Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] We have a bit of a bitcoin mystery on our hands.
[00:00:05] 80,000 Bitcoin, just a casual 8.6-ish billion dollars worth of Bitcoin just moved. Now, was it an old whale just going back and digging into. Did they just hold for 14 years?
[00:00:21] Well, it actually appears that it was not the original owner of those coins who has now moved them in OP return messages, in weird quirks about how the addresses were generated, and peculiar connections to the sequence of numbers in the old show Lost that suggested the end of the world.
[00:00:42] This is a really bizarre mystery. The OP return of these transactions have a link to a law firm with an owner notice, a claim that if they can offer the private key showing that these are coins that belong to something, somebody else, that they can be redeemed if they do it before a certain date. Numerous things that suggest the original owner is not the one moving these coins. So is there a major cryptographic vulnerability in bitcoin? Are tons of old addresses actually susceptible to this? Are Satoshi's coins at risk?
[00:01:17] Did Quantum just break something in bitcoin's system? Is this a hack that's trying really hard to look legitimate? Or did somebody just happen upon an old wallet with $9 billion worth of Bitcoin in it? Well, today we're going to do a little bit of digging, a little investigating, and we're going to see if we can't come up with an answer to the 80,000 bitcoin mystery. It's time for a guy's take episode.
[00:01:52] Foreign what is up guys? Welcome back to the show. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know. And this is Bitcoin Audible. This is where you learn all about bitcoin, about sound money, the economics, the philosophy, the history of cypherpunks and the Internet, everything and anything around it. We cover it here and we do a deep dive into. And actually on that note, we've got a really cool technical stuff for all the nerds out there who love to really dig into the nit and gritty with me, there's a really fun article. It's. I mean it's not really the nit and gritty. We're not going to do something too serious, but there is a new signature aggregation scheme that has been proven that actually works with bitcoin's native curve. And they just released Kiara Bickers. I believe it was released an article on Bitcoin magazine and we'll be doing that article. I actually already did the audio for it. I just haven't put the episode together but we'll have a guy's take kind of breaking it down to try to make sense of it. It's definitely on the technical side, but it's fascinating and it's actually a really, really big step. It's a really cool thing. And just so you know, for anybody confused about this, signature aggregation is not multi sig. We're not talking about like we need, you know, two of three like you, me, you, me and you know, I don't know, BTC sessions. We need two of us to sign in order to release the coins. This is very different. This would be me signing my transaction and my input, Ben signing his transaction, his input and you signing your transaction and your input. But us putting it all together and actually only having to put one combined signature on chain so that we can just pool our transaction and save money. And interestingly, this is a huge boon for things like Coinjoin and any and all privacy standards because coinjoin costs a lot more when you add tons of different signatures and tons of different inputs together because you're all sharing this cost. And signatures are really kind of the head heavy part of transactions. Well, in this case, coin joins would actually be more efficient. They would be. This is something we've talked about on the show. This is why I was so excited about Taproot. Even though the signature aggregation scheme has, has yet to even be fulfilled with, with everything around Taproot. So it's really cool to see this. This is referred to as dalias by the way, this new scheme. And it was two engineers from Blockstream and then also another from Ledger who put this paper together and has demonstrated this. Now it would require a soft fork, but the really cool thing is not only is it super inefficient, it also doesn't require any major new cryptographic assumptions. It basically builds off the exact same thing. Again, it's Bitcoin's native curve. It's just a different way of essentially doing the verification process, which is why it would need a new consensus, a new set of consensus rules or system for verifying it. But it's built entirely compatible with the way Bitcoin is today.
[00:04:56] So maybe, maybe that actually is a road to a soft fork with a really, really significant benefit and something that could finally realize a really cool feature and efficiency and security improvement to Bitcoin that I feel like has been highly desirable for a really long time. And the other improvements and you know, soft forks that have been made in the Past were really geared around hopefully getting to point. So it's just a really cool thing and it's going to be worth digging into I think. So we will be reading that on the show but today we have this crazy 80,000 Bitcoin mystery and before we get into it, I just want to shout out Chroma for supporting the show. They are a sponsor and they also have some amazing products if you haven't gone down the kind of light health rabbit hole. It's actually been fascinating to me and I was kind of skeptical at first until my wife and I actually were extremely regimented and strict about putting this all together properly about getting all of our screens to go red at a certain time of day.
