Someone has transferred ~$1 billion from a bitcoin wallet quiet since 2015

Wallet is likely tied to Silk Road, the underground crime bazaar shut down in 2013.

Nearly $1 billion in bitcoin has been transferred out of a mysterious wallet that has been quiet since 2015.

The haul of slightly more than 69,369 BTC—worth about $975 million at the time this post went live—was moved out in the past 24 hours, the bitcoin ledger shows. Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of security firm Hudson Rock, was among the first—if not the first—to report the transaction.

“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!” Gal went on to say that it wasn’t clear if the person responsible was the original wallet owner or someone who pulled off the unlikely feat of cracking the password.

. . .

The chances of successfully cracking the password that unlocked the wallet was widely viewed as a long shot. Passwords are generally long, and the encryption involved—a combination of AES-256-CBC and SHA-512—is extremely slow to process. What’s more, it was never certain that the wallet.dat file that was passed around was the real bitcoin wallet or a forgery.

For the moment, the quasi-anonymous nature of bitcoin transactions is concealing the identity of the person or party who transferred almost $1 billion worth of digital currency. Given the interest of law enforcement and the advances made in cryptocurrency forensics, you can bet people are working hard to solve this mystery.