Someone Just Emptied Out a Bitcoin Wallet With $964,000,000 In It
Edit: 4 November 2020 at 11:01 EST: There is an amended post regarding this matter found here.
As the world braced for a long election night that effectively hasn’t ended, someone emptied out one of the most valuable digital wallets in the world.
On Tuesday, whoever is in control of the Bitcoin address “1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx” transferred all its contents—a staggering 69369.16716000 BTC or roughly $964,000,000. At this point, it’s impossible to know whether this was a heist or just the long-dormant owner of the wallet moving out their savings to another wallet.
The full transaction can be found here.
The transaction hash is: 3f036ff88bb851b57a1e28780dbce35a6457a8b57995c095b55b3b0cf48ba9fd
That wallet has been an object of speculation for cryptocurrency enthusiasts for years, and until the transfer it was one of the most valuable Bitcoin addresses in existence. More recently, several hackers have been trying to break into it, trying to bruteforce the passcode that protects the wallet in an attempt to steal the funds.
Now, the money is gone, moved to another Bitcoin address, and we will never know what happened unless the person who ordered the transfer comes out publicly.
“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,” Alon Gal, a security researcher who’s been keeping an eye on the wallet, said on Twitter. “Maybe the owner? Hard to know.”
The wallet was considered “dormant” since 2015, meaning the owner didn’t move any Bitcoin out of it since then, As Gal, the Chief Technology Officer of cybercrime intelligence company Hudson Rock, explained.
