7 ms·

A Bitcoin Address with 782,000 BTC Moved Through It

189 points by patio11 13y ago

sorenbs 13y ago
How traceable are bitcoins? Would it be possible to track when someone tried to offload the stolen bitcoins on one of the major exchanges by tracing back to this address or some Gox logs? Given the value of the stolen coins are in the range of 0.5B USD it's not unreasonable to suspect that some government capacity would investigate this. If the stolen coins can indeed be detected - how would they go about extracting the value? Seems like a large scale, risky money laundry effort would be needed.
- icebraining 13y ago
  You can trace all transactions forever, they're all public in the Bitcoin ledger (blockchain). But since Bitcoins are fungible, if you transfer them to an address that holds BTC from many people, you can "mix" them and make it harder to tell to where did your amount go: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service
  - obiterdictum 13y ago
    You can also use alt-coin exchanges, e.g. BTC->LTC->BTC, or even multiple exchanges (one to buy, one to sell) to obscure the trail even more.
  - kordless 13y ago
    Keep in mind older transactions are pruned from the tree on most nodes. While you may see where a Bitcoin originated, not all intermediate addresses will be shown forever in some version of the Blockchain. That's not to say that someone somewhere doesn't have the full blockchain, so you should keep in mind that it depends on what blockchain you are viewing at the time of investigation.
    - stcredzero 13y ago
      If I were the NSA, I'd be keeping track of the full blockchain.
      - kordless 13y ago
        Based on current observations, I would assume they are and have for some time.
    - makomk 13y ago
      That's not exactly true. Older transactions aren't indexed by most nodes, so it's a lot of work to retrieve them, but almost all nodes still have a full copy of the entire transaction history.
- rtkwe 13y ago
  You can't trace individual coins, but you can trace amounts. Bitcoin is made of nothing but the blockchain which is the whole ledger of which wallet owns how many BTC.
- smtddr 13y ago
  You cannot[1] track thieves through the blockchain like this. If you're going to catch any alleged MtGox thieves, they need to make some other mistake outside of bitcoin-world. Like a leaked email, or telling a friend who then goes leak it, etc. e.g. SilkRoad's Dread Pirate Roberts got caught because of his errors outside of bitcoin's blockchain. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7235113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7235113
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    Your argument would benefit from precision; it's exactly 'through the blockchain' that you can track thieves. The issue you are bringing up is that it is straightforward to move value off the blockchain.
    - smtddr 13y ago
      I stand corrected. :)
fidotron 13y ago
Get the pitchforks and the torches! Looks like we've got ourselves a witch-hunt.
- DannyBee 13y ago
  Don't worry, the internet is pretty good at these. I mean, Reddit did a great job with the ... oh, that's right.
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- brazzy 13y ago
  IF the leaked document proves authentic and IF there are no other addresses with a similar cumulative traffic, then I might be inclined to agree.
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perlgeek 13y ago
So, what about it? Does it belong to some BTC exchange? Or is it all stolen, or something? I'm pretty sure there are lots of company and governmental bank accounts with lots of money moving through them...
- mseidl 13y ago
  MtGox has about 700k+ BTC
  - perlgeek 13y ago
    Wasn't it said they lost 700k BTC? Also just comparing balances doesn't seem like a very strong indicator of identity to me.
    - AUmrysh 13y ago
      Couldn't someone with a known withdrawal from mtgox use the address the money came from to trace up the blockchain? I don't know if gox used multiple wallets, but if not it should be pretty obvious where the money came from and went.
- Anderkent 13y ago
  This refers back to http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S..., an allegedly leaked MtGox document detailing their crisis management strategy, where a theft of 744,408 BTC is discussed.
kiba 13y ago
Context would be nice.
- dblacc 13y ago
  MtGox is the context i believe
- harrigan 13y ago
