When a Bitcoin Heist Turns into a $14.5B Mystery
A crypto mystery just got unboxed. On August 3, Arkham dropped a bomb: LuBian, a once-top mining pool in China, lost 127,426 BTC in what’s now the biggest bitcoin heist ever. That’s $3.5B back then in 2020. Now? It’s worth over $14.5B. And somehow, nobody said a word about it for nearly 4 years.
LuBian was kind of a big deal at one point powering 6% of the Bitcoin network. Then, poof December 28, 2020, 90% of its wallet got cleaned out. The next day, more BTC and USDT vanished. By New Year’s Eve, the rest was rushed to recovery wallets like a digital fire drill.
Ghost Messages to the Hacker
Here’s the twist: LuBian didn’t go public. Instead, they dropped 1,500+ on-chain messages asking the hacker to “be a white-hat” and return the coins. Even used OP_RETURN to send blockchain notes, burning over 1.4 BTC just to beg. One message from July 2024 read: “To the white-hat who is saving our asset, you can contact us.”
Still, silence.
Turns out LuBian’s tech used flawed key-generation that made it easy to brute-force. That’s hacker 101. And now, the thief’s wallet is ranked 13th largest Bitcoin holder—above some actual crypto exchanges.
This isn’t just a hack it’s a huge Bitcoin Heist and It’s a full-on cyber thriller that sat in the shadows for years—and the loot is still untouched.
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