Bitcoin Forum

$3.5 billion recovered out of the stolen $4.5 billion by
the couple: Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein after a thorough investigations, they were arrested by the US department of Justice for being the masterminds behind the hack of Bitfinex exchange in 2016 claiming about $4.5 biliion


Aside the hack, it was stated that they own one of the wealthiest bitcoin account of which i know that privacy is not secured here which is one of the major reasons one have not to make use of centralized exchanges.

As am against any unlawful act as such in Bitfinex hack, my question is that, what can we say about government impact on regulating crypto as in the case of Bitfinex.

What impact do you think this will have on bitcoin price if the total seizure were back into circulation?

Even if they are the one that worked for the coin, it can be seized by the government. What I just wish to know is how almost the whole amount of the bitcoin when Bitfenex was hacked were with them possibly they are the hackers. But only noncustododial ways and decentralized means of exchanging can help in having total control

If you are a bitcoin holder, you do not have to panic, the effect of this on bitcoin price will not be significantly noticed.

Sounds shady to me. I don't really buy that hacked crap anymore. This was probably a inside job. Maybe it was all planned. If there was a real hacker, he probably wouldn't do something that stupid knowing that he won't spend any of that money. Something don't fit right here.

As for the bitcoin holders, you shouldn't worry at all. $3.6b is small potatoes now. It won't affect the markets.

Obviously this huge amount will be refunded to all affected user on Bitfinex. However the government can seize it if Bitfinex didn't claim it. The impact will be huge because the government will surely liquidate it immediately after the court decision since it will be beneficial for them as additional budget. The amount is too huge for them to still hold it for a long time so they will sell it off or auction it for public buy. This will surely create panic among the Bitcoin holders because this is a huge quantity that needs to be absorb by the current circulating Bitcoin.

It really depends on what they're going to end up doing with the money. If they ended up deciding to sell it for whatever reason, it's really unlikely that they're going to dump it on spot exchanges in the first place. Instead, they're very likely going to sell it through OTC as to not heavily and directly impact the market.

Nothing. No matter what the good and bad news are there, one thing for sure is that bitcoin will continue to thrive. And even those seized coins are back in circulation and they start selling it, it will eventually go up as everyone's going to buy those cheap bitcoins.
There's really no need to worry about this news. We've seen many type of bad news and FUD yet the market has grown stronger and better. That's what I think and it doesn't make me worry whether they put that seized coins on an auction or dump it immediately.

The impact will be on credibility of exchanges and in the safety. Also the general public may think that crypto is "dangerous" or "risky", but I got the feeling that it is anyway the case. As always, your keys you bitcoin and anything else is running an unnecessary third party risk in the form of custodial intermediaries. The lesson that has to be learnt over and over is that if you hodl a significant bit of bitcoin you should not have it on a exchange or at least not in just one exchange.

Other than that... there may be a dip in price, so excellent to buy more.

Bitfinex was hacked by two Israeli brothers, and the people in question are just trying to launder that money - although there is no doubt that there is a connection between them - but those who devised the hack are still two brothers, one of which belonged to a special section of the Israeli IDF army.



Do you think that 90+ thousand BTC can mean something in a market that has almost 19 million BTC in circulation (mined so far)? These funds will one day either be sold at auction or partially returned to Bitfinex, which should return them to damaged clients. These coins have not disappeared from circulation, nor will they disappear if their owner becomes someone else.

The issue of arresting them does not seem logical because hackers have technical knowledge that makes them keep that money in cold storage instead of this method.


Perhaps this story is more logical because I think hackers are smarter than that in general. Let's wait for more details, because it seems that what happened may be a coincidence or related to another case.



It will not have an effect. On the contrary, the effect will be positive. The seized money often takes a while to return to the platform, and after paying taxes and others, the matter may settle from one to three months.
Thus, when it is pumped into the market, the price may have gone up already.

That is just poor journalism from coindesk


They didn't hack anything, they were just sending phising links to eveyone, why would you try to get login details when you had access directly to the cold wallet?

