One of the brains behind the bitcoin blockchain who lost an eye-watering $3.6bn worth of digital currency has asked the FBI to help him recover it.
Luke Dashjr is a developer of Bitcoin Core, which runs 97% of the nodes – meaning communication points – in the blockchain, and has been involved in the running of the decentralised cryptocurrency since 2011.
But on New Year's Day Dashjr took to Twitter, claiming his entire Bitcoin fortune – worth around $3.6bn (£3bn) – was "basically all gone" after his computers were compromised, and urged others to stay away from the cryptocurrency for the time being, Ars Technica reported.
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"DO NOT DOWNLOAD BITCOIN KNOTS AND TRUST IT UNTIL THIS IS RESOLVED," he wrote. "If you already did in the last few months, consider shutting that system down for now."
The developer added that he had contacted the FBI and the police – but said that he hadn't heard back from either.
"What the heck @FBI @ic3," he added.
"Why can't I reach anyone??? I paid those taxes and the police don't care. What a scam."
Dashjr said that the wallets hackers stole from were both hot – meaning connected to the internet – and, he thought at the time, cold – meaning they shouldn't be accessible via the Web.
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He seemed to believe that one or more of the computers he was using was infected and the hackers were then able to obtain funds stored on them, and guessed that the hack had been made possible by a compromised PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) key.
Dashjr had previously reported a privacy breach in November, when he said hackers "bypassed my software-side security measures by rebooting the server off an unknown storage device.
"For about 5 minutes it was running some other system."
Bitcoin was founded in 2009 by an anonymous founder who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
The digital currency is decentralised, meaning it has no central authority through which it is managed.
Instead it is run peer-to-peer and transactions are verified through network nodes and recorded in a distributed ledger, or blockchain, which can be stored by anyone on a computer.
Dashjr was a public proponent of Bitcoin before his vast fortune was allegedly taken on New Year's Eve.
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