  The alleged Mt. Gox insolvency document claims that they lost about 744,408 BTC due to malleability-related theft which went unnoticed for several years. This is an address that just happens to have had 782,558 BTC flow through it over the last two years. Of course, if the Mt. Gox document is a fake, the author could easily have chosen an amount that corresponded to an address that had such a number of Bitcoins flow through it. It's difficult to know what's going on here.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  The account shows transactions roughly matching the number of BTC missing from Mt. Gox. The recent transaction lots are large: 3000 - 15,000 BTC going back to December (at least, I'm still looking). That's $1.5 - $7.5 million in daily TX, which is pretty damned significant. Well above financial reporting requirements pretty much anywhere. For a long time this was at $10k in the US, though that threshold is now lower with improved technical capabilities. Odd story: a friend of mine was a bagman for a con artist who happened to get caught. The friend ended up testifying in the case. Quite some years back. Edit: The account dates to April, 2012, with lots of TX, including large blocks, even fairly early on. There's some discussion at reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yvdcd/heres_a_summary_of_what_has_happened_over_the/cfo7vho http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yvdcd/heres_a_summ...
lettergram 13y ago
Same time MtGox Disappeared
- icebraining 13y ago
  No, it's not, the 780k were not from a recent transaction, they're the cumulative sum of all transactions in the last two years on that address.
  - shawabawa3 13y ago
    The leaked mtgox document claims that 700k coins went missing over the last 2 years
    - jpalomaki 13y ago
      If somebody wanted forge "leaked strategy document" these kind of verifiable facts would be nice to put in.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Many of those transactions were recent. Though the account dates to April, 2012, the volume of TX seems to have accelerated through 2013 and 2014.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      More (only because I'm learning this as I go): the balance shows the flow of funds in and out of that account. I've traced a bunch to various endpoints and through intermediaries: https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQtMZ3Tew https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?timespan=all&showData... http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yvdcd/heres_a_summary_of_what_has_happened_over_the/cfocqz3 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yvdcd/heres_a_summ...
nakedrobot2 13y ago
While I am still terribly sad that I didn't mine bitcoins with my workstation 3-4 years ago, I am glad I can stand at the sidelines and watch this amazing drama unfold. Incidentally, I never figured out how to pronounce "Mt.Gox" But now I know: "Empty Gox" sounds about right :-)
- dodyg 13y ago
  7 - 8 years ago I was envying all my friends who were buying properties that keep going up and up ...
  - mcv 13y ago
    I bought my house 6 years ago. I bought some bitcoins this autumn.
    - davidiach 13y ago
      You lucky bastard! :D
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - kokey 13y ago
      It sounds like a winning investment strategy would be to go short on whatever you are investing in.
      - stcredzero 13y ago
        Can this be applied recursively? Can you go short on your own going short, then go short on that as well?
      - bertil 13y ago
        That was the best back-handed compliment I’ve heard since the last episode of Downtown Abbey. I'm sure csv hates you every tiny bit I love you right now. :)
dave1010uk 13y ago
To save you doing the math, that many bitcoins is about $375 million at today's prices - not that the market is deep enough to be able to sell it for anywhere near that price.
- negamax 13y ago
  It really surprises me that Bitstamp has absorbed 100k+ in last 24 hours at current price range.
yuvadam 13y ago
It never had more than a few thousand BTC (except for a few peaks) at any point in time. [1] [1] - https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQtMZ3Tew https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1Drt3c8pSdrky...
- VMG 13y ago
  Also fairly round, large denomination. Even when scamming somebody as incompetent as MtGox, as a criminal I'd be more elaborate than saying "I haven't received the 5000 BTC, can you send them again?" to the same address hundreds of times. I don't think this has anything to do with it, it should be easy to determine if the transaction are linked to MtGox and malled tx's
  - wcummings 13y ago
    Criminals are lazy
- ok_craig 13y ago
  Do you think this means that it is less likely, or more likely to be related to the thefts? According to Gox, the theft was happening over a long period of time, not one lump sum. Transfers to this address began in April of 2012, which is consistent with the story.
  - shawabawa3 13y ago
    If this address does belong to the thief, why would they steal all the bitcoins with a single address? Surely using different addresses would make it less suspicious
    - ok_craig 13y ago