[00:06:03] And she wears her, her nightshades, her like blue light blocking glasses at a particular time and I actually have mine on the way now and it's, it's just been. I was shocked at the how much it changed and how much it has affected me and her especially in like the ability to get to sleep or me being like kind of an insomniac and having energy late at night for no reason that has been being able to kind of shift and having my circadian rhythm feel in balance. You gotta check these guys out. This is what their products are about. It's about having good hormone and light health and they have a ton of really cool products to check out. And I have you a 10% discount with code Bitcoin audible which you'll find right down in the show notes. And they accept bitcoin on a special based website. That link you will also find right down there. Also shout out to hrf, the Human Rights foundation and their Financial Freedom Report for not only just the amazing work that they do, but also I'm honored that they thought my show was, was worth supporting. We actually just had a fantastic conversation with CK all about the insane work that they do over there and the Finney Freedom Award and their development fund. There's lots of details that you will find. I urge you to listen to that chat episode if you haven't. But also just all the details and links and stuff to check that out and to sign up for their newsletter. Highly, highly recommended and they are right in the show notes as well. And lastly pub key by synonym and particularly the pub key ring. I want you to get a feel for how amazing their key system is and how powerful it could be if you had an address that anybody could find or direct to any of your content, any information that you wanted, whatever your hosting is and Nobody could shut it down, that it was just available in the BitTorrent network and there was nothing anybody could do. And if somebody wanted to find you by your id, by your public key, anybody could. That is the power of a decentralized sovereign web and the fact that this is lightweight and simple and modular. There's something really, really cool being built here, and I suggest you check it out. I've been on the pub key beta for a while and they just released it so that you can go to their website. The link and details are in the show notes, and I will have my pub key up there so that you can follow me and give me a shout out and tell me what you think.
[00:08:25] All right, let's go ahead and get into this 80,000 Bitcoin mystery. So what are the details here? A bunch of different addresses with the exact same balance, 10,000 bitcoin that have had. I went and, you know, have been digging through Mempool, that space here, and there's a bunch of just like random, you know, transactions being sent to them. Basically all the spam attacks and the little, like tiny fee stuff have been sent to them over the years. So there's like a little bit more than the original 10,000 bitcoin, but the 10,000, that original 10,000 bitcoin has not moved the entire time. And that's an important piece of this puzzle, actually, because none of these addresses have been spent from or at least the ones that I've got open right now and looked into. That was a. That was a big thing is I wanted to know have these been spent from or have these literally been addresses unused, just as UTXOs sitting there untouched for literally 14 years? And they have two of them are from April of 2011, and five of them, or six of them I think are from May of 2011 and again, 10,000 Bitcoin each. So about a billion dollars in each address. This is either a legendary hodler who has not touched them for this entire time, or lost coins. And that's like a huge part of this, is that, you know, how do you. How do you determine? Or when do you call coins lost? Because I have absolutely seen people who have been holding from 2010, 2011 who never moved their coins suddenly wake up and decide they want to do something with him, or they just move them to a new setup and they never even get, you know, sent to an exchange or anything. But they are clearly there. They clearly exist. In fact, during the whole faketoshi era, when fake Toshi claimed certain addresses as Belonging to his or belonging to him. And in fact, I think it was one of these. If I'm not mistaken, I saw somebody post about this that one of these addresses is actually in listed in the supposed Tulip Trust of fake Toshi, which just another confirmation that he just made all this crap up. But one of the other ones, in a totally unrelated situation, when he was claiming to be satoshi and it was noticed that that address that had been dormant for all of this time was that fake Toshi that Craig Wright had claimed that this belonged to him, One of those addresses moved with an op return message that said Craig Knight, Craig Wright is not Satoshi. So that was. That was pretty cool. I mean, it should have been obvious then that all of this was just a total fraud by him. But the fact that this one of these actually shows up in the Tulip Trust is also just like another funny piece of that little story. But yeah. So is this guy just massive hodler, and then now today randomly, he decides to move his coins? Doesn't seem like it. It seems like the person who is moving these coins is not the original owner. So now the question is, how did this person get the private keys? So here's one of them. So this is 10,000 Bitcoin you see here. So this is the transaction that went out on the 3rd. So this was just 5 days ago, 4 days ago on July 3rd, 2025. And you'll notice on the 2nd and then the 30th of June, there were 3 other transactions in very, very small amounts. And important to note is that this had an OP return with details. So the first one shows legal notice.
[00:11:56] We have taken possession of this wallet and its contents. So this is a public notice that we own this. You know, basically just like legal domain, that if you are publicly declaring that this is yours and you want, quote, unquote, legal rights to it, this is the abandonment doctrine. This is.
