Once on the Silk Road, banned drugs such as marijuana, LSD, heroin, and cocaine were sold, and it was called the drug eBay. The Silk Road was closed when the operator was arrested in 2013, but amid the nation’s attention to the results of the 2020 US presidential election, reports that someone secretly transferred bitcoins worth KRW 1 trillion related to the Silk Road came out.
Launched in 2011, Silk Road was a dark site only accessible to people who knew URLs that could not be found with regular search engines. It is known that illegal drugs, malicious codes, illegal contents, stolen credit card information and hacking methods were sold on the Silk Road.
Silkroad’s founder and operator Ross William Ulbricht has adopted bitcoin as a transaction currency as well as using Tor, an anonymous communication technology, to avoid law enforcement investigations. This structure, which was progressive at the time, is said to be the result of the influence of the liberalist economic theory that Woolbrick deepened.
Silk Road secured more than 900,000 users within two years of its opening, but the Silk Road was closed after Woolbrick was arrested by the FBI in October 2013. In addition, a site called Silk Road 2.0 appeared as the successor to the Silk Road, but the operator here was also arrested by the FBI.
Woolbrick was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole on charges of money laundering, hacking, and drug dealing. The FBI seized 174,000 Bitcoins held by Silk Road, but still 450,000 Bitcoins were not confiscated. Bitcoin’s price has fluctuated due to various factors, and the value of bitcoin has changed drastically even when the transaction is stopped due to the arrest of Woolbrick. As of October 2013, when the Silk Road was closed, the value of 1 BTC was around 100,000 won, but now it is worth 15 million won. Therefore, the unconfiscated bitcoin value related to the Silk Road also surged more than 100 times from the time.
Some of the wallets in which Bitcoins related to Silk Road are stored have already specified transaction details. One of them, the wallet that held 69,370 BTC, was known as the world’s fourth-largest Bitcoin wallet, but has maintained that state since April 2013.
However, on November 3 (local time), when the entire U.S. was paying attention to the 2020 presidential election results, all of Bitcoin worth 1 trillion won related to the Silk Road was transferred to a new wallet. According to the transaction history, first, only 1 BTC was transferred to the new wallet, and then the entire remaining amount was transferred to the new wallet. This is to ensure that the wallet to be sent is correct when transferring large amounts of bitcoin and to prevent misremittances.
One expert said that it is possible to judge that the fund is likely to originate from the Silk Road through blockchain analysis, but it is not known who moved the bitcoin, and the move of bitcoin worth $950 million is Woolbrick. As T is in jail, he says it is unlikely that he will trade Bitcoin in jail.
On the other hand, it is also possible to think about the possibility that an external hacker obtained the wallet password and stole funds. The bitcoin address itself used for wallet remittance is already widely known, but for the past year, hacker forums say that a file containing the wallet private key has been circulated. If this file really contained the private key, it could have been possible to decrypt the file and access the wallet in a brute-force attack. However, experts believe that it is highly likely that the Silk Road officials, not an irrelevant hacker, transferred the funds, and they estimate that the funds were moved in order to see the time to pay attention to the presidential election.
In addition, one can pay attention to the future cashing of 1 trillion won worth of bitcoin. Experts said that it is difficult for hackers to monetize bitcoins because bitcoin transactions are recorded and disclosed on the blockchain. Related information can be found here .
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