Record movements for Bitcoin in the single day of Tuesday, November 3: 1 billion dollars transaction.
The transaction originated from an «account» linked to Silk Road (the largest web platform for drug dealing, illegal arms sales, money laundering and other crimes that was officially closed in 2013) and involved 69,370 Bitcoins.
The facts: the record transaction
Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of the security company Hudson Rock, was among the first to notice the operation and to «announce it» on his twitter profile: «Someone managed to decipher the password of the "Bitcoin wallet" that I reported just a short time ago and to spend 1,000,000,000 dollars». It should be remembered that cryptocurrency transactions are by definition public and therefore visible to all. You can see the departure address, the arrival address, and the amount that was handled - explains Christian Miccoli, founder of Conio, an all-Italian application that allows you to buy and sell Bitcoin - the only thing you can’t see is who is making the transaction».
The role of the US federal government
A $1 billion mystery that was unveiled only two days later, Thursday, November 5. The transaction was carried out by the US government, which seized Bitcoins to recover at least part of the money connected to the illegal Silk Road business. In an official statement (link to the statement), the US Department of Justice (Doj, Department of Justice) said that this money had been «stolen» in 2012-2013 at the hands of a computer hacker who had managed to enter the Silk Road site and transfer the money to his virtual wallet. Now, this mysterious thief, whom Doj himself defined as «Individual X», has decided to collaborate.
Silk Road, the crime and business marketplace in Bitcoin
«Silk Road was the most famous online criminal marketplace - says in the statement released by the Doj the United States attorney for the northern district of California, David Anderson -. The success of the legal proceedings against its founder (Ross Ulbricht, ndr) in 2015 left open a question of a billion dollars: where is the money? What happened today offers an answer, at least in part. A billion dollars of these criminal proceeds is now in the hands of the United States».
