTE.TOP, Hui Yi, committed suicide. The day before, he opened a short position on Bitcoin with a leverage of 100x and lost 2000 BTC.
According to Hui’s partner, all the money belonged to the service’s clients, so the latter decided to give up his life.
It later turned out that the company’s office was closed a month before the suicide. BTE.TOP users suggested that this could be a staged event. This is where the story, mostly discussed in Chinese on WeChat, ends.
September 2020: Trick or Treat
The Latvian State Police prevented the kidnapping and murder of two people. The criminal planned to receive cryptocurrency worth about 500,000 euros from them.
A resident of Riga was looking for perpetrators of kidnapping in the criminal environment. He wanted to force the victim to transfer his existing cryptocurrency and then kill him.
The attacker also prepared instruments of torture, which he planned to use if the victim refused to provide passwords to their cryptocurrency wallets.
August 8, 2023: sic transit gloria mundi
On this day, 41-year-old crypto millionaire Christian Peev, who had American and Bulgarian citizenship, disappeared. He was later found dead in an apartment in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The investigation believes that the millionaire was killed with a dumbbell blow. A certain Konstantin Subotinov helped Valchinov hide his corpse. After the arrest, the latter admitted that he flushed most of the victim’s body down the toilet, and buried the head and some bones in the Vitosha National Park.
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2023-10-31 15:01:01
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