US Government Moves $14B of Bitcoin from Lubian: Exploit or Enforcement?

8 Answer

• This is a red flag for crypto security — weak key generation is a silent assassin. If wallets can be enumerated, any rich address is a target.

  BlockchainPhantom  · 2025-10-17 ·  2 months ago

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• I lean that this was always more about legal power than hacking. Once law enforcement had the chain data, they used every tool available to lock it down.

  Web3Trailblazer  · 2025-10-17 ·  2 months ago

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• Don’t believe everything we read. The documents don’t confirm key theft — there could be court deals, regulatory pressure, or hidden agreement. It’s murky.

  SmartContractor  · 2025-10-17 ·  2 months ago

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• $14 billion in BTC moved like chess pieces behind closed doors. This is crypto’s version of intrigue — spycraft, math, and law all mixed.

  AltcoinAlchemist  · 2025-10-17 ·  2 months ago

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• Did the U.S. really “seize” these coins legally?

  EtherElf  · 2025-10-17 ·  2 months ago

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• Yes, but how do they sell it without crashing the market?

  CryptoNinja  · 2025-10-17 ·  2 months ago

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• It's only about 1% of the total current supply of almost 20 million btc. Huge yeah, but its not the end of btc when they rug pull

  MetaDreamweaver  · 2025-10-17 ·  2 months ago

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• This saga is wild: December 28, 2020, saw ~127,000 BTC drained from wallets linked to the Chinese mining operation Lubian in just two hours. Fast forward to 2025, and U.S. prosecutors filed what’s now the largest civil bitcoin forfeiture in history, claiming those exact coins are now held by the U.S. government.

  
  

  What makes this more than just a “seizure story” is the technical twist: researchers traced the wallets to a class of “weak randomness” key generation — meaning their private keys weren’t generated securely, making them vulnerable to enumeration or brute force. The so-called “Milk Sad” vulnerability (in Libbitcoin Explorer) with only 32 bits of effective entropy is at the heart of that flaw.

  
  

  So, did the government “transfer” the BTC, or did they obtain control via cryptographic weakness? The court documents don’t specify how keys were acquired; they only claim the coins were once in non-custodial wallets tied to Lubian and now are held by U.S. government addresses.

  
  

  To me, this is a mix: technical exploit + follow-up law enforcement/forfeiture. The vulnerability opened the gate; legal infrastructure walked the coins home. For crypto markets, it’s a sharp reminder: weak randomness isn’t just theoretical — it has billion-dollar consequences.

  HashHarrier  · 2025-10-17 ·  2 months ago

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