I don't think it will affect the market if the government sells it gradually, it's just a stupid government if it sells bitcoin prices cheaply, at least if the confiscated BTC can help the country's finances why should they destroy the bitcoin price itself

they haven't sold yet that large amount of btc and i don't think they will sell it all at once. and in any case, we have seen many times how bitcoin auctions were done. it may have an impact at the time of auction but afterwards, the btc price always recover. so yes, imo, there's no need to be paranoid about it. and in case they will sell cheap, it will be your opportunity to get your satoshis.
and btw, are they going to give back the recovered funds to bitfinex or not? we don't know yet where will those bitcoins go. 

Anyone know what will happen with the recovered funds? I was part of the hack back in 2016 and was given some token in return. It wasn’t LEO but something else, that token rose in value and I sold it and my loss in terms of fiat was very minimal, so I didn’t care and moved on.

So now that they are recovered who will get all of them? Most likely it will be the owners of Bitfinex since they gave us those tokens back in 2016. Would be nice to get some of it back in BTC term and not fiat.

If there are some sort of compensation into those times where bitfinex owners had done then it would be normal that they would really be getting all of those coins/assets that had been hacked
since they wouldnt really be having any liability since they had already done their part  but it would be good if they would consider it out on giving some portion at least into those users
who had been affected but its better not to be hopeful for this thing since there would be no assurance that it could happen.

This is not a case of a lack of government regulation but rather an insecure site with vulnerabilities that can be exploited. IMO, the recovered funds will not affect the price of bitcoin in a huge way. Maybe once the funds were given back as compensation, people will immediately sell, but seeing that bitcoin is performing positively as of late, I doubt that's something people would do. The government will probably hold on to those coins just like they do on previous seized coins, and auction them off to not affect the market directly.

I wouldn't really be too shocked. I have been in journalism for over 6 years now (not really, just content writing, but to places that does have journalists so I know them) and I could tell you that these people barely research their topic. In fact, they barely read the news they are sharing as well.

I have seen people who wrote topics that are so irrelevant to the context that, you would assume they are writing 100 articles a day by how rushed of a job it was and that was just the only thing they wrote that week. Journalism is not what it used to be, people do not care about news as much as they used to, hell many people get news from twitter let alone reading a newspaper, so journalism is a dying business with money still in it, making it difficult to find people who would be willing to do the work for a little amount of money just to make their bosses richer.

It is hard for them to sell it because the address that they use are already track, much more if they sold it at once or at bigger amount but now that the hackers have caught, the bitcoins that they stole will never be sold. They only waste time and effort there, how unfortunate they are. Kudos to the authorities for doing a good job.

Other hackers now are thinking if they will continue their evil plans after reading this news. Anyway I do not think someone will buy a stolen coin even if we say the price is cheap. Better if they will return the coins back to the exchange and the exchange will re distribute it to the costumers which bitcoin got hacked.

I think that the impact wouldn't be felt, that much isn't bitcoin around 800 billion USD in total market cap already? Then that means that even when those stolen bitcoin gets reintroduced then it's not going to be adding that much effect and those bitcoin seized won't be reintroduced straight away, they're going to be auctioned and those who wins the bid will have the final say.

- In all honesty, I am quite suspicious about this hack. Just think about it, if they were the real masterminds or if this hack is even real, just imagine how much thinking and plannknv has gone through this scheme. Do you think that if they were smart enough to device such a plan they would not have any exit plans or at least have some commonsense that if they do this or that they'd be fckd? Either this is a fake hack, or these poor couple were used as a scapegoat. Oh well, this is just my own opinion anyway.


-It'll barely have an effect obviously. The good thing about this though is that at least these 94,000 bitcoins will go back to the market and be circulated as it should be.

Definitely this has made a worst impression on them and we should not care about it much since fiat is more hampered as compared to the bitcoin. I mean on any given time period there are cases of bank looting, with shooting around, peeps getting hurt, sometimes cross firing death tolls etc. I mean, if we compare it in that sense then definitely bitcoin is far safer and also Bitfinex Hack won't matter much. Most of the money is now recovered in both circulation liquidity and actual coins which were lost and found.

Government is regulating the fiat, but it does not mean that they are able to stop the robberies all the time.

Moreover, its better than drugs and alcohol. Crypto is at least clean without any impact on economy as such.