      I don't necessarily believe that this address was related to the theft, only pointing out that the expectation of one transaction containing all the stolen bitcoin is not correct. Yes, using different addresses would be less suspicious.
mburst 13y ago
I think in another 5-10 years bitcoin will finally be realized as one of the great scams of our time
- gambiting 13y ago
  Why would it be? Bitcoin on it's own is just a good that can be traded, just like gold, silver, or bags of potatoes. If you setup an exchange for gold,but then instead of paying people who deposited gold with you ran away with all of it, would you call gold a "scam"?
  - edent 13y ago
    Or tulips.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
    - viraptor 13y ago
      This is really annoying. No - not even comparable to Tulip mania. That thing was based on artificially limited supply. If you want to start trading bitcoin or get your own miner, you can do it any time you want at a reasonable investment. Supply is always known in this case and demand is not ongoing (as in, bitcoins you keep don't disappear after a couple of days, unless you keep them with mtgox). Or do you want to explain why it's comparable?
      - acdha 13y ago
        Because bitcoin has an artificially limited supply built into the system and the pricing has exhibited the kind of wild fluctuations more characteristic of penny stocks rather than a currency? Toss in the fact that the entire system is predicated on making early adopters rich and it's a basic econ lesson concealed behind some cool crypto code.
      - w0utert 13y ago
        Isn't BTC supply also artificially limited? I though that was the whole point so it wouldn't become 'inflationary'? I can't stop being amazed by the persistent denial and non-sequitur arguments made by many BTC fans as to why none of the problems BTC has been suffering from are relevant and how BTC is nothing like a tulip bubble or a pyramid scheme, or a scam, or whatever, but the 'money' of the future. Huge price swings, theft, illicit trade, failing exchanges, problems withdrawing or converting BTC, yeah sounds like a great alternative to 'money controlled by central banks' :-S It's just like gold, silver, and it's definitely much better than fiat, because... it's THE FUTURE, it's FREE, and it uses TECHNOLOGY!
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jcfrei 13y ago
I'm sure you could find several addresses with a transaction amount in those heights. Exchanges don't operate from a single address - so any theft could only be traced back to several addresses.
smtddr 13y ago
So... for those that might not know how to read the blockchain.info site, this isn't 782,000 BTC moved today. That's the total amount the address has ever been exposed to, ever. As you scroll down you'll see red arrows and green arrows, along with dates. Red = withdraws from the address, and green = deposits into the address. You can see the dates and note this is just an address that's been doing business(whatever that is) for awhile now. You see the pagination at the bottom and can view history for at least a year back. In short, this isn't news. It's people who are angry looking for a target. Don't let this be a repeat of SheepMarketPlace fiasco... http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/09/recovering-stolen-bitcoin-sheep-marketplace-trading-digital-currency-money http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/09/recovering... You can't catch bitcoin thieves this way. They need to make some other mistake somewhere else outside of blockchain world.
- mcv 13y ago
  Yeah, it could be just a coincidence that the total amount matches the amount stolen from Mt. Gox. Or it could be the culprit. Is it possible to verify whether this came from Mt. Gox? And Whether it matches the transactions that were messed with?
  - deleted 13y ago
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- ok_craig 13y ago
  The fact that it wasn't all moved today does not mean it isn't related. The theft was due to a leak that happened over a long period of time. The transactions to this address start in April of 2012. That is entirely consistent with the theft. 740k worth of transactions in one day would make it a less likely candidate for being related.
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o_nate 13y ago
If I was going to steal 782,000 BTC over a period of two years why would I steal them all from the same address? Doesn't pass the sniff test.
- Consultant32452 13y ago
  Nice try hacker.
- beedogs 13y ago
  The hacker really only needs to be slightly smarter than whoever wrote that bad PHP in the first place. It's not implausible really that they'd send it through the same address.
antidaily 13y ago
That was me.
r721 13y ago
