An extraordinary transaction, One of the biggest Bitcoin wallets ($ 955 million) has been emptied

One of the largest Bitcoin portfolios ($955 million) has been emptied - Dantesque hack... or leak?

Bitcoins that go poof - It's an extraordinary and mysterious Bitcoin movement that just happened on November 3rd. A huge wallet linked to the black market Silk Road and which contained 69,370 BTC has just been completely emptied.

A transaction out of the ordinary

CipherTrace is a cyber security and blockchain transaction monitoring company. On November 3, it spotted an exceptional movement from a Bitcoin portfolio (at 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx).

An anonymous person has just transferred the 69,370 BTCs of this wallet, i.e. more than $955 million, to another address whose owner is also unknown. He first transferred 1 BTC (probably as a test), before transferring 69,369 BTCs.

The bitcoins that were moved would originally have come from the black market of the darknet Silk Road.

According to CipherTrace, it would appear that this transaction was done "to move 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 that this important move may simply have been done to "stay current with the Bitcoin network", the cyber surveillance company believes that there is also a possibility that the wallet may have been "cracked by hackers".

Indeed, the portfolio has been in existence since 2015 and is well known to Darknet hackers, many of whom appear to have attempted to access it. It must be said that the BTCs at stake represent a nice sum.

It can also be noted 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 have also been moved to new BCH and BSV addresses a priori specially created for the occasion.

Whether the original owner or a hacker, he has thus 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 the future holds for this large quantity of Bitcoin. However, the sulphurous origin of these BTCs remains engraved in the blockchain, and it will prove difficult to sell them - at least quickly, even through mixing services to blur the tracks.