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Until Tuesday evening at 10:34 pm, the Bitcoin exchange with the string 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx (1HQ3) was one of the most valuable in the world. Nearly 70,000 Bitcoins, the equivalent of around 900 million euros, were in the digital wallet. Nobody knew who owned the money. But the online safe has been creating a gold rush atmosphere among criminal hackers for years.
The money was in the Bitcoin wallet since April 2013. Now the assets have been suddenly transferred.
After two days of speculation in the global Bitcoin community, it became known this Thursday that it was a U.S. Department of Justice action. Investigators confiscated the money because they believe it is profits from the Silk Road darknet black market. The bitcoin confiscation is “the largest amount of cryptocurrency confiscated to date,” the US Department of Justice happily writes in a press release.
According to today’s Bitcoin rate, Silk Road took eight billion euros
The Silk Road platform is considered the first major darknet black market. Ecstasy, cocaine, heroin and LSD were traded here. Hackers are also said to have offered their services there to detect personal profiles on Facebook and Twitter and to outsmart ATMs. According to court documents, Silk Road is said to have raised the gigantic sum of over 600,000 Bitcoin in fees when it closed in October 2013. According to today’s Bitcoin rate, this equates to nearly eight billion euros.
Some of this money was apparently stored in 1HQ3, as can be seen from the court files that have now gone public. As a result, the Silk Road operator himself became a victim of criminals. A hacker named Person X is said to have illegally accessed Silk Road servers between 2011 and 2013 and stole your money.
Ross Ulbricht is said to have noticed this and threatened Person X to return the 70,000 Bitcoins. But person X is not.
Person X works with the United States government
In recent months, US tax investigators have finally discovered the hacker. It is said to have repeatedly transferred amounts from two accounts assigned to the Silk Road platform to two of its Bitcoin exchanges. And it is from these two Bitcoin accounts that the 69,471 Bitcoins were sent to the 1HQ3 exchange.
The prosecutor’s office then determined the identity of Person X. On Tuesday, he apparently signed the consent to confiscate the Bitcoin 1HQ3 account.
Online bitcoin hunters were also on the trail of millions
The hunt for Bitcoin assets apparently began at least two years ago. The reason: the so-called Wallet.dat file to access the million dollar safe had appeared on the net, as the security expert Alon Gal a few weeks ago announced on Twitter. He himself had received a copy of the file. For Bitcoin hunters this is an important piece of the puzzle: Wallet.dat files store the private keys that open Bitcoin’s digital safes. However, these Wallet.dat files are usually extremely well encrypted.
Only those who know the password to open the wallet file have access to the online wallet. Without the password, the files are useless. The codes can hardly be cracked because they are double encrypted with the AES-256-CBS and SHA-512 algorithms. According to experts, it is impossible to guess a complex password of 15 characters in length within a lifetime that contains lowercase and uppercase letters, special characters and foreign letters.
Cryptographic Bitcoin Exchange Trading
However, this does not stop hackers from attacking wallet files with automatically generated passwords. After all, Bitcoin’s price is currently at an all-time high of 13,000 euros. This also automatically increases the value of the 1HQ3 wallet.
The currency is an object of popular speculation known for its extreme values. Sudden accidents of several thousand euros are not uncommon. When the currency was founded about 20 years ago, a Bitcoin cost a few cents. Today, digital currency is worth 100,000 times more.
Selling crypto wallets, which can really be worth a lot, has turned into a business model, reports online magazine “Vice”. On platforms like “All Private Keys” there are purported wallet files with millions on offer, which are being sold at low prices. The password for this is obviously missing.
On the trail of drug money
Even after the current action by the US Department of Justice, income from the illegal Silk Road business has not yet been found. Because financial transactions with Bitcoin are public, but they are pseudonymous. This means that the owners of the digital wallets do not appear with real names and are difficult to identify. This is also why Bitcoin is often used for extortion with ransomware, illegal weapons, and Internet drug orders.
California authorities would also like to know where the rest of the drug money is stored. Bitcoins confiscated by the 1HQ3 exchange only partially answered the question of where the lost assets are stored.
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