This address was mentioned in November in Washington Post article about 194,993 BTC transaction: [Sarah Meiklejohn: ] "About half of the transactions sending bitcoins to this 12sENw address between August 29 and November 14 were from addresses we had associated with Bitstamp. This could be true for a lot of reasons (a heavyweight user withdrawing their bitcoins, for example), but there were a few other weird things I saw that made me think otherwise. For example, a lot of the bitcoins that flowed out of the 12sENw address went to one of two other addresses: 1Drt3c8 and (especially recently) 1HBa5. The former of these addresses we have tagged as Bitstamp, and the latter is often within one hop of a known Bitstamp address (e.g., it has also sent a lot of bitcoins to 1Drt3c8). So, while a lot of things could explain many bitcoins being received from Bitstamp, it seems like fewer of them could be explained by many bitcoins flowing from Bitstamp and then back to Bitstamp in a small span of time which is what leads me to think this is an internal shuffling of some kind. Of course, I could also be completely wrong! For example, I should definitely mention that, for the direct transaction of interest, I don't have any of the input addresses tagged (i.e., they might or might not belong to Bitstamp), so that my inferences are really just going on the past behavior of this small handful of addresses." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/23/heres-who-probably-did-that-massive-150000000-bitcoin-transaction/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/23... So this address was tagged as "Bitstamp" in her database.
mdemare 13y ago
It is possible for the exchanges and miners to get together and change the protocol, to mark the stolen bitcoins as invalid? The thief is probably going to dump the stolen bitcoins on the market - not exactly a good thing for the bitcoin price or the long term viability of bitcoin itself. Especially since it will take quite some time to dump all thsoe bitcoins - the market isn't all that liquid.
- cLeEOGPw 13y ago
  Nobody can say for sure the bitcoins in that address are stolen. But it would be very possible to reject bitcoins from certain addresses, and the protocol don't need to be changed. All it would take is make a client to reject to include transactions to/from blacklisted addresses into blockchain. And for everyone to update clients. That still would be vulnerable to 51% attack, but it is very real possibility.
- aidos 13y ago
  It's a flawed idea though unfortunately - a malicious party could have a legitimate address blacklisted by sending stolen bitcoin to them. It's a wonderfully interesting social issue. We have this high stakes protocol where everything is transparent and the whole system needs to be in a consensus. It's fantastic watching the internal struggle.
adam12 13y ago
This whole situation reminds me of Michael Bolton's virus in Office Space.
- hackerboos 13y ago
  Yeah or Richard Pryor in Superman III
nikcub 13y ago
I doubt this is the thief's wallet because it would mean that they somehow managed to execute withdrawals of 3k and 5k bitcoin 7 and 5 days ago respectively - MtGox has stopped all withdrawals for weeks/months now. The number of transactions seems low as well, the malleability bug would have involved thousands of smaller transactions. It would also be insanely stupid for a sophisticated hacker to funnel their loot through a single wallet. Someone who understands transaction malleability enough to exploit it likely won't be making that mistake. It isn't hard to pick out a number of bitcoin and then dive into the blockchain and find a wallet that has a same/similar number of bitcoins. Similar types of misidentification happen during the Silk Road and Sheep Marketplace heists.
- amacneil 13y ago
  I don't think they are suggesting it's the thief's wallet - it's presumably the Gox hot storage wallet.
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struct 13y ago
Seems that quite a lot of the volume on that address[1] is about 40% of the volume of the of the stuff going through MT Gox[2]. Might be a coincidence. [1] https://blockchain.info/charts/received-per-day?timespan=180days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQtMZ3Tew https://blockchain.info/charts/received-per-day?timespan=180... [2] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg180ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg180ztgSzm1g10z...
fu86 13y ago
I hope, his USB-stick doesn't get corrupted or unreadable ...
vxNsr 13y ago
Well I don't know if this matters but it checks out against benford's law, or at least kinda... http://i.imgur.com/nL9lO6r.png http://i.imgur.com/nL9lO6r.png for comparison here is a dataset that doesn't checkout against benford's law (it's the city of Chicago's employee Salaries) [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/SxAY1d2.png http://i.imgur.com/SxAY1d2.png (don't get too alarmed though, it fails because they've used estimations for hourly employees)

