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One of the prominent developers behind the Bitcoin blockchain said he has asked the FBI to help him recover $3.6 million in the digital coin stolen from his storage wallets on New Year’s Eve.
Luke Dashjr is a developer of the Bitcoin Core, an app that runs 97 percent of the Bitcoin blockchain’s nodes. Bitcoin Core is derived from the software developed by the anonymous Bitcoin inventor who goes by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. That software was simply called Bitcoin, but was later changed to Bitcoin Core to differentiate it from the coin. Dashjr has been contributing to the Bitcoin Core since 2011 and has long championed the concept of decentralization on which the cryptocurrency is based.
“Who cares, FBI?”
On New Year’s Day, Dashyr went to Twitter to report that his entire Bitcoin holdings – worth about $3.6 million – were “basically all gone”. He said the hack stemmed from compromising a PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) key he used to make sure his downloads of Bitcoin Core and a smaller app known as Bitcoin Knots weren’t riddled with malware. He said all his computers had been hacked and urged people not to download new versions for now.
“So to be clear, DO NOT DOWNLOAD BITCOIN KNOTS AND TRUST IT UNTIL THIS IS FIXED,” he wrote. “If you’ve already done that in the past few months, consider shutting down that system for now.”
Dashjr did not respond to an interview request.
In the same thread, the developer said he contacted the FBI and the police, but received no response.
“Who cares @FBI @ic3. Why can’t I reach anyone???” He wrote. “I paid those taxes and the police don’t care. What a scam.”
Dashjr said the compromised wallets were both hot, meaning they could be accessed over the internet, and what He believed were cold, meaning they were hosted on a device that was not connected to the internet. He didn’t elaborate, but it seems he was theorizing that one or more computers he was using were infected and that the hackers could then get their hands on the money stored on them. It’s hard to make sense of that though, as a wallet stored on an internet-connected device is hot by definition.
That issue aside, the theory could be consistent with a Dashjr breach reported in November. During that incident, the developer said, “the hackers bypassed my security measures on the software side by rebooting the server from an unknown storage device. It ran a different system for about 5 minutes.” The hackers then installed two or three external shell backdoors.
There is still a lot that doesn’t add up to the events Dashjr reported. Without more details it is difficult to draw firm conclusions. One takeaway is clear, however, as evidenced by one of the most influential Bitcoin developers calling on law enforcement to recover his stolen digital coin: The idea of cryptocurrencies providing a decentralized platform that takes out established authorities is nothing short of a utopia.
