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November 3 U.S. Department of Justice confiscated 69,370 BTC. These coins originate from the Silk Road darknet marketplace.
About $1 billion of Bitcoin tied to the Silk Road marketplace was seized by the U.S. on Tuesday https://t.co/01FIMgW14Y
— Bloomberg Crypto (@crypto) November 5, 2020
Law enforcement officers also confiscated an equivalent number in Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, and Bitcoin Gold. The agency stressed that this is the largest amount of cryptocurrency ever seized by the US authorities.
According to a court document, the owner of the address, who goes by the pseudonym Invididual X, hacked into Silk Road and stole the coins. Previously we already wrotethat they were taken out of the darknet market on May 6, 2012. A year after the withdrawal, they were moved to address, on which they lay until the moment of confiscation.
On November 3, Invididual X signed an agreement to transfer the coins to law enforcement. On November 4, the price of coins exceeded $ 1 billion amid rising bitcoin prices.
Individual X managed to hack nearly $1 billion from the old Silk Road Bitcoin accounts.
Then the govt found Individual X and took the Bitcoin back, the DOJ announced today.
Who is Individual X? pic.twitter.com/N0Rra8EqOR
— Nathaniel Popper (@nathanielpopper) November 5, 2020
The doc says that Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence, threatened Invididual X in an attempt to recover the funds, but did not succeed.
«Ulbricht became aware of Individual X’s online
identity and threatened Individual X for return of the cryptocurrency to Ulbricht. Individual X did not
return the cryptocurrency but kept it and did not spend it.»— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) November 5, 2020
Chainalysis assisted the authorities in tracking 54 transactions with Silk Road.
This week, the cryptocurrency world reacted to the movement of over $1B in BTC from a long-dormant wallet connected to the Silk Road darknet market. The DOJ announced today this transfer was in fact a govt seizure of funds. Read our blog for the details! https://t.co/JGzZYGBSIW
– Chainalysis (@chainalysis) November 5, 2020
Silk Road is believed to have earned 614,000 BTC in commissions, although only 174,000 BTC was seized from Ross Ulbricht upon arrest.
Silk Road history: how bitcoin took the darknet economy to the next level
Recall the wallet.dat file to the address Invididual X sold on hacker forums for several years. When 69,370 BTC was transferred to another address, many came to the conclusion that someone had managed to find a private key.
69,370 BTC started moving on one of the richest wallets. Hackers have been hacking it for years
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