THE COLDCARD THIEF SAT ON 1,789 COINS FOR FIVE WEEKS AND FINALLY TRIED TO MOVE SOME — THE SWAPS KEPT BOUNCING BACK — GALAXY: “THEY KEEP GETTING REFUNDED AND HE KEEPS RETRYING”
For five weeks the coins did not move. Not one. A thief holding 1,789 bitcoin taken from 8,865 wallets — about $114.7 million the day he took it — left every coin sitting exactly where he put it. This week he finally tried to move roughly a tenth of it, swapping bitcoin into ether through THORChain, and the swaps kept bouncing. Galaxy's Alex Thorn watched it happen and wrote it plainly: “they keep getting refunded and he keeps retrying.” It is the first time coins from any of the three waves have moved from the thief's own addresses.
Sit with that. The hard part of stealing bitcoin was never taking it. Taking it took one bad random number generator, shipped five years before anybody noticed. The hard part is spending it, because every coin he holds is a coin the whole world can watch, and the exits he needs are narrow, public and slow. He has been sitting on nine figures for five weeks like a man holding a briefcase he cannot open in a room full of cameras.
This is the property people call a weakness when the price falls. Every coin carries a permanent record, and nobody quietly moves a large pile of them. He has the keys. He does not have the freedom. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is the whole design. He got the coins. He still cannot get away with them. Maximalist.
Sit with that. The hard part of stealing bitcoin was never taking it. Taking it took one bad random number generator, shipped five years before anybody noticed. The hard part is spending it, because every coin he holds is a coin the whole world can watch, and the exits he needs are narrow, public and slow. He has been sitting on nine figures for five weeks like a man holding a briefcase he cannot open in a room full of cameras.
This is the property people call a weakness when the price falls. Every coin carries a permanent record, and nobody quietly moves a large pile of them. He has the keys. He does not have the freedom. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is the whole design. He got the coins. He still cannot get away with them. Maximalist.
TFTC Sep 3, 10:06 UTC (6:06 AM ET) · + COINTELEGRAPH Sep 3, 09:31 UTC (first report) · forensics and quote from GALAXY RESEARCH head of research Alex Thorn · Wave 3: 1,789 BTC from 8,865 addresses, $114.7M at the time of theft · first onchain movement from any of the three waves · 64 BTC previously sent to Wasabi and 200 ETH to Tornado Cash in August, per CertiK · outlets do not reconcile on the size of the swap — TFTC and Cointelegraph say roughly 10%, other outlets print 20.5 BTC or $11M — so we print the share both primaries agree on and no coin count · anchors: our COLDCARD coverage since Jul 30