The anonymous user may have made the transaction „to stay up to date with the Bitcoin network“, but the possibility of a hacker attack is not excluded.
An anonymous crypto user has just moved 69,370 Bitcoins from an address associated with the former Silk Road marketplace, which recently became the target of a hacker attack.
According to a November 3 report from the CipherTrace analyst firm, the transaction includes two moves totaling 69,370 Bitcoins (BTC), approximately $960 million at the time of publication of this article. The funds started from an address linked to Silk Road, which closed in 2013. The mysterious user first sent 1 BTC, probably as a trial transaction, and then moved most of the coins.
CipherTrace assumed that the anonymous user made the movements „to stay up to date with the Bitcoin Era network“ by switching from one address format to another. Since the last time someone moved funds associated with the deceased marketplace was in April 2015, the wallet should also have all Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) associated with hard forks in the past.
However, the company has not ruled out the possibility of a hack:
„These movements could mean that the owner of the wallet is moving funds to new addresses to prevent hackers from accessing the wallet.dat file, or that the hackers have already cracked the file“.
The Silk Road funds were contained in a wallet known to the hacker community for more than two years. In September, a Twitter user claiming to have the wallet.dat file launched an appeal to find solutions on how to access the over 69,000 coins, even suggesting a quantum computer as a potential method for determining private keys.
Silk Road was a darkweb platform that allowed users to buy and sell illegal goods such as weapons and credit card numbers, but most of the exchanges were linked to various drugs. Ross Ulbricht, the site’s founder, is currently serving two life sentences without parole after being found guilty of money laundering, computer hacking and conspiracy to commit drug trafficking. From prison, he still provides regular analysis of the Bitcoin market.