69.3K Silk Road Bitcoins Move After 5 Years of Inactivity
Bitcoin worth roughly one billion US dollars has just been transferred after being locked for five years. The BTC is associated with the famous underground marketplace, Silk Road.
Recently, hackers have been salivating to get control of the wallet, holding 69,370 BTCs. However, it’s unclear whether the transfer has been initiated by the wallet’s rightful owner or by a malicious actor.
1 BTC to test, 69,369 to Move
According to CipherTrace, a digital currency company researching, among other things, the movement of cryptocurrency, the funds were moved in separate transactions. The firm also noted that the BTC is worth close to one billion US dollars ($960,000,000). In what CipherTrace sees as testing the waters, the anonymous BTC user first sent a single Bitcoin. Its success guided the bulk transfer.
The darknet marketplace was brought to a halt in 2013. Since then, coins were on the move until 2015 when transactions involving the Silk Road Bitcoins stopped. Apart from BTC, the wallet also holds Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) emanating from a hard fork. BCH is from the Bitcoin hard fork, while BSV is from the BCH hard fork.
Notably, for the last 24 months, hackers have been trying to get hold of the Silk Road Bitcoins. For Example, in September, a Twitter user claiming to have access to some information pertaining to the wallet, invited like-minded people in the crypto space to help dismantle the wallet to gain access to the millions worth of Bitcoin locked inside. Some in the space even added that the wallet’s password could be cracked with a super-powerful computer like a quantum computer.
Super Computers Aren’t Ready for the Job, for Now
Unfortunately, computing experts are divided on whether a quantum computer can successfully carry out the job. But, even with the disagreements, experts believe that the current breed of quantum computers cannot crack the cryptographic systems used by Bitcoin and other blockchains. But, this may change with the next generation of quantum computers.
However, even without the help of a quantum computer, CipherTrace is not entirely ruling out the possibility of hackers getting hold of the Silk Road Bitcoins.
According to the firm, either the hackers have succeeded, or the coins’ owner moved the funds to “most likely,” “switch between address formats.” Note that the original Bitcoin addresses didn’t have segwit functionalities. And, since the previous wallet holding the Bitcoins is a legacy address, the anonymous Bitcoin user may have moved the funds to the latest Bitcoin address with segwit features.