CIRCLE AND TETHER BLACKLISTED A WALLET HOLDING ABOUT $318,000 IN USDC AND USDT — THE ATTACKER HAD ALREADY SWAPPED THE REST INTO ETHER — AND THE TOTAL TAKEN FROM BITGET IS STILL MOVING BETWEEN $350 MILLION AND $388 MILLION

Someone took hundreds of millions of dollars from Bitget. Circle and Tether then did the thing they are always said to be able to do. They blacklisted the attacker's wallet. The amount they caught was about $318,000. Decrypt puts the contents at 99,990 USDC and 218,023 USDT, which adds to 318,013, and CoinDesk describes the same wallet the same way.

The rest was in ether, and ether has no blacklist. Decrypt says the attacker appears to have raced to convert freezable assets into ether before the issuers could intervene. He was not clever. He was fast, and fast was enough, because the freeze is a phone call and the swap is a transaction.

This is what a freeze button is actually worth. Not nothing. Three hundred and eighteen thousand dollars is real money and it is more than zero. But it arrived after the assets it could reach had already left, and it was never going to reach the ones it could not. An asset somebody can freeze for you is an asset somebody can freeze on you, and the only question was ever who is holding the phone.

The total is still unsettled and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Arkham's count, carried by Bitcoin.com, says about $350 million. Decrypt says roughly $387 million. Bitcoin Magazine says $388 million, citing the chief executive. Yesterday the same event was reported at $183 million, then $351 million, then $352 million, inside half an hour. Pick a number tonight and you will be correcting it tomorrow. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $83,975.