₿ Bitcoin

On 9 June 2021, 24.465 BTC was stolen from my Trezor after I entered my recovery seed into what I believed was a legitimate Trezor page. It wasn’t. I had been redirected to a fake page through a malicious Chrome extension. The stolen bitcoin was traced on-chain. Months later, it began arriving at deposit addresses belonging to Huobi, now HTX. Blockchain investigators alerted the exchange within hours. The transactions continued. I spent the following years trying to understand what had happened and attempting to recover the bitcoin. Eventually I took the matter to the UK High Court. In December 2024, the court entered judgment in my favour and ordered the return/payment of assets valued at approximately £1.95 million. HTX did not comply with the judgment. What fascinates and frustrates me about the case is that Bitcoin itself did exactly what it was supposed to do. The blockchain preserved the trail. Years later, those transactions are still there for anyone with the appropriate expertise to analyse. The difficult part was what happened when that trail reached a centralised exchange. Five years after the theft, I am still pursuing the case and still trying to understand exactly who was behind it and where the bitcoin ultimately went. I’m curious what people here think about one particular question: When an exchange is warned in real time that identifiable stolen bitcoin is arriving at its deposit addresses, what should we reasonably expect that exchange to do? UPDATE Thanks for all the responses, including the critical ones. There has been a lot of discussion here about personal responsibility, Bitcoin’s decentralization, the role of exchanges and what an exchange can reasonably be expected to do when stolen funds arrive. I have never denied my own responsibility. I made a catastrophic mistake by entering my recovery seed into what I believed was a genuine Trezor recovery page. Bitcoin did not fail, and my Trezor was not hacked. I was successfully phished. But that is only where the story begins. The stolen Bitcoin was subsequently traced through the blockchain and into Huobi deposit addresses. While the funds were still arriving, Huobi was warned that these were proceeds of a reported theft. Those warnings were supported by a criminal complaint, screenshots and blockchain analysis from four separate specialist organisations. I have never argued that Huobi should have reversed a Bitcoin transaction. They couldn’t. Nor have I argued that an exchange should automatically return Bitcoin simply because someone claims it was stolen. The issue is much narrower: what responsibility does a centralized exchange have when specifically identified proceeds of a reported theft arrive under its control and it is warned while this is happening? That question eventually led me through police investigations, blockchain investigators, lawyers in several jurisdictions and ultimately to the UK High Court, where I obtained a judgment against Huobi. The judgment remains unpaid. I’m now working on the next stage of enforcement, including looking at jurisdictions where a UK High Court judgment may be recognised and where HTX/Huobi or related entities have a legal, regulated or otherwise enforceable presence. At the same time, I have spent the past years documenting this entire story. I’m now writing it all down, including the theft, the mistakes I made, the blockchain trail, the warnings sent to Huobi, the police investigation, the legal battle, the judgment and what happened afterwards. I intend to make that story, together with much of the underlying documentary evidence, available to a much wider international audience. Perhaps public scrutiny will achieve something that five years of private correspondence, investigations and legal proceedings have not. We’ll see.

Dr. Ko Ju-Chun has delivered the BPI's Bitcoin reserve report to Taiwan's premier and central bank. Two of his five-step roadmap's steps are done. The electoral math is the only variable left.

ARE WE FRICKIN LATE NOW?!

What are your thoughts on this commonly debated topic? I've read the arguments for both. I started to move towards 2/3 multisig after the coldcard incident however I can't fully commit. I really like that with single sig I can memorize both the seed and strong passphrase while of course still having solid backups saved. Point being if I am away from my backups and some emergency happens I can recover my funds wherever I'm at. With multisig that is much more difficult.

Conduition, Ram, and Fabian Jahr joined Optech to discuss Newsletter #417: Draft BIP for stale tip relay CISA for taproot keypath spends (BIP460) Segwit commitment to post-quantum witness data PQC output type discussion Input-triggered transaction expiry Layered quantum recovery of hashed addresses Segregated Data (SegData) BIP draft And more You can listen on our website: https://bitcoinops.org/en/podcast/2026/08/11/ Fountain: https://fountain.fm/episode/X3dpYvlQy2N6tO4DeQl3 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7wkE8AkAwXf7QIKlcO5cK4 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bitcoin-optech-newsletter-417-recap/id1674626983?i=1000782982957