Cryptocurrencies are the wonders of the modern tech. Powered by blockchain, transactions involving cryptocurrencies are traceable and transparent.
But the people behind the wallets however, can remain in the shadows.
In other words, despite the assets inside wallets are publicly available for anyone to see, the owners can still be anonymous and unidentifiable.
And this time, 69,369 Bitcoins worth a little less than $1 billion has been transferred out of a mysterious wallet that has been dormant since 2015.
Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of security firm Hudson Rock, was among the first to report the transaction.
But he wasn't sure that the person moving that sum of Bitcoins out of the wallet, was the owner, or a hacker who managed to crack the wallet's password.
“UNBELIEVABLE,” he wrote. “Someone was able to crack the password of the bitcoin wallet I reported on only a short time ago and spend the $1,000,000,000 that was inside it!”
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) November 3, 2020
Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientist of blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, said that the Bitcoin wallet was the world’s fourth largest.
He believed that the funds may have come from the sales that happened on the dark web's Silk Road. The platform by Ross Ulbricht was the largest underground market for illegal drugs, murder-for-hire, and other illicit goods and services before being brought down in 2013.
Ulbricht after all, is no stranger to cryptocurrencies.
It was said that when the Bitcoins moved out of Silk Road, they were worth roughly $350,000. But in the intervening years, Bitcoin experienced a surge in value, soaring the wallet's content to worth more than $955 million and beyond.
The account was dormant since 2015, with the last transaction was when someone transferred 101 Bitcoins into BTC-e, a Bitcoin exchange whose founders and staff members were arrested in 2017 on allegations that he committed $4 billion worth of Bitcoin laundering
These events led to the closure of the BTC-e service.
Since then, the wallet remained dormant, until this time.
Here, people speculated that it's either Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht who moved the Bitcoins, or one of people who used to be the sellers in the online crime bazaar.
Another possibility, is hackers that have been trading encrypted wallets in the hopes of recovering long lost and dormant cryptocurrencies, which at the time was worth around $690 million.
According to Gal, this particular wallet has been "passed around between hackers/crackers for the past 2 years for the purpose of cracking the password."
What this means, many hackers know about the wallet's existence and have tried cracking it.
But here, Gal, Robinsonm and others can only speculate about the owner of the wallet.
Due to the nature of Bitcoin and blockchain, no one can really prove who is the person responsible for the wallet's activity.
Previously, someone moved $1 billion worth of Bitcoins, but paid only $5 in fee.