[00:12:19] This is. This looks like a legal. At least to me, this looks like a legal defense that says, here is our public declaration from, with, you know, our legal team backing it, that we have claimed ownership of this, and if you are the rightful owner, you must come forth and then using whatever legal precedent is in their jurisdiction, or maybe they're just kind of setting up their own legal precedent because there isn't really precedent for this yet when it comes to Bitcoin. Is that okay? We are establishing these terms. We are making this fully available to you. We are publishing this as publicly as we possibly can. This is about taking ownership of these Coins in a legitimate and what they appear to think or probably hope a legal way so that it rightfully quote unquote, belongs to them.
[00:13:13] And they have sufficiently given notice to the the original owner who has clearly who they hope has abandoned these coins so that they can acquire. But there's another, another little bit of oddity in this and a couple of articles and people I've seen are speculating that there's some super mystery and this crazy but after these coins have been sent out, another transaction from the basically in line with this. So 10,000. The. The 10,000 Bitcoin addresses were emptied and then another transaction from that location was then sent with another OP return. And this also appears to be present in every single one of them. But we'll go back and I'll share my screen so that, so that we can see this.
[00:14:01] So all right, so this is again for people watching the video if you want to, if you want to see the video, this will be on Twitter as well as YouTube and nostr natively. So you can go watch it and you can see what I'm talking about here. But like, so here's the. So this is the 2011 creation of it. And then this sends it out and it sends this 10,000 bitcoin. They actually broke this one 11,000 bitcoin balance into one with 10,000 bitcoin. Now you click on this one and this sent first sent all the 10,000 Bitcoin.
[00:14:36] That's the coming in.
[00:14:38] What's the current balance? Pending balance zero. Where did the 10,000 go out? Oh, that's 704. Okay, so this was the 10,000 Bitcoin going out and then there were two additional transactions after that. It's bringing this down to there's only a dollar and 83 cent. There's only 1690 sats left in this address. But there was another op return that has 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 a number sequence in this. In the op return and they all seem to have it. So here's the, here's the other one that has the 10,000. So here's the 10,000 going out on 704. So we're going to go to that address and then look at its op returns.
[00:15:24] And okay, so this one has two 10k in. In an op return which is a funny, it's an odd thing to put in the opera turn, but just after again, so here's the 10,000 Bitcoin coming out and then we have another. This is an inscription, actually. Let me, let me look at that one, I didn't take a notice of that yet. Then the next one has the upper turn again. 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. These are the numbers from the season of Lost that were showing up all over the place. And like, supposedly it was like the end of the world. I never actually watched Lost. In fact, I watched a couple of episodes or something, so I had the idea. But what's interesting to me, a whole bunch of people are speculating that this is some sort of mystery or illusion to what's going on here. But I almost wonder if this might actually have something more to do with how these addresses were discovered. Maybe. Or maybe this had something to do with the generation of the. Of the keys for this. Because Lost was a show that was popular in. Was it 2006 to 2010? So it was during the time in which 10,000 bitcoin went into these addresses that this sequence of numbers would have held significant cultural relevance. And it was kind of the, the talk of the town, kind of the Game of Thrones of the era. Which makes me wonder if there was like some random number generator and this being used as, as some entropy in the creation. And maybe this was hacked in that way or this was recovered in this way. But that also kind of makes me wonder about the whole, you know, going back to the idea that if this was an exploit, you really wouldn't want to leave it open for someone else to also get this exploit and then get those coins. Because now everybody's going to be looking for this. And if those numbers are significant, like, why would you publish those number if these are actually significant to the recovery of the bitcoin themselves? Because, you know, you can maybe show that, oh, for the, the person who used to hold the wallet, it's like, oh, we figured out that these numbers are relevant. And so, you know, we, we generated the private keys based on this. But if you're giving that information out publicly on the chain, well, then people are going to be trying to use those numbers. Like, like other people are probably going to be wondering if this is an exploit. Okay, what do I need to. I've got 90 days, right? I've got until. Or I guess I've got until the end of September, September 30 or October 5, according to the Solomon brothers notice, to prove that I have the. I could have the private key as well, and that this is actually my balance and these are my coins. You wouldn't if, if these were, if these were yours, you wouldn't want that to be the case. So if you had just hit an exploit and gotten into this wallet, you would neither want to reveal or give time for someone else to get the exact same exploit and take the coins or prove the coins and then you now have a big legal battle over whose are they if it's an exploit. So not only do you not want that, but you certainly wouldn't reveal sensitive information that was critical to that unless it was information that only you were using if it was relevant to this. There is one interesting caveat about this though that does suggest there is just some somebody nerding out and maybe creating a narrative around this or trying to send a message.
