Following the movement of 69,369 Bitcoins from Silk Road, the U.S. government has seized the coins from “ Individual X”.The rest of the article focuses on the method by which law enforcement came to know about the Silk Road address and the seizure process.
An In-depth Glance At the Silk Road Address
News.Bitcoin.com has investigated the address and reported it following hackers trying to offload an encrypted data file during the past two years.
Following on-chain data, the address or “1HQ3” sent 69,471 BTC on 9th April 2013 to the address. Some of the funds arrived from the Silk Road marketplace and others from “1BBq”. Over $1.5M(101 BTC) were transferred to the defunct BTC-e exchange.
Law enforcement is trying to seek forfeiture. To protect the hacker’s true identity, the prosecutors and government termed the person as “Individual X”.
The IRS is involved in the process. Law officials have hired blockchain investigators (third party) to analyze transactions done by Silk Road.54 transactions took place between the addresses and Silk Road containing 70,411.46 BTC.
On 3rd November 2020, David Anderson, Attorney for the U.S. wrote “Individual X” agreed to forfeit the property of the defendant to the U.S. Govt.
The court filing also stated that two years post of what happened, Alexander Vinnik, a Russian operator, was held on the charges of money laundering. After the 1st transfer(2013) various cryptic messages were transmitted to the address. There are also hackers trying to crack into the wallet in the past two years.
Exactly How Popular Was This Silk Road Address?
Using note4ever.com, which encodes a message in the Bitcoins addresses list, if anyone inspected the transactions involving address 1HQ3 they would notice a lot of unusual messages.
After seizing 69,369 bitcoins from Silk Road, messages containing addresses like “1FreeRossF*ckCops77777777777W87XM” and many others were seen on a blockchain explorer. All these led to advertisements leading Alon Gal, CTO, Hudson Rock to tweet about it. It is a very popular address on Google for having 16,700 links.
Before the Feds seized the coins from “Individual X” the data file was also seen on websites like All Private Keys and Satoshidsk.com. When news.bitcoin.com tipped off on attempted sales, the file was still being sold for $1,050 by one site.
“1HQ3” address might be a new thing today but more revelations may come out in the open later. However, 444,000 Silk Road BTC worth around 6.8 billion is currently missing. It remains to be seen whether the 69K BTC stash is auctioned by the Government.
What are your opinions regarding the BTC stash maneuvered by the “Individual X”? Let us know about it in the comments below!
