A little less than 70 thousand bitcoin (69369, to be precise) were transferred from a wallet that has remained untouched since afar 2015 . This is a sum whose equivalent value moves around one billion dollars , obviously depending on the change in the exchange between bitcoin and american fiat currency. The transaction took place in the past few hours, as can be seen from the analysis of the Bitcoin blockchain.

A dormant bitcoin wallet resurrects from 2015: it contained 1 billion dollars

Note the transaction was among the first, if not perhaps the first, Alon Gal , co-founder and CTO of security company Hudson Rock, sharing their bewilderment on Twitter. It is not clear whether the operation took place at the hands of the legitimate owner of the wallet or if someone succeeded in the arduous task of “guessing” the password. The wallet is (or rather was) the fourth largest BTC wallet in the world.

UNBELIEVABLE – 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! https: // t .co / cEcdGcYzfI pic.twitter.com/XfBbkj1mHJ

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

Second Tom Robinson, co-founder and head of blockchain analysis company Elliptic , suspects that the funds in that wallet came from sales made on Silk Road, the notorious black market of the web on which it was possible to find all kinds of illicit material and services before being closed and seized in 2013.

When the BTCs were transferred to that wallet before the Silk Road closing, their total value was approximately 350 thousand dollars . The surge in the value of Bitcoin that occurred in the following years led this wallet to exceed one billion dollars. The last recorded transaction dates back to 2015, when they were moved 101 BTC in BTC-e, a trading platform later closed in 2017 and which saw the founder arrested on charges of money laundering.

Still the shadow of Silk Road

It still remains the mystery behind the hand behind this transfer. There are hypotheses that indicate the possibility that it is someone connected to Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, but also, more simply, some trafficker who has used the black market of the web. Then there is another possibility: a few months ago on Vice an article was published speculating that someone had placed the wallet in the underground of the web to find someone able to force it and recover the cryptocurrency contained, which then had a equivalent of approximately 690 million dollars.

It is true that in this case it would really be a more unique than rare enterprise, as the passwords of Bitcoin wallets are long and protected by AES encryption – 256 – CBC and SHA – 512, extremely onerous to process. And then we have to consider that the wallet.dat file circulated in the undergrowth of the web was not the real 1 billion dollar wallet.

In any case, the pseudonymous nature of bitcoin transactions does not allow us to trace the identity of who actually transferred those funds. But forensic analysis has made important strides in this area, and someone is already hard at work trying to unravel the fog that shrouds this mystery.