[00:18:51] Is that the deadline October 5, 2025, which I'll actually get to in just a second. This is the deadline for them to actually recover or claim ownership of the coins.
[00:19:03] Actually happens to be exactly 20 years after the orientation episode of of the Lost show, which is the episode where the significance of those numbers are revealed aired on TV October 5, 2005. But whatever the significance of that is, it is interesting and a little bit weird. Like what was the point of the the lost numbers in all of this when the first three opera turns for the original transactions were all about legal notice and you know, basically making public declarations about the ownership of these coins.
[00:19:47] So and then of course the 20 years after the.
[00:19:52] The release of that the episode in which those numbers were shown, there's the significance of those numbers were revealed which on that. I'll just read the notice really quick. So.
[00:20:03] So this is the notice on the Solomon Brothers website owner notice which again is. Seems to be down at the moment or it just shows a 404 like as if it's not there and there's just a blank website. So they've taken it down, I guess, but says this digital wallet appears to be lost or abandoned. Our client has taken constructive possession of it and is seeks to determine probably not the first language and seeks to determine if there is a bona fide owner. Legal notices posted pursuant to and in compliance with applicable law which is intended to provide an opportunity for the owner to claim property otherwise qualifying as lost or abandoned. The owner is provided 90 days to respond to this notice. In other words, an owner with valid proof of ownership must respond before October 5, 2025 if no responses received. The digital wallets and their contents will be considered to be confirmed as abandoned. In sum, the lack of a response may be provided to a court as evidence of the relinquishment of all rights, title and interest in the digital Wallets. This is an important legal notice and rights could be adversely impacted if the bona fide owner of this digital wallet does not respond.
[00:21:04] Provide proof of ownership either by using the private key associated with the wallet on any on chain in any on chain transaction which allows the owner to signal ownership while maintaining anonymity and costs an owner nearly nothing or two Sending Solomon Brothers a message using the contact form. See below with a detailed description of your valid claim to ownership, including supporting documentation. Message can be sent by owner or by owner's representative to maintain anonymity. Send a message via the contact form below. Client seeks ownership Right. Blah blah blah blah. Henceforth no shall trespass fund. Blah blah blah blah. Okay, so that's basically the. The gist of it. And this all seems to be a way to like in. In my mind this would be a way to like. I would be super defensive. I am. I'm about to come into $9 billion. Governments hate people finding money and also the legal like I would desperately want to protect myself legally around this. And again, this is part of why I just don't under. I don't. I'm not 100% sure about the exploit narrative. There's at least not very strong evidence of it yet. And if it was an exploit, the fact that it would be like one wallet or maybe one tool with just a few different addresses, you know, this was at the, in the end just eight UTXOs.
[00:22:24] So it's not like, you know, hundreds of different addresses are being compromised with tons of different amounts. If this tool was compromised, it might have been a very specific tool or a very like a script that somebody wrote, you know, some super cypherpunk nerd wrote for themselves and made an error, made a mistake in the entropy and maybe somebody was just literally mining old addresses and transactions as hard as they could, trying to figure out how to generate private keys from whatever. I don't know, an assumption of some error or maybe there was some past exploit in, in random number generators and somebody was. Has just been using that and comparing it to addresses in the blockchain, hoping that they stumbled upon something which can mean that all of these addresses are associated and you know, maybe they were part of the same wallet or they could actually be separate ones with this same tool used on some website or you know, released on GitHub or something somewhere like who knows.
[00:23:28] But I'm less inclined to think this is some very serious as number of speculation that there's some very, very serious core system of Bitcoin from the early days risk or exploit? And if we did see that, then I would expect, you know, they, they did all eight of these at the exact same time. So do they do another batch later? Like why did they wait until they had all eight? If this is an exploit where they're just slowly getting addresses. Did they check every address in the first three years of Bitcoin's history and they couldn't find it? Find it. But if they're just.