189 points by patio11 13y ago

How traceable are bitcoins? Would it be possible to track when someone tried to offload the stolen bitcoins on one of the major exchanges by tracing back to this address or some Gox logs? Given the value of the stolen coins are in the range of 0.5B USD it's not unreasonable to suspect that some government capacity would investigate this. If the stolen coins can indeed be detected - how would they go about extracting the value? Seems like a large scale, risky money laundry effort would be needed.

icebraining 13y ago
You can trace all transactions forever, they're all public in the Bitcoin ledger (blockchain). But since Bitcoins are fungible, if you transfer them to an address that holds BTC from many people, you can "mix" them and make it harder to tell to where did your amount go: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service
- obiterdictum 13y ago
  You can also use alt-coin exchanges, e.g. BTC->LTC->BTC, or even multiple exchanges (one to buy, one to sell) to obscure the trail even more.
- kordless 13y ago
  Keep in mind older transactions are pruned from the tree on most nodes. While you may see where a Bitcoin originated, not all intermediate addresses will be shown forever in some version of the Blockchain. That's not to say that someone somewhere doesn't have the full blockchain, so you should keep in mind that it depends on what blockchain you are viewing at the time of investigation.
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    If I were the NSA, I'd be keeping track of the full blockchain.
    - kordless 13y ago
      Based on current observations, I would assume they are and have for some time.
  - makomk 13y ago
    That's not exactly true. Older transactions aren't indexed by most nodes, so it's a lot of work to retrieve them, but almost all nodes still have a full copy of the entire transaction history.
rtkwe 13y ago
You can't trace individual coins, but you can trace amounts. Bitcoin is made of nothing but the blockchain which is the whole ledger of which wallet owns how many BTC.
smtddr 13y ago
You cannot[1] track thieves through the blockchain like this. If you're going to catch any alleged MtGox thieves, they need to make some other mistake outside of bitcoin-world. Like a leaked email, or telling a friend who then goes leak it, etc. e.g. SilkRoad's Dread Pirate Roberts got caught because of his errors outside of bitcoin's blockchain. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7235113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7235113
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Your argument would benefit from precision; it's exactly 'through the blockchain' that you can track thieves. The issue you are bringing up is that it is straightforward to move value off the blockchain.
  - smtddr 13y ago
    I stand corrected. :)

fidotron 13y ago

Get the pitchforks and the torches! Looks like we've got ourselves a witch-hunt.

DannyBee 13y ago
Don't worry, the internet is pretty good at these. I mean, Reddit did a great job with the ... oh, that's right.

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brazzy 13y ago
IF the leaked document proves authentic and IF there are no other addresses with a similar cumulative traffic, then I might be inclined to agree.

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perlgeek 13y ago

So, what about it? Does it belong to some BTC exchange? Or is it all stolen, or something? I'm pretty sure there are lots of company and governmental bank accounts with lots of money moving through them...

mseidl 13y ago
MtGox has about 700k+ BTC
- perlgeek 13y ago
  Wasn't it said they lost 700k BTC? Also just comparing balances doesn't seem like a very strong indicator of identity to me.
  - AUmrysh 13y ago
    Couldn't someone with a known withdrawal from mtgox use the address the money came from to trace up the blockchain? I don't know if gox used multiple wallets, but if not it should be pretty obvious where the money came from and went.
Anderkent 13y ago
This refers back to http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S..., an allegedly leaked MtGox document detailing their crisis management strategy, where a theft of 744,408 BTC is discussed.

kiba 13y ago

Context would be nice.

