As Meiklejohn had trawled cryptocurrency forums for discussions of interesting addresses worth scrutinizing, one mysterious mountain of money in particular stood out: This single address had, over the course of 2012, accumulated 613,326 bitcoins—5 percent of all the coins in circulation. It represented around $7.5 million at the time, a figure nowhere near the billions it would represent today, but a heady sum nonetheless. Rumors among Bitcoin users suggested that the hoard was possibly a Silk Road wallet, or perhaps the result of an unrelated, notorious Bitcoin Ponzi scheme carried out by a
...more