First of all as they said they recovered the bitcoins , which does mean that they did not really steal and sell, they kept those coins. The government currently seized those coins and there is high chances that it would be given back to the people whose bitcoins were stolen but it's government work, it takes ages which does mean that we might have to wait for a really long time to see that happening. At the same time what individuals will do with their bitcoins will be their own choice, you cannot generally put anything on it. I do think that government at least did the good job of tracking them back, which shows how government involvement in Bitcoins and cryptocurrencies can make it more legal and cannot be all bad.

It would be nothing new and nothing far from what happens when the law of demand and supply applies and that is, flooding the market with more bitcoins and should that be of significant, it would push the market to being bearish but, the market is sure to recover shortly afterwards.

Though, I don't think the government would want to do that. Perhaps the next good thing would have been to see how they could compensate indigenous users of the exchange but, there no support for bitcoin could be some reason in the way. Coupled with what ever conspiracy they might have.

I would estimate that these type of money should be nothing for the size of a company bitfinex is, and that is why it didn't really impact anything. And the "funny" situation of it really caused it to be a bit more blunt and not really impact anything in a long period of time neither and since they are "caught" as well so it is not really a big deal.

I would assume that doing it 10x bigger amount or so and getting away with it could have been a bigger deal but at the same time that did not happen so we would only be able to guess these type of things. If you are in the crypto world and you trust exchanges with your money then you have to accept the fact that it could be hacked.

All for now would be assumptions that  there would be some sort of compensation but they have already done that in the past which it is unlikely that they would be given some of those coins recovered.
It is indeed for sure it would make out some impact but not really that much considering into those number of coins which wouldnt really be that enough on taking the market down unless if
there would be some sort of FUD which make things even more worst but for now all of those things are just presumptions and theres no guarantee that it could happen.
Lets just see and wait on what would be the future updates for this one.

Not sure how i missed this news, a couple behind the hack, looks like a bond movie. So what about the $1 billion, they stashed it somewhere and usually in situations like a major hack or a major theft they usually do not recover everything and a major portion will be missing, so these hackers will get hold of the money once they get our of the jail.

Usually they would return to the exchange and it is not going to be in circulation all of a sudden, if not they usually auction off these. I do not see any major changes to the price because of this.

We will not see the impact in the market as long as the government is holding it.
Usually, they put it in auction after years of holding, because there will be investigations and documentations that will be done first.
And as we have observed, even after the auction, the price comes back to normal.
For me, we don't have to worry about this because it may not happen anytime soon and won't be a determining factor of the btc fate in the market.

They are not going to put it thru auction like they did in the past. When they were auctioning off bitcoins in the past it was coins which were seized from Silk Road and such. These coins belong either to Bitfinex or the users who had funds back in 2016.

Most likely they won’t hold them for long. Maybe until after the trial. And then most likely sent to Bitfinex and where it goes from there is anyone’s guess. No idea if users will be compensated or if it belongs to Bitfinex legally.

There is no billion anywhere.
Those $4.5 billions are the total amount the entire stash of bitcoins would be worth now, but the two tried a lot of times, unsuccessfully to launder those coins, starting with early 2017, and by that time one coin was under 1k.

For example one of their deposit to a Cex identified was frozen somewhere in March 217 with $186,000, which was around 200BTC which could be said is now $8.5 million worth but those are long gone. The couple managed to get almost 1 million dollars out of exchanges but that while spending 1000 coins worth now $42 million. Most of that money was already frozen when they miserably failed time after time to provide documents, so no, there is no billion left anywhere.

Honestly it doesn't even matter because if they could have withdrawn to bitcoin somewhere, if they kept some bitcoins to this day, then they would be still quite rich. Laundering bitcoin is not really "that" difficult, why they end up with this type of problem is beyond my understanding.

There are mixers everywhere and if you really want to do it, just use monero and hide your wealth and you would be able to withdraw small by small. Nobody really needs a billion dollars anyway, if you could just withdraw 10 million dollars a month, from like 20 even 50 different names which would be people around you basically, and then give them a share, then you could actually do it.

50 different people would be the hard part if you are stuck at home all the time but if you are a popular person you should be able to convince that many people, which makes it only 200k dollars per month and would fly under the radar if you could be careful. If not, just one person? It is still like 500k per day from somewhere if you launder it from monero.

Because the theory behind a monitor is different from real life.


