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The case of 120,000 bitcoins missing in 2020 revealed: stolen due to "pseudo-random private keys."

Oct 16, 2025 20:06:01

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ChainCatcher news, according to market news, the research team's technical report updated on August 4 reveals the truth behind the incident involving approximately 120,000 bitcoins (worth about $3.7 billion at the time, now about $15 billion) that were suddenly transferred in December 2020.

The research found that the wallets associated with this batch of bitcoins were generated by the Chinese mining pool Lubian.com, and their private keys were not truly random but generated by a flawed pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), making the private keys predictable. The report indicates that U.S. law enforcement recently obtained the relevant private keys, not through hacking or breaching systems, but by confirming that there were systematic vulnerabilities in the wallet generation mechanism.

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