[00:24:06] If they're using a, an exploit that allows them to generate a private keys from not sufficiently random, not sufficient entropy, basically, you know, how long has it been that they haven't found one that they think they found, you know, all eight of them? Or are we going to see this again, you know, in two weeks, are we going to see another? That might be the real question here. If around that that particular risk is does another address with a thousand bitcoin or 23,000 bitcoin is another address from that era move in a week or two with the exact same not and legal framework around it that suggests that this could just keep going as this exploit is continually exploited. Something that's really crazy though is the number of people like after this happened. Like I was digging through the transactions like going to this. There's inscriptions where like one dude's like congrats man, this is a huge find. And all this stuff by the way, you know, just maybe send me a little bit since I sent good vibes your way. And there's another one with an opera turn that says it would be a tiny amount for me, it would be a tiny amount for you, a life saving amount for me. And a whole bunch of people just sending them that 690sats and stuff like, like kind of dust threshold sort of stuff just to stick messages in the chain like literal, every single one of them. People just begging for, for coins from this which is just like, it's literally panhandling. Like one dude was like please just send me one bitcoin, that's all I need. And then there was another one who just sent the the same because I was trying to figure out like you know, sometimes kind of confusing when you're looking at this, which ones are sent out and which ones are sent in for, you know, who has the private keys. When you're looking at addresses it can be confusing if you hadn't done it in a while. And one of them like somebody put on an inscription, did those same numbers again for eight, six, eight, whatever they were. So it's just funny, I Guess and just ridiculous. The number of like, tiny transactions that have already flooded in to these balances after they moved of. Please, give me some. Please, I want some. Looking at the transactions, there's actually something interesting that I thought that nobody pointed out, which actually, maybe that had to do with the address. So if you look at these different addresses that actually have the balances now, they're all P2WPKH, which, this is just like the, the new segue. It's the BC1 address. It's the one that you see commonly now. Another BC one. BC one.
[00:26:52] Let's look for the, for the word effer. Okay, here we go. This one goes to this guy.
[00:27:01] WPKh 10,000. 10,000. So here is the one that's interesting is this is holding over 10,000 bitcoin now out of one of them. But the odd thing about this one is that this is a one. This one starts with a one. This is the P2PKH. This is the same address format that all of them were paid out to, which suggests this was sent to a different wallet. Because, you know, when you, when you pick a wallet or you, you create like your derivation path, you. You decide your transaction type. So I just found that kind of interesting is that it kind of looks like they sent a bunch of them to the same wallet or maybe they sent them all to completely different wallets. Maybe every single one of these has a different seed phrase and different private keys. A billion dollars a piece of. It probably makes sense to do that, but I just thought it was interesting that they chose something completely different. They, they went with an old standard. In fact, they went with the standard that, the P2PKH standard that was the address type that these were being spent from another kind of indication that, I mean, it's certainly not P2PKH addresses that are being exploited here, which again, doesn't quite really fit that. The, the structure here doesn't seem to fit that narrative to me anyway, more that it would be some explicit tool or bad entropy that somebody created and somehow this was, you know, finally exploited. Now, what I'm not so sure about is the, the fact there was one address that has the word, the F word in it. So it's F, U, C, K randomly in the address.
[00:28:39] Now, one of the articles I was suggest or reading was suggesting that this shows how hard they worked and that they generated, you know, an unbelievable amount of dress addresses in order to create this and how explicit it was to show like, you know, they're trying to show a cryptographic puzzle or something here. And again the lost numbers are interesting and I can't quite, I don't quite understand and even the people who are speculating this is some like super narrative and message and stuff. I, I haven't heard any indication as to what really the significance of those numbers is in this context outside of, you know, we figured out something terrible or something. But I don't know.
[00:29:24] It is an odd thing and I probably wouldn't think anything of the fact that one of the addresses then associated with other transactions around this had F U C K in it. I actually would not find that totally out of the ordinary or it would be, I would assume it was a coincidence because the likelihood of producing any particular four letter word I think was.
[00:29:51] It's been a minute. I should, I should have confirmed it but I think it's like one in like 400,000 or something like that. Whereas a three or four letter word isn't totally uncommon to show up in the address. It would be a crazy coincidence that specifically F U C K showed up in these addresses related to these balances.
