Why are you ruling out the possibility of him buying one?
I think there is a good chance that ***** has created his new account somewhat recently, or will create it shortly.
It is possible that ***** had purchased
redsn0w. Or if not him, then someone else did.
If you look at the
wallet that contained his vanity address (1reds...), then you will see that he often would deposit to and withdraw from a number of gambling sites on a regular basis. If you look at this wallet, you will see that he deposited ~5.25
BTC to primedice, and there is no indication of any kind of withdrawal following these withdrawals. If you query what is likely his username on PD chat "U:redsn0w" then you will see that he lost roughly 4.6
BTC (maybe he was up a little bit prior to him what was likely him chasing losses). After that, he received additional money and gambled small amounts on what appears to be some kind of on-chain gambling site. Him busting was likely what caused
this thread.
Over time he receives additional money (probably from signature campaign payments), spends some money at sites that accept bitpay, still sends money to and withdraws from gambling sites until he sends .1 BTC to Coinichiwa on April 6 which leaves him with roughly 1.21 BTC. Since he busted at PrimeDice, the most he had was ~2.2 BTC.
Then on April 6, all of the money in the 1reds... vanity address are sent to Redsn0w's "new" address of
1GkGt3218AM8FU7ZGDCeZS4LWZR8xeZcjf. Over the next month, that address receives an additional ~8.5
BTC from what can be traced back to various exchanges that trade alt coins (you have to go back several "hops" on wallet explorer). The balance on that address peaks at around 14
BTC. Although it is possible that he purchased an additional ~$2,300 worth of bitcoin after loosing ~$1,000 gambling, but I think that is somewhat unlikely. Plus his transaction history does not show him playing at any gambling sites as soon as the address switches.
If his account was in fact sold, then I believe that the sale was for the account plus the private keys to his vanity address with ~1.2 BTC unspent. So if the account sold for 1
BTC, the buyer would have sent 2.2
BTC to Redsn0w in exchange for his password and the private key. However, in late April, I had sent him a message asking if he had paid CITM for a spot on DefaultTrust that was GPG encrypted to his GPG private key, however he was unable to decrypt it which I thought was strange (at the time I chalked it up to him deleting his key because he was no longer offering escrow services).....He either decided that finding the PGP private key was worth the
~$1.20 in interest that was not worth finding when someone sent him an encrypted message, or he decided to get the key from the "real" Redsn0w when he was publicly requested to sign a message.
I also know that at least ~11% of post history was in the Italian sections. Out of the last ~20 pages of his post history, he posted maybe 5 posts in Italian, and although I do not speak Italian, I got the feeling that google translate was used. This works out to roughly 1% of his last 400 posts.
I think if his account was sold, that whoever bought it did their research on how he talks as he does speak in a similar way but there are noticeable differences (e.g. not using "~" and not using quotations).
There is also this:
Yes, I would personally suggest you electrum. It is very good and light wallet.
If you look at both his vanity address and his "new" address, you will see that all of the transactions he spent were initially seen by blockchain.info's own node, indicating that he either used their wallet or was using blockchain.info/pushtx to spend his funds.
At the very least, an eye should be kept on him....