dblacc 13y ago
MtGox is the context i believe
harrigan 13y ago
The alleged Mt. Gox insolvency document claims that they lost about 744,408 BTC due to malleability-related theft which went unnoticed for several years. This is an address that just happens to have had 782,558 BTC flow through it over the last two years. Of course, if the Mt. Gox document is a fake, the author could easily have chosen an amount that corresponded to an address that had such a number of Bitcoins flow through it. It's difficult to know what's going on here.
dredmorbius 13y ago
The account shows transactions roughly matching the number of BTC missing from Mt. Gox. The recent transaction lots are large: 3000 - 15,000 BTC going back to December (at least, I'm still looking). That's $1.5 - $7.5 million in daily TX, which is pretty damned significant. Well above financial reporting requirements pretty much anywhere. For a long time this was at $10k in the US, though that threshold is now lower with improved technical capabilities. Odd story: a friend of mine was a bagman for a con artist who happened to get caught. The friend ended up testifying in the case. Quite some years back. Edit: The account dates to April, 2012, with lots of TX, including large blocks, even fairly early on. There's some discussion at reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yvdcd/heres_a_summary_of_what_has_happened_over_the/cfo7vho http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yvdcd/heres_a_summ...

lettergram 13y ago

Same time MtGox Disappeared

icebraining 13y ago
No, it's not, the 780k were not from a recent transaction, they're the cumulative sum of all transactions in the last two years on that address.
- shawabawa3 13y ago
  The leaked mtgox document claims that 700k coins went missing over the last 2 years
  - jpalomaki 13y ago
    If somebody wanted forge "leaked strategy document" these kind of verifiable facts would be nice to put in.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Many of those transactions were recent. Though the account dates to April, 2012, the volume of TX seems to have accelerated through 2013 and 2014.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    More (only because I'm learning this as I go): the balance shows the flow of funds in and out of that account. I've traced a bunch to various endpoints and through intermediaries: https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQtMZ3Tew https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?timespan=all&showData... http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yvdcd/heres_a_summary_of_what_has_happened_over_the/cfocqz3 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yvdcd/heres_a_summ...

nakedrobot2 13y ago

While I am still terribly sad that I didn't mine bitcoins with my workstation 3-4 years ago, I am glad I can stand at the sidelines and watch this amazing drama unfold. Incidentally, I never figured out how to pronounce "Mt.Gox" But now I know: "Empty Gox" sounds about right :-)

dodyg 13y ago
7 - 8 years ago I was envying all my friends who were buying properties that keep going up and up ...
- mcv 13y ago
  I bought my house 6 years ago. I bought some bitcoins this autumn.
  - davidiach 13y ago
    You lucky bastard! :D
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - kokey 13y ago
    It sounds like a winning investment strategy would be to go short on whatever you are investing in.
    - stcredzero 13y ago
      Can this be applied recursively? Can you go short on your own going short, then go short on that as well?
    - bertil 13y ago
      That was the best back-handed compliment I’ve heard since the last episode of Downtown Abbey. I'm sure csv hates you every tiny bit I love you right now. :)

dave1010uk 13y ago

To save you doing the math, that many bitcoins is about $375 million at today's prices - not that the market is deep enough to be able to sell it for anywhere near that price.

negamax 13y ago
It really surprises me that Bitstamp has absorbed 100k+ in last 24 hours at current price range.

yuvadam 13y ago

It never had more than a few thousand BTC (except for a few peaks) at any point in time. [1] [1] - https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQtMZ3Tew https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1Drt3c8pSdrky...

VMG 13y ago
Also fairly round, large denomination. Even when scamming somebody as incompetent as MtGox, as a criminal I'd be more elaborate than saying "I haven't received the 5000 BTC, can you send them again?" to the same address hundreds of times. I don't think this has anything to do with it, it should be easy to determine if the transaction are linked to MtGox and malled tx's
- wcummings 13y ago
  Criminals are lazy
ok_craig 13y ago
Do you think this means that it is less likely, or more likely to be related to the thefts? According to Gox, the theft was happening over a long period of time, not one lump sum. Transfers to this address began in April of 2012, which is consistent with the story.
- shawabawa3 13y ago
  If this address does belong to the thief, why would they steal all the bitcoins with a single address? Surely using different addresses would make it less suspicious
  - ok_craig 13y ago
    I don't necessarily believe that this address was related to the theft, only pointing out that the expectation of one transaction containing all the stolen bitcoin is not correct. Yes, using different addresses would be less suspicious.

