For the past few days, I guess most of you guys have noticed that the media has been busy covering the news about the Colonial pipeline hackers and how the FBI was able to "hack" their wallet.
If that looks unfamiliar to you, allow me to begin with a bit of background...
On May-7-2021, one of the largest fuel pipelines in the united states experienced a cyber attack that shut down fuel delivery across it.
The pipeline spans 5500 miles and transfers millions of gallons of fuel per day. It was hit by Ransomware. The hackers took over computer systems and then demanded money to release the system back to the colonial pipeline company. And because the pipeline was so important and cannot be left shut down for long, the company succumbed to hackers' demands and paid the ransom which was 75 BTC (equivalent to 4.4 million dollars at the time).
After the incident, the FBI kept investigating the hackers and surprisingly, they were able to recover most of the ransom (63,7 BTC) after "they cracked the hackers' wallet".
This in short was the media narrative, but wait, what the hell has happened?
If the FBI really managed to crack the SHA 256 algorithm, it would be a disaster for the crypto world.
If that was true, then there is no longer anything to protect our crypto funds and Bitcoin is officially dead.
If the glorified SHA 256 algorithm was really broken, we should sell all our crypto holdings and RUN...
Alright, all the speech above is complete nonsense 🙄
What actually happened was a far cry from cracking a private key to a Bitcoin wallet...
The Colonial pipeline hackers transferred the BTC they got as a ransom through more than 20 addresses in an attempt to obfuscate it. And because all BTC transactions are recorded on a public ledger, the FBI was carefully tracking those transactions...
After a long journey of concealing and obfuscation attempts, the hackers decided to put most of the bitcoin together into a single wallet, and they were naive enough to choose a hot one.
This wallet was hosted on a cloud server, meaning its private key was on the same server and since The FBI is able to smoothly access cloud infrastructure they sent a subpoena to the hosting provider and managed to seize that server and everything on it.
This scenario is akin to the hackers storing the Bitcoin on a centralized exchange and the FBI ordering the administration of that exchange to hand it over. There is no cracking of a BTC wallet here.
Believe it or not, it was just that simple...
ِCracking a BTC private key is practically impossible, and having done so would mean the inevitable collapse for all encryption systems around the world, not just Bitcoin.
Of course, the headlines that addressed it didn't point out that entire story. After all, it's a lot easier to promote clickybeat titles.
Another thing I found quite weird was the number of "experts" who suddenly came out of the blue on several TV channels to suggest different scenarios, mostly revolving around that “the FBI might have cracked the bitcoin algorithm”.
Do they really understand how Bitcoin works? Why are they just running like a chicken with its head cut off to discredit crypto?
Well, I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes it honestly feels like a coordinated assault.
I've been in crypto for quite some time and have learned that despite how far Bitcoin has come, there are still too many people that would like to see it fail. They would like to propagate the imagination that it was doomed from the start. That way, they could feel less guilty about not investing in Bitcoin in those years when it was too cheap and they were blindly dismissing it...
If you ask me, I see all these cases as further evidence that we are the crypto community on the right way to financial freedom…
What do you guys think?
I'm keen to read your feedback...
PS, Unless otherwise stated, all images in this post are either my own design or from free photo-sharing sites (e.g. pixabay.com)