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

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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The haul of slightly more than 69,369 BTC—worth about $975 million at the time this post went live—was withdrawn in the past 24 hours, the bitcoin ledger shows.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.

It was either the person who cracked the password or the original owner who may have noticed the recent articles about his wallet being circulated among hackers.

The wallet was considered “dormant” since 2013.

Either way this is pretty interesting.

— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) November 3, 2020

Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientist of blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, said on Twitter that the bitcoin wallet is the world’s fourth largest. He said he believed the funds came from sales on Silk Road, the underground market that peddled drugs, murder-for-hire, and other illicit goods and services before being brought down in 2013. Elliptic published this blog post earlier on Wednesday.