mburst 13y ago

I think in another 5-10 years bitcoin will finally be realized as one of the great scams of our time

gambiting 13y ago
Why would it be? Bitcoin on it's own is just a good that can be traded, just like gold, silver, or bags of potatoes. If you setup an exchange for gold,but then instead of paying people who deposited gold with you ran away with all of it, would you call gold a "scam"?
- edent 13y ago
  Or tulips.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
  - viraptor 13y ago
    This is really annoying. No - not even comparable to Tulip mania. That thing was based on artificially limited supply. If you want to start trading bitcoin or get your own miner, you can do it any time you want at a reasonable investment. Supply is always known in this case and demand is not ongoing (as in, bitcoins you keep don't disappear after a couple of days, unless you keep them with mtgox). Or do you want to explain why it's comparable?
    - acdha 13y ago
      Because bitcoin has an artificially limited supply built into the system and the pricing has exhibited the kind of wild fluctuations more characteristic of penny stocks rather than a currency? Toss in the fact that the entire system is predicated on making early adopters rich and it's a basic econ lesson concealed behind some cool crypto code.
    - w0utert 13y ago
      Isn't BTC supply also artificially limited? I though that was the whole point so it wouldn't become 'inflationary'? I can't stop being amazed by the persistent denial and non-sequitur arguments made by many BTC fans as to why none of the problems BTC has been suffering from are relevant and how BTC is nothing like a tulip bubble or a pyramid scheme, or a scam, or whatever, but the 'money' of the future. Huge price swings, theft, illicit trade, failing exchanges, problems withdrawing or converting BTC, yeah sounds like a great alternative to 'money controlled by central banks' :-S It's just like gold, silver, and it's definitely much better than fiat, because... it's THE FUTURE, it's FREE, and it uses TECHNOLOGY!

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jcfrei 13y ago

I'm sure you could find several addresses with a transaction amount in those heights. Exchanges don't operate from a single address - so any theft could only be traced back to several addresses.

smtddr 13y ago

So... for those that might not know how to read the blockchain.info site, this isn't 782,000 BTC moved today. That's the total amount the address has ever been exposed to, ever. As you scroll down you'll see red arrows and green arrows, along with dates. Red = withdraws from the address, and green = deposits into the address. You can see the dates and note this is just an address that's been doing business(whatever that is) for awhile now. You see the pagination at the bottom and can view history for at least a year back. In short, this isn't news. It's people who are angry looking for a target. Don't let this be a repeat of SheepMarketPlace fiasco... http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/09/recovering-stolen-bitcoin-sheep-marketplace-trading-digital-currency-money http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/09/recovering... You can't catch bitcoin thieves this way. They need to make some other mistake somewhere else outside of blockchain world.

mcv 13y ago
Yeah, it could be just a coincidence that the total amount matches the amount stolen from Mt. Gox. Or it could be the culprit. Is it possible to verify whether this came from Mt. Gox? And Whether it matches the transactions that were messed with?
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ok_craig 13y ago
The fact that it wasn't all moved today does not mean it isn't related. The theft was due to a leak that happened over a long period of time. The transactions to this address start in April of 2012. That is entirely consistent with the theft. 740k worth of transactions in one day would make it a less likely candidate for being related.
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o_nate 13y ago

If I was going to steal 782,000 BTC over a period of two years why would I steal them all from the same address? Doesn't pass the sniff test.