How do you hide your wealth?
This is not about hiding your wealth from other poeple so they don't whose know house this is, this is about hiding your wealth from the IRS.
You go and buy a 30k car, with what money if you're unemployed? You buy a 300k house, again with what money?
It doesn't matter what you used to launder your money, from monero to mixers, you have solved one problem, the tracing from where the coins originated, but you can't hide the physical wealth and you can't hide real-life purchases.


They weren't able to withdraw 178k and 122k in 3 months from an exchange and you're talking about 10 million a month?
Oh, let 50 poeple know that you have billions, and let your family share your prison time.
Do you think Cex and banks and the IRS are stupid? They have reports of poeple withdrawing money from exchanges when they see entire families withdrawing in each of the member's names cash what do you think they will do?


Exactly, contacting stranger after stranger to help you exchange coins to fiat and have that sent to you in a parcel to a PO box won't trigger any flags from them, there won't be anyone ratting you out to the FBI and there won't be anyone blackmailing you after this. :D

Tell me - what is real through the exchange, to withdraw a huge amount of fiat, having previously brought there a huge amount of cue ball, which is stolen and whose "path" can be traced? No, we are not talking about 5,000 or 50,000 dollars, I'm talking about those same tens or hundreds of millions? It seems to me that the withdrawal route is through the exchanges, especially the ones that are quite "law-abiding", well, is it somehow stupid or what? There are a lot of problems on the way of withdrawal - from registration and passing the KYC, to the technical possibility of blocking the account / accounts of scammers at any time.

By the way, do you believe that those were the real hackers?

It seems that they were suspicious from the very start though because something doesn't add up or is it just they were noobs when hiding from the authority. The story is still unbelievable to me though because it looks like they were covering something/someone like who are the real hackers.

Anyway, the hack doesn't affect the market I think since there's no dump going on after that ot perhaps if those stolen Bitcoin return in circulation with the market, we might see a pump that would take Bitcoin close to the resistance level.

I'll join the question. Judging by their actions, which I described above, 2 "hackers" simply did not know how to deal with such a volume of funds, and did not find anything better than introducing "dirty money, in a white way", not understanding the essence of the process, for which they paid

I have the feeling that they are also not the real hackers of bitfinex, but just two of the actors covering something. Because if they are, why they made a mistake after all these years of hiding. I am not discriminating them for any reason. But when I saw the photo of these 2, I couldn't believe that they hacked a multi-billion dollar amount of money. There's more than meets the eyes in this situation.

The hacking reason is just a crap and this is a planned act so expect that there was a huge cover up because they can do it since there's a lot of money taken so they can paid anyone just not to let their name float. Better avoid trading at that exchange anymore since this is so huge and I think there reputation has been ruined for that incident.

In this case, the withdrawal of money through dummy "actors", but rather "clowns" is a very stupid idea! It feels like a certain group acquired from real thieves, in non-exchange conditions, accounts with stolen cue balls. And then I decided to convert them to fiat, hoping that no one would understand.
I am sure that _hackers_ are well versed in broad knowledge of the subject area, and would not, to put it mildly, in an idiotic way, withdraw funds, knowing full well what risks there are and what counter-measures will be taken against merchants of the stolen goods.

The whole of the Bitfinex Sega is a big blow on the entire game as most people believe is not an outside job as the whole hack process went on a smooth manner until all the coins were moved to a private wallet and even some percentage of that amount was transferred and converted.

I don't think this hack will have any negative impact on the economy be it decentralized or centralized economy, the amount stolen can morale much effect on the general cryptocurrency market.

with a market capitalization of almost $2 trillion, this amount will not affect the global market in any way. The impact can only be at the level of the exchange that was robbed, reputational losses, but nothing more. Again, only the exchange was compromised, not the crypto algorithms. In a word - everything is quiet, everything is calm, there was an ordinary "pickpocket"

Indeed it will not affect the market since the evildoer will not dump all those stolen amount in bulk they dump it little by little so that people will not notice their illegal activities done recently. For sure they already plan their exit so expect those amount might be seen once this issue sink and replace by different one so for worrying about the possible dump well in my opinion we don't need to worry about that.

We have already seen a lot of hacking incidents and seizure of big amount of bitcoins. And they only influence the market at a short period of time. Let us say for example, the government will put up the seized bitcoins into auction, only few days that they will make a dent in the market. But after several days or so, we are back again to where it was. You can also compare the amount to the amount in circulation, and calculate its percentage and you will already know what impact it can give to the btc market.

