Haven’t checked in for a while, and I just realized it’s almost at 300k views now. The comment section is full of retail investors pretending to be asleep, refusing to believe that 1 is real no matter what. For those who genuinely don’t understand, here’s a quick explainer: how did the U.S. Department of Justice crack open the big players’ private keys? The U.S. Department of Justice didn’t hack in or break the algorithm. Instead, they discovered that the private keys for these wallets were generated way too “casually.” In other words, the wallets used “fake random numbers” to generate private keys. That random system was like a broken slot machine, spitting out almost the same numbers every time. Once the U.S. Department of Justice figured out the pattern, they could reverse-engineer a bunch of wallet private keys and directly empty the Bitcoin from those wallets. A Bitcoin private key is supposed to be a 256-bit string of 0s and 1s. In theory, it’s highly random, like flipping a coin 256 times to create a unique key. But if someone uses a broken “random machine” to generate private keys, the result is like flipping a coin and always getting the same side. Following the clues, the U.S. Department of Justice violently transferred 127,000 BTC at the end of 2020, of which over 120,000 were confirmed to be Chen Zhi’s stolen funds. This was a massive blow to Bitcoin believers!