[00:30:15] So this very well could be a vanity address. And whoever is doing this clearly knows what they're doing. They're just having, they're just throwing stuff into opera turn regularly. They, they were testing and they were prepared for this entire process to unfold very, very quickly in a matter of a couple of hours. They had set all of this up beforehand. They had consulted with a legal entity to make sure that they could have protection. They are probably ready and waiting with lawyers if a government comes after, if somebody, you know, some claimed owner comes after them or something. So they seem very, very prepared. The that being a vanity address is a little odd, but considering there is already the oddity of the numbers from the show lost, I don't know, maybe that does seem a bit of a stretch that both of those kinds of things are coincidences. And We've got the 10-05-2025 as the deadline which is related to the show. Just a lot of really quirky things about the whole situation. But outside of the suggestion or outside of the narrative that you know, this is some very serious exploit and Bitcoin is vulnerable or certain address type is vulnerable. I don't, I don't find that likely. It could be some old software or some tool or script that had very poor entropy and likely something not used in mass or it seems odd that these addresses would all be done at exactly the same time and we wouldn't have a ton of others or you know, I guess probably just time will tell when it comes to that is we'll see what happens in a few days, in a few weeks. Do they do this again with a different set of addresses?
[00:32:12] And you know, then if we see this again, that's, that would be concerning from the context of old coins, is okay, what tool got compromised, what wallet service, what, what wallet generation or key generation device or software got compromised and how many coins are literally at risk because of this? What, what it feels like to me and what seems to make the most sense, especially considering these all have different private keys, they were all done in one batch. And it seems very possible and very likely that these could be associated with each other. I'm inclined to think this is all one wallet. This is one person's wallet.
[00:32:53] And this was.
[00:32:55] Somebody had come across a laptop or a computer or whatever with a wallet on it that had these coins in that wallet. And interestingly with a lot of the old wallets and I actually stumbled upon this myself not too long ago because somebody was trying to get me to recover coins and I, I kind of dug into it trying to, trying to recover some coins, but their wallet was, their wallet was encrypted so I couldn't send a transaction. However, the, there was actually a text file that just showed the generated addresses. So I could see the addresses with the relevant wallet related files without actually being able to get into or decrypt the wallet itself with the private keys and all of that stuff. So I could go onto the blockchain and check the addresses. And there was no actual bitcoin in any of them. And we think that the person was just mistaken. They probably used a blockchain.info wallet or whatever way back then when. And they, they thought, you know, they had some wallet with like one or two bitcoin in it, which was no big deal at the time.
[00:33:56] And I was digging up all my old installers because I've SA versions of multi bid and Electrum and God knows what from all from way, way, way back when, just so I can recover stuff for people if it ever comes up. But no luck on that one. But the wallet had never, had apparently never been used. But it makes me wonder if someone had gotten access to something like this, saw that these coins were there or that this wallet was there, managed to probably brute force them maybe for years, you know, trying to get into this thing, got into the wallet and then were just extremely careful. They're like, holy crap, this is a shocking, this is this absolutely frightening amount of Money like, someone will kill me for. This literally has happened numerous times.
[00:34:48] And so they set out to protect themselves, get legal defense before they. Maybe they hadn't even broken into it yet. And they. They knew or were aware of the balances that they were trying to get into. And so they started legal defense and stuff at that point. But then they broke into it and they were preparing things, and then they decided on, you know, I guess, July 4th, to go through all of this, post these transactions, post the op return and be like, all right, 90 days from now, October 5, 2025, because they're a nerd from, you know, Lost or something. Or maybe, heck, maybe that would be funny if the local password to the wallet DAT file was actually those numbers from Lost, which would be an interesting reason for them to have actually posted them in the opera turn, because publicly it wouldn't be a threat because the assumption would be that you have the wallet and nobody else has the old file, and so they can't decrypt anything with it. But maybe that was the password. Maybe that was what they finally brute forced to get into the wallet. And that was another kind of statement to the previous owner, like, is this you? This is. This is how we got into your wallet. And it's just something that nobody else would know, but they might know that the actual owner of these coins might know. Maybe they're whatever, you know, brute force generator, like, you know, whatever password brute force or they were using either knew, they were aware of the significance of those numbers. They looked them up afterward and realized that, you know, lost was, you know, this was a significant thing in a show. And so they.
[00:36:32] They made the dates around this, like, relevant to it. Again, maybe as a message to the owner, not to everybody else. I don't know. Really hard to say. But clearly whoever is orchestrating or putting all this together knows what they're doing when it comes to bitcoin. And, you know, may very well have generated one of those addresses with F U C K in it, because that would suck. That would suck to lose all of that bitcoin if somebody had gotten into your wallet.