Consultant32452 13y ago
Nice try hacker.
beedogs 13y ago
The hacker really only needs to be slightly smarter than whoever wrote that bad PHP in the first place. It's not implausible really that they'd send it through the same address.

antidaily 13y ago

That was me.

r721 13y ago

This address was mentioned in November in Washington Post article about 194,993 BTC transaction: [Sarah Meiklejohn: ] "About half of the transactions sending bitcoins to this 12sENw address between August 29 and November 14 were from addresses we had associated with Bitstamp. This could be true for a lot of reasons (a heavyweight user withdrawing their bitcoins, for example), but there were a few other weird things I saw that made me think otherwise. For example, a lot of the bitcoins that flowed out of the 12sENw address went to one of two other addresses: 1Drt3c8 and (especially recently) 1HBa5. The former of these addresses we have tagged as Bitstamp, and the latter is often within one hop of a known Bitstamp address (e.g., it has also sent a lot of bitcoins to 1Drt3c8). So, while a lot of things could explain many bitcoins being received from Bitstamp, it seems like fewer of them could be explained by many bitcoins flowing from Bitstamp and then back to Bitstamp in a small span of time which is what leads me to think this is an internal shuffling of some kind. Of course, I could also be completely wrong! For example, I should definitely mention that, for the direct transaction of interest, I don't have any of the input addresses tagged (i.e., they might or might not belong to Bitstamp), so that my inferences are really just going on the past behavior of this small handful of addresses." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/23/heres-who-probably-did-that-massive-150000000-bitcoin-transaction/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/23... So this address was tagged as "Bitstamp" in her database.

mdemare 13y ago

It is possible for the exchanges and miners to get together and change the protocol, to mark the stolen bitcoins as invalid? The thief is probably going to dump the stolen bitcoins on the market - not exactly a good thing for the bitcoin price or the long term viability of bitcoin itself. Especially since it will take quite some time to dump all thsoe bitcoins - the market isn't all that liquid.

cLeEOGPw 13y ago
Nobody can say for sure the bitcoins in that address are stolen. But it would be very possible to reject bitcoins from certain addresses, and the protocol don't need to be changed. All it would take is make a client to reject to include transactions to/from blacklisted addresses into blockchain. And for everyone to update clients. That still would be vulnerable to 51% attack, but it is very real possibility.
aidos 13y ago
It's a flawed idea though unfortunately - a malicious party could have a legitimate address blacklisted by sending stolen bitcoin to them. It's a wonderfully interesting social issue. We have this high stakes protocol where everything is transparent and the whole system needs to be in a consensus. It's fantastic watching the internal struggle.

adam12 13y ago

This whole situation reminds me of Michael Bolton's virus in Office Space.

hackerboos 13y ago
Yeah or Richard Pryor in Superman III

nikcub 13y ago

I doubt this is the thief's wallet because it would mean that they somehow managed to execute withdrawals of 3k and 5k bitcoin 7 and 5 days ago respectively - MtGox has stopped all withdrawals for weeks/months now. The number of transactions seems low as well, the malleability bug would have involved thousands of smaller transactions. It would also be insanely stupid for a sophisticated hacker to funnel their loot through a single wallet. Someone who understands transaction malleability enough to exploit it likely won't be making that mistake. It isn't hard to pick out a number of bitcoin and then dive into the blockchain and find a wallet that has a same/similar number of bitcoins. Similar types of misidentification happen during the Silk Road and Sheep Marketplace heists.

amacneil 13y ago
I don't think they are suggesting it's the thief's wallet - it's presumably the Gox hot storage wallet.

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struct 13y ago

Seems that quite a lot of the volume on that address[1] is about 40% of the volume of the of the stuff going through MT Gox[2]. Might be a coincidence. [1] https://blockchain.info/charts/received-per-day?timespan=180days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQtMZ3Tew https://blockchain.info/charts/received-per-day?timespan=180... [2] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg180ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg180ztgSzm1g10z...

fu86 13y ago

I hope, his USB-stick doesn't get corrupted or unreadable ...

vxNsr 13y ago

Well I don't know if this matters but it checks out against benford's law, or at least kinda... http://i.imgur.com/nL9lO6r.png http://i.imgur.com/nL9lO6r.png for comparison here is a dataset that doesn't checkout against benford's law (it's the city of Chicago's employee Salaries) [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/SxAY1d2.png http://i.imgur.com/SxAY1d2.png (don't get too alarmed though, it fails because they've used estimations for hourly employees)