Wow.. interesting.
I think that many of us were assuming that the Bitfinex "hackers" were never going to be found - and especially, if found, not expecting many of the coins to get recovered.., and geez a husband and wife team of hackers.. huh? true or not.. let's consider the matter..
For sure the USDOJ public release document remains quite laudatory towards the USGovt policing efforts and striving to suggest that no one is really going to get away from them - no matter the type of obfuscating that they are attempting to accomplish - and frequently mistakes are made (fair enough) - and surely we have seen Govt officials exaggerate regarding their own skills/abilities in the past (whether US Govt or other Govts have tendencies to do that) - but still interesting that the USDOJ take such a stance in their publicly released document.... and for sure, just through the press released document, it seems that a weakness (at least in terms of the USGovt getting ahold of the 94k recovered BTC was that the hackers were apparently holding their coins with a third-party service rather than in a privately controlled wallet.. at least that is what I gathered from this portion of the press release:
"After the execution of court-authorized search warrants of online accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan, special agents obtained access to files within an online account controlled by Lichtenstein."
So that does seem to be a pretty BIG mistake to be holding those coins with a third party - and not trying to suggest ways that "hackers"/"criminals" might improve their techniques, but just pointing out that we had already seen some implications that there might be something wrong with bitcoin.. when the reality does seem that there was a kind of third-party access involved, and we do not yet know which third party that was - whether we will find out is another interesting question, no?
Another historical conspiracy theory concern that had a decent amount of logical validity was that there was likely quite a bit of speculation that there was "insider-jobbedness" going on with the purported Bitfinex hackening - and this USDOJ press release does seem to lend credibility to Bitfinex's version of events - that there was no "insider" aspect to this - even though for sure, none of us should be accepting any new information without any possible grain of salt skepticisms.
By the way, I had also recalled that in late 2016, Bitfinex had issued a couple of different kinds of tokens (and/or forms of equity), and one of them regarded the account holders getting reimbursed (for their losses - socializing the losses based on total holdings that any account holder had on Bitfinex at the time of the hack), but another relevant form of equity token that Bitfinex issued around that late 2016 timeframe had to do with potential profitability (or windfall to equity purchasers) regarding if any of the hacked coins were to ever be recovered.. gosh and I suppose that anyone still holding those kinds of equity tokens with Bitfinex would be receiving some considerable windfall profits from this matter, if it ends up being true...
Another aspect that I recall is that Bitfinex did not permit any US resident to purchase any of those equity tokens that involved potential recovery of the "hacked" coins.. but I had not really kept track of those matters either... I would actually expect that Bitfinex has been a quite conniving business entity during this whole process (as it has shown itself to be), and I would suspect that Bitfinex had likely bought back a decent quantity of those hacker recovery related tokens/equity over the years.
Another thing is that in the past few weeks, we did hear about some recent moving of the "hacked" coins, so surely mistakes may have been made in those most recent coin movements that ended up drawing attention to how to identify the purported "hackers"? Perhaps? perhaps?
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