We could really make out those calculations but to presume out that not all of those coins would really be sold which means its neither on those parts or its better to calculate out on maximum on which
you do at least have the idea on where it could possibly go down but its true that it would really be that temporal  on which even it do dips but still it would really be that having that recovery later on.
We have seen several exchange hacks and these seizures of coins in the past and its neither it do made out some significant effect or not.

The economic impact is minimal, a few billion dollars worth of crypto could manipulate the market short term, but the larger economic ramifications won't be anything that someone should worry about. Software is fallible to human hackers, so it goes without saying that you carry the risk of losing your coin if you decide to not retain control over your private keys. Government doesn't have any place regulating because of hack, it should just serve as a costly lesson when people entrust these exchanges.

And what would government do anyways? Bitfinex has a financial incentive to secure people's coins, government doesn't need to be involved.

The effect may be there if those who get the Bitcoin back to sell it simultaneously, but it seems like they are experienced traders who will very likely try to influence the market to be able to make the price of BTC go up in order to get more profits compasate, all this time because they can not use their BTC to trade long enough.

I don’t think that even technically it will be possible to put up such a volume for sale on official exchanges. Again - do not forget about regulatory risks, I'm sure exchanges have a set of rules that came from regulators on how to behave in some situations, including the release of significant volumes to the market, which can lead to pronounced negative consequences. Account blocking "for trial" - and the drain was stopped ..

I don't think it is a smart move to sell it all at once as it will create a red flag to the exchange that they will use. If we are talking about the remaining funds from the hack. But if we are talking about the seized funds, usually, the government will put that into auction. It may create a dump for that period, but afterwards, the market will just go back to normal as I have stated in my previous post. This is what we have seen in previous auctions. So for those who want to get some cheaper satoshis, they can keep up with the dates of the possible auction for those seized BTCs. But right now, it seems more investigations are needed on this case.

You could do p2p type of deal to people who do not know better, but that would be risky move as well because you are doxxing yourself when you are doing one to one trading. I would still guess that any method that allows them to mix the money would be the best way for them to get the money out, not that they could right but not at the same time this is for anyone.

If we have some sort of preventions for all these hacks and other stuff then it would mean that we are talking about a bit more safety and security in crypto. That's not really that bad, while people are unhappy that anti-vaxxers getting their money blocked, we are seeing hackers getting their accounts blocked and for some reason one of them is unfair while the other one is fair and I believe that they are both needed at the same time, if we could have regulations on exchanges, then it is fine, if you want to be fair then use non-custodial wallets.

Short tearm, some minor dip in the market and this isn't because of a direct sell effect of this Bitcoin. Others have given a perfect reason so I won't have to repeat what they have said but you should know the government don't use your regular spot exchange and that's the platforms that gives Bitcoin its current price. This dip will be because of news like yours spreading this information and creating fud among the community. Many (especially) those with less or no knowledge about how things are been done will panic and sell off their Bitcoin in anticipation of a dump which will then bring about the dip in price.

In situations like this, you shouldn't join the crowd in panicking instead seized the opportunity in buying discounted Bitcoin for yourself because in the long run, Bitcoin is likely to be higher than its current value due to the power of scarcity resulting from a limited supply of coin that Bitcoin posseses.

If we return specifically to this situation - as you can see, state structures have the potential to investigate a crime, and even investigate, solve a crime and return most of the funds! Yes, despite the fact that it was an intangible asset! This is a good signal in fact - it means that there is control, there are structures that can solve such crimes, and most likely there are protocols for interaction between the state and crypto exchanges for such cases. And of course, do not forget about the "mental abilities" of the kidnappers :)

But they would still able to make out some sale on gradual manner plus having those mixing possibilities or methods on which you could really able  say that it isn't impossible to do so.

Despite on having those strict regulation they could still able to pull it off even though not in bulks but it would be still significant.Every exchange hacks and the stolen coins
attached to it would surely be creating not only on mental but also in emotional aspect on which it could stir up the entire market on that case.

It's not just that I indicated the "mental abilities" of the thieves, in quotation marks :) I wonder what they hoped for when they planned an operation to turn such a huge amount into fiat money. It was an absolutely idiotic act that did not have a single logical explanation!