Record-breaking movements for the Bitcoin, which in the day of Tuesday 3 November alone saw around 1 billion dollars change hands. The transaction started from an “account” linked to Silk Road (the largest web platform for drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, money laundering and other crimes that was officially closed in 2013) and involved 69,370 Bitcoin.
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The facts: the record-breaking cryptocurrency transaction
Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of the security company Hudson Rock, was among the first to notice the operation and to “announce” it on his twitter profile: “Someone managed to decrypt the password of the” Bitcoin wallet “that I have reported only a short time ago and to spend 1,000,000,000 dollars ». It should be remembered that cryptocurrency transactions are by definition public and therefore visible to everyone. “It is possible to see the starting address, the arrival address, and the quantity that was handled – explains Christian Miccoli, founder of Conio, an all-Italian application that allows you to buy and sell Bitcoin – The only thing you don’t can see who is making the transaction. ”
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The role of the US federal government
A $ 1 billion mystery that fueled the web pages of major specialized sites and was revealed only two days later, Thursday 5 November. To carry out the transaction was the American government, which seized the Bitcoins to recover at least some of the money linked to the illegal Silk Road business. In an official press release (the link to the press release), the Department of Justice American (DoJ, Department of Justice) made it known that this money had been “stolen” in 2012-2013 by the hand of a computer hacker who had managed to enter the Silk Road site and transfer the money to his virtual wallet. Now, this mysterious thief, which the DoJ himself has defined as “Individual XHe decided to collaborate with the American judicial authorities and deliver the “loot”.
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Silk Road, the marketplace for crime and Bitcoin business
«Silk Road was the most famous online criminal marketplace – says in the statement released by the DoJ the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, David Anderson -. The success of the legal proceedings against its founder (Ross Ulbricht, ed) in 2015 left open a billion-dollar question: where did the money go? What happened today offers an answer, at least in part. One billion dollars of these criminal proceeds are now in the hands of the United States. “
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