1⃣️ At the end of 2020, $3.5 billion worth of Bitcoin vanished from a mysterious mining pool, with no announcements, no responses, and not even a single truly trending news story at the time. Recently, on-chain data platform Arkham pointed out that the 'largest BTC theft in history' has finally come to light, and the protagonist of this shocking event is a mining pool named LuBian.
2⃣️ You may have never heard of this name, but in the history of the Bitcoin network, it was one of the few players that controlled 6% of the total network hash rate. The mining pool's servers were deployed between China and Iran, and the official statement described it as a 'private mining pool'; however, its operational method remains a mystery to this day. LuBian quietly went online in March 2020 and squeezed into the industry's top ten in less than three months. Until February 28, 2021, when the last block it mined was recorded on the blockchain, the entire mining pool vanished without a trace.
3⃣️ The turning point occurred on December 28, 2020. On this day, the LuBian mining pool suffered a hacker attack, losing over 90% of its BTC holdings, totaling 127,426 coins. At the price at the time, this was about $3.5 billion, and at today's price, this asset is worth as much as $14.5 billion. While the blockchain world is not short of theft incidents, such a scale, such silence, and such a thorough 'emptying' have never been seen before.


4⃣️ The most bizarre part is that after the entire incident, LuBian's official channels made no announcements, and the hacker did not come forward. Only some fragmented on-chain data recorded the panic of the parties involved—numerous OP_RETURN messages were sent to the hacker's address, each resembling a plea on a message board: 'Please return our coins.' According to statistics, LuBian sent these on-chain messages to the hacker through 1,516 transactions, spending 1.4 BTC. It was a heavy and desperate on-chain dialogue.
5⃣️ There are speculations that the LuBian mining pool may have used some insecure algorithm when generating private keys, leaving behind a structurally exploitable vulnerability that could be brute-forced. This also made the hacker a real-world Bitcoin whale ranked 13th, with holdings even exceeding those of the Mt. Gox hacker, which had previously severely harmed the entire crypto industry.