SILK ROAD WAS A HIGHLY CONTENTIOUS dark-web marketplace launched in 2011, and shut down by the FBI in 2013. Payments for its dubious offerings were made in Bitcoin. Its creator, Ross Ulbricht, was hit by hackers, and had over 70,400 Bitcoins stolen. Apparently the coins had been stolen in increments while Silk Road was operational, and have been sitting in an account ever since. Recovering lost Bitcoin is difficult, and as Silk Road acted as a “tumbler” to hide the transactions, following the blockchain wouldn’t work.
After much data analysis, law enforcement agents have caught up with the stolen coins, and the unnamed hacker who originally purloined them has signed a forfeiture agreement and handed the coins over to the government. At the time the coins were originally stolen they were worth about $9.5 million; this has jumped to over $1.26 billion, as Bitcoin’s volatile value has been on something of a surge recently. Quite a haul.
–CL