Wallet possibly affiliated with Silk Road moved converted 813 million euros

By admin On Nov 4, 2020

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A bitcoin address that has shown no activity since 2015 and can possibly be traced back to the online drug marketplace Silk Road, which was rolled up in 2013, sent an amount of 69,369 bitcoin, converted 813 million euros, in one go.

Unknowns have transferred the total content of 69,369 bitcoin from the address 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx to another wallet. According to BitInfoCharts, it is the fourth largest wallet worldwide. The address first received bitcoins in 2013 and made its last transaction in April 2015. It is not clear who controls the wallet and why the content was moved.

It is striking that a .dat file has been offered on the hacking forum RaidForums for months with the claim that it relates to the address 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx. Motherboard wrote about this in September. The .dat file would contain the public and encrypted private keys for the wallet and whoever cracks the private keys would be in control of the address and the 69,369 bitcoin.

There are no indications that this was successful. It is also not certain whether the file actually contains the data for the address. Wallet security uses both AES-256-CBS encryption and SHA-512 hashing. A system with nine GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards would therefore only be able to try ten passwords per second. If it was a complex 15-character password, it would take a lifetime to crack, writes KeychainX, which offers a wallet recovery service.

Coming from Silk Road?

By means of blockchain analysis a link could be made between the address with the 69,369 bitcoin and the underground drug marketplace Silk Road, says Tom Robinson, co-founder of Elliptic. That company offers blockchain analysis services. The bitcoins are said to have been sent in May 2012 from a wallet of Silk Road and transferred to the relevant address in 2013. By the way, Robinson is very cautious about Bloomberg and mentions a 60 percent chance that the bitcoins will come from Silk Road.

Silk Road was rolled up by the FBI in 2013. The then 29-year-old owner Ross Ulbricht was then arrested. He was found guilty in 2015 and is serving a life sentence. The FBI seized 144,000 bitcoin in the action, which was worth 20 million euros in 2013 and would now be worth 1.7 billion euros.