[00:37:00] And of course, if I had gotten into a wallet with that amount of bitcoin, I would probably say the F word a lot of times in multiple different concepts out of sheer fear, out of excitement that that word would come up a lot. And maybe I would generate a bunch of vanity addresses. Especially if I just spent a long time, you know, brute forcing passwords. I got a computer. This is just hashing and crunching away at a bunch of stuff. Well, just generate a whole bunch of random addresses. And here's one that says this word that I've said 2300 times in the last 24 hours. So, you know, maybe I'm. Maybe that's just somebody screwing around. Really hard to say. But that's kind of the narrative that, that fits for me right now as I wonder if somebody just has had a computer or device or an old wallet that they just finally broke into and this is their way of like, okay, I have to make it public now. This is my. Do I have all my ducks in a row? Crap. This is, this is going to be hard. This is scary. All right, I'm going to publish it. Here's the legal notice, here's the website. Here's who you contact now. Fingers crossed. And I'm going to pray that nobody says anything until October 5th. And these are mine and that I can defend myself from the government and from everyone else and protect my privacy. As I watch all of these transactions and inscriptions and OP returns come in begging me for just a couple of bitcoin brother, just a little bit. And it also makes me wonder if, you know, do they dump them all or do they just stick them in cold storage?
[00:38:31] It is at least a really interesting story, really interesting little piece of everything that's been going on lately. Because, you know, they could dump them. They could just market sale, dump them on the market and, you know, cause a pretty little hefty price dip. I think that's kind of stupid. And if you were this serious about protecting it, you, you would probably also be very slow and meticulous and careful about exiting any of it. But if you're also a bitcoin OG to the point that you're, you're, you're throwing OP returns in, you're making vanity addresses and you're also using P2PKH and a P2PKH address to hold them. You're not really worried about them being taken.
[00:39:15] You're, you know, you, that person clearly thinks they have the setup and they might, you know, sell some because life. And you, you don't want to act. You actually want to access your capital. But also they seem to be a bitcoiner, not somebody who's desperate to get a whole bunch of fiat in a bank.
[00:39:32] And they're also seem to be a little concerned legally as to how do I protect myself. The last thing, if I had stumbled upon all of that and I actually knew bitcoin as well as this person definitely seems to know it the last thing I would want is a billion dollars in fiat trying to figure out what the heck to do with that and how to move it. Like dear God, no. I would be keeping it in bitcoin and using the tiny little extra shallow portion of it that I possibly could. So I think the fears of, you know, somebody's going to dump $8 billion of Bitcoin all of a sudden is just. It's not a good strategy. This person seems very careful or these people seem very careful with how they're doing this.
[00:40:13] And it's stupid from a market price standpoint, but it's also just stupid if you're this knowledgeable about bitcoin to not want to keep the bitcoin. That also lends itself, I think, to either the direct tool or like kind of somebody made bad entropy exploit, but also possibly to the I have an old wallet in a laptop or a computer that I purchased and I'm trying to get into it because you're clearly from that per this.
[00:40:43] I would gander that whoever this person is may actually be from the 2011, 12, maybe all the way back to 2010 era of Bitcoin. Very much knows what they are doing. Maybe they're from the 2013 era and this is when they found the wallet or they had the computer and so they stumbled upon this on a hard drive that was thrown away or included in something that was, you know, by accident and somebody else has lost this and they've been, they've spent all this time learning about bitcoin trying to get into it maybe, who knows. Actually there was actually another piece of the puzzle that was relevant to this is apparently one of the addresses paid out to a counterparty address, which counterparty is a really old like kind of layer. Two, you could say it was, it was one of the first like tokens on top of tokens for bitcoin and a smart contract platform for bitcoin. It's not actually, it's not trustlessly pegged to it or whatever, but it was one of the early attempts to do that and it was always an interesting project to me, but it never seemed to catch up. Get off the ground. Everybody just went to shitcoins and altcoins because you can issue your own tokens out of thin air and make millions of dollars off of nothing.
[00:41:59] So but they sent some to one of the counterparty addresses, one of the official counterparty addresses. So it's an indication that again, they're aware of that and that that might be meaningful to them to Suggest when what era of bitcoin they are from. And if they're from an era that's anywhere near around the 2011 zone, well then it's very possible that they just stumbled upon or have a machine, it has a wallet on it and they are the luckiest damn people alive, willing to do the hard work and scared and trying to protect themselves so that this bitcoin that they found might actually end up belonging to them rightfully or legally I guess is the better term because they just don't want someone coming after them. And the and governments my inclination was their is their biggest fear is the government and it would be mine is that oh, I stumbled upon this and now the government comes in. Like if you just find, you know, $100 million worth of gold in the walls of your house, that's not you, that is not going to be yours. As now you go to court, go to court with, you know, the previous owner or whatever. There's been multiple stories of this government will come in and that is the government's money. So the question is what happens when you stumble upon $9 billion or $8.6 billion in Bitcoin and how do you defend yourself from that? That story?
