Poof Bitcoin – It’s an extraordinary and mysterious bitcoin movement that just happened on November 3rd. A huge wallet linked to the Silk Road black market and which contained 69,370 BTC has just been completely emptied .
An extraordinary transaction
CipherTrace is a cybersecurity and blockchain transaction monitoring company. On November 3, she spotted an exceptional movement from a Bitcoin Era wallet (at the address 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx).
An anonymous has just transferred the 69,370 BTC of this wallet, or more than 955 million dollars , to another address whose owner is also unknown . He first transferred 1 BTC (probably as a test ), before transferring 69,369.
The bitcoins that have been moved are believed to originally come from the Silk Road darknet black market .
Details of the wallet and its nearly $ 1 billion bitcoin transaction
According to CipherTrace, it appears that this transaction was performed “to switch from one address format to another” . Indeed, the old address is a Legacy / P2PKH address (starting with a “1” ), while the new address is a Bech32 / P2WPKH address (starting with “bc1q” ).
A voluntary action or a hack?
While CipherTrace believes this important move may simply have been made to “stay up to date with the Bitcoin network” , the cybersurveillance company believes there is also a possibility that the wallet was “cracked by hackers . ”
Indeed, the existing wallet since 2015 , it is well known to the Darknet hackers , many of whom seem to have tried to access it. It must be said that the BTC in play represents a good sum.
We can also note that, these bitcoins having been deposited well before the successive hard forks of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and BSV , an equivalent quantity of these forked cryptos were also moved to new BCH and BSV addresses a priori specially created for the occasion.
Whether it is the original owner or a hacker, he has very conscientiously transferred this “small change” , which represents respectively 16.3 million and 10 million dollars .
No one knows why this transaction took place or what future this large amount of bitcoins will see. The sulphurous origin of these BTCs remains engraved in the blockchain, however, and it will prove difficult to sell them – in any case quickly, even going through mixing services to confuse the issue.