Key Bitcoin Developer Calls on FBI to Recover $3.6M in Digital Coin
upstart writes:
So much for enthusiasts championing the decentralization of cryptocurrencies:
One of the prominent developers behind the bitcoin blockchain said he has asked the FBI to assist him in recovering $3.6 million worth of the digital coin that was 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 nodes making up the bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin Core derives from the software developed by the anonymous bitcoin inventor who uses the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. That software was called simply Bitcoin but was later changed to Bitcoin Core to distinguish it from the coin. Dashjr has been contributing to the Bitcoin Core since 2011 and has long championed the concept of decentralization that the cryptocurrency was founded on.
[...] Dashjr said the wallets compromised were both hot-meaning accessible over the Internet-and what he believed were cold-meaning they were hosted on a device not connected to the Internet. He didn't elaborate, but it appears he was theorizing that one or more computers he used was infected and that the hackers could then obtain the funds stored on them. It's hard to make sense of that, however, since a wallet stored on an Internet-connected device is, by definition, hot.
[...] There's still a lot that doesn't add up to the events Dashjr has reported. Without more details, it's hard to come to any firm conclusions. One takeaway, however, is clear, as evidenced by one of the most influential bitcoin developers calling on law enforcement to recover his stolen digital coin: The notion that cryptocurrencies provide a decentralized platform that cuts out established authorities is nothing short of a pipe dream.
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