[00:43:19] That story seems most likely to me and maybe they're a nerd and they really like the show Lost. Hard to say. It'll be really interesting. If it is an exploit, we would see more. We will see more. And so it will be something interesting to keep an eye on for the next coming days, weeks, months, you know, what happens after October 5th.
[00:43:38] Do they move the coins again? Do they do another batch from a different wallet, etc. So I'll let you know. Stay tuned. Subscribe to Bitcoin audible. We'll be talking about it. If you some more news heads our way, maybe we'll do another guy's take or I'll just do an update and we'll discuss it on the roundtable. I'm curious what mechanic and Steve and my brother have to say about this one. But with that, thank you guys for listening. I hope you enjoyed this guy's take. I hope you learned something. I'll have some links in the show notes so you can check out the transactions to an article and the Solomon brothers stuff if you have any other. Oh actually there was. I totally forgot this whole element of it but somebody on the bitcoin talk forums from like a million years ago back in 20.
[00:44:22] I received 10,000 bitcoins 10 years ago, but it was a private key on my old computer, October 5, 2021.
[00:44:29] That one's less. This one was from August 10, 2013, but it's two different addresses or two different people claiming one of the addresses as this is mine. Does anybody know how we can reclaim them?
[00:44:46] I'm inclined to think, you know, you just go look at 10,000 bitcoin addresses and you know, just like fake Toshi just Craig Wright also put it in. Put one of them in his tulip Trust. And then the same thing with a different one that the og, you know, did the opera turn of Craig Wright is. Craig Wright is a fraud. I'm more inclined to think that those examples on the Bitcoin Talk forums are just people just saying stuff. And, oh, I used to have this 10,000 Bitcoin. Can anybody help me out? Because, you know, 10,000 Bitcoin, even in 2013 is like 30 grand, 40 grand, something like that. So. Or wait, no, that would be, that would be 2011. I'm an idiot. 2011 is when it was in the 30 range. So 2013 was like a thousand. So that's. That's a million dollars at that point. I mean, yeah, you don't just like, oh, I forgot about that. And, you know, I just, I didn't think it was important.
[00:45:41] Now I need to. Can anybody else help me out? It was a lot of money when you were saying that it was irrelevant to you. But I have the link to those, those forum posts if you want to kind of dig into those. And somebody actually found the user on X and there's. Now there's fresh posts up there, people talking about like, whoa, maybe he found him. Did somebody. Have you contacted them? You know, blah, blah. But they're clearly indicating that they don't have the private keys. So granted, one of them said that he sold the laptop and, you know, now he was trying to get back into it. How do I get my private keys back?
[00:46:15] So maybe, maybe it's actually true. And he didn't even realize that he had, you know, seven more addresses with 10,000 Bitcoin in them. Totally forgot about that. Because if you love, if you forgot about one batch of $33,000 worth of Bitcoin, maybe you forgot it seven times and maybe that's the laptop with, as he said, like almond butter on the keyboard. And that's the one that that other guy has been hacking into or trying to break into for years and years and years. And they finally broke in, and he's just hoping and praying that the guy on the Bitcoin talk forums never found his private keys and tries to claim it. So anyway, fascinating story, interesting stuff.
[00:46:54] Hope you guys enjoyed that one. Don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to follow me on all the socials and follow the podcast. This is Bitcoin Audible. This is where you will find out everything about bitcoin and I'm the guy who's read more about it than anybody else you know. Don't forget to check out Chroma. I have a 10% discount. Bitcoin audible all about light health blocking blue light. I highly suggest you start going down that rabbit hole. You check that out. I think it it's made a huge difference for me and I think it has absolutely worth checking out. They also have the again they have the bitcoin website based get Chroma co I believe it is but link will be in the show notes if I screwed that one up. And check out Pub key. The beta is live.
[00:47:36] I will have my public key in the show notes so that you can find me up there. This is the best of BitTorrent and the web combined and of course HRF and their amazing newsletter for everything staying up to date for the fight for freedom, for financial sovereignty, for monetary sovereignty, the the news and politics that are threatening it and how Bitcoin and the other relevant tools are protecting it and what those are. It is an unbelievably valuable resource and I highly recommend it. With that I will catch you guys on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. And until then everybody, that's my two sats Sam.
