🥷 How a hacker stole 700 BTC from the FBI

Gm, this is the doodhwala, we’re that GOOD friend who’ll give you the AUX cable to play your road trip jam 🤘

Here’s what we got cracking:

• Bitcoin makes 🤡 outta the 👮🏽‍♂️ FEDs

• 3 reasons why BITCOIN hashrate 🚀

• Chaach and charts: Solana making it BIG? 🔥

• Taaza Tweet of the day: We can’t find him! 👀

Thursday FUNday.

Bitcoin makes 🤡 outta the FEDs

Two brothers managed to make 🤡 outta the US Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI.

The FBI is like firangi CID, but without this terrific trio:

But the story is HILARIOUS + ENRAGIN af

Hilarious: One dude stole BTC from a hardware wallet that was locked up in a safe

Enraging: FEDs locked up the dude for a crypto crime that shouldn’t be a crime at all

Let’s get into it.

Meet this guy:

He might look at Gary V’s fat cousin who’s into NFTs (No Fitness or Treadmills and not NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens).

But he’s not, he’s actually a dude called — Larry Harmon.

Larry was arrested in Feb 2020.

Y tho?

He created 3 crypto companies doing some shady stuff:

• Grams: Google for illegal stuff like drugs, guns, etc.

• Helix: Mixie (like the one you use to make chutney) for cryptocurrencies

• Dropbit: Paytm for crypto

My dude is like the Elon Musk of shady crypto companies, just hit after hit!

The main concern for authorities was product#2 → Helix.

Y tho?

Helix was used as a mixing service for transactions coming from AlphaBay, a marketplace on the darknet. Basically, it took transactions from shady places and mixed them with normal transactions to make it look legit.

In total, Helix’s trading volume was 3.5 lakh BTC between 2014 to 2020.

When he was arrested 3 years ago, the Feds seized his Trezor hardware wallet.

What’s a hardware wallet?

Hardware wallets is wallet to secure + store cryptocurrencies. These wallets work by storing private keys in an external, physical device like a USB or hard drive.

The Feds put Larry in jail and his Trezor wallet into a safe.

But they couldn’t lock up the 4.1k+ BTC in Larry’s wallet.

And his brother — Gary Harmon (again, nothing to do with our Vee friend) — knew Larry’s seedphrase and began taking away the BTC.

So, when Larry’s wallet was in the Fed’s hands, Garry began transferring the BTC out.

And the authorities could do nothing about it. But watch, and cry because for the first time they couldn’t stop a financial transaction.

Garry pulled out 20% of the BTC, or about 713 BTCs from his brother’s account.

But he was caught too, not before he managed to:

• drop off some BTC in BlockFi

• liquidate some crypto to buy an apartment

• liquidate some crypto to hire a baller a crypto lawyer, who called out the FBI:

"Just because the government cannot manage to keep up with its technology, that is not the defendant’s (Gary Harmon’s) problem.:

Currently — Larry is in jail, Gary is going to jail, mixing services are going down, but the doodhwala is still unfunny.

Doodhwala’s take: We got 2 takes here.

1. For the govt to target mixing services specifically for one use case (inflow from illegal markets) is not cool bruh. We get drugs and stuff are bad, but they have nothing to do with mixing services.

2. For the govt to not be able to fence a financial asset is pretty cool. And for someone to steal crypto from a seized and well-guarded storage device is hilarious. It also emphasizes the importance of a truly decentralized cryptocurrency.

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3 reasons why BITCOIN’s hashrate 🚀 is important

The most important Bitcoin metric just made a new all-time high.

I’m not talking about price.

I’m talking about hashrate.

No, hashrate is not the rate at which you ingest hashish.

This is what hashrate is:

Hashrate measures the computing power of a cryptocurrency network that operates on a proof of work consensus algorithm. Computing power refers to the security and processing ability of the network.

Look at that baby go 🚀

Think of hashrate as the rate of a calculator's calculations.

And it’s not weird math-exam calculations like “If Raju has 2 apples and Ravi has 5 apples, calculate the distance between Raju’s house and the moon?”

What kinda calculations? 👉 Useful calculations like time intervals between the creation of two blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The faster the calculation = The quicker the block creation = The higher the hashrate.

So, why tf does higher hashrate matter? 3 reasons:

1️⃣ Security: The higher the hashrate the higher the security of the Bitcoin network2️⃣ Efficiency: The higher the hashrate the more efficient the miners in confirming transactions3️⃣ Expense: The higher the hashrate, the moex expensive mining equipment required to mine Bitcoin

An increase in hashrate → increase in SEE (Security, Efficiency, Expense) cause an increase in both sides of the Bitcoin market.

→ Demand: More demand for BTC because people trust in the security of the Bitcoin network

→ Supply: Higher competition to mine Bitcoin due to an increase in efficiency

So, is higher hashrate better for Bitcoin?

Yes, yes it is.

So, is higher hashrate better for Bitcoin’s price?

Lol, no idea.

Price is something we really know nothing about. 🤷‍♂️

Chaach and charts: Solana making it BIG?

Sometimes we talk 💩 about Solana, but sometimes we talk 💎 about Solana.

Today, we’re doing the second one.

Solana’s daily transactions rn is at 28.5 million ahead of — that's more than Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, and Ethereum COMBINED.

This is pretty mad considering Solana’s total value locked (TVL) is lower than all of these blockchains.

This is bullish af.

But then again it's Solana, a blockchain that goes down more often than the electricity in my neighborhood the minute it starts raining.

🤞

♨️ Taaza Tweet of the day: WE LAUNCHED?

If you want more doodh then, be sure to follow our Twitter (@DoodhwalaDaily)

That’s all for today bhaiyo aur bheno! Naale Sigona!

Aakash "Dahi Cheeni" Athawasya & Arvind "Doodh Peda" Krishna

Yo! Our legal and financial advisors (aka our good ol’ conscience) have asked us to add this boring disclaimer.

None of what you read here is financial advice. We aren’t here to get you to buy or sell a crypto. We’re only here to tell you what’s up in crypto today and make you laugh. So, if you screwed up on a trade, that’s on you G. Stay safe in the markets.