Alex Horn, The Guardian:
A billion dollars worth of bitcoins linked to the shuttered darknet market Silk Road has changed hands for the first time in seven years, prompting renewed speculation about the fate of the illicit fortune.
Almost 70,000 bitcoins stored in the account which, like all bitcoin wallets, is visible to the public, had lain untouched since April 2013. The website was shut down by an FBI raid six months after they were deposited, and they have not moved since.
Late on Tuesday night, however, the full amount less a $12 (£9) transaction fee was transferred to a new bitcoin address, records show.
This is an amazing story. If you’ve never heard of Silk Road (the online marketplace), here’s a link to the Wikipedia page. It’s a riveting read.
Silk Road’s founder, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to life in prison. Did he somehow move this trove? Did someone figure out a way to hack into the bitcoin wallet and move the funds? This is a pretty great story.
If this intrigues you, you should check out the book American Kingpin. It tells the story of the creation and, ultimately, the shutdown of Silk Road and it is a real page turner.
UPDATE: From this Wired story, posted later in the day [H/T Cabel Sasser]:
Today the Justice Department finally revealed where a billion-dollar tranche of the Silk Road’s treasure ended up: stolen by a mysterious hacker, and now seized by the US Treasury.
The DOJ today filed a civil forfeiture complaint over 69,370 bitcoins—and other variants of the cryptocurrency—seized on November 3 from an unnamed person who court documents refer to only as Individual X. According to the IRS’s criminal investigation unit, Individual X successfully hacked the Silk Road sometime between May of 2012 and April of 2013, stealing that abundance of drug money from the dark web site’s bitcoin addresses before Ulbricht’s downfall in October of 2013. The IRS says it has finally tracked down the hacker who stole the Silk Road’s nearly 70,000 bitcoins—now worth more than $1 billion—and allowed law enforcement to take control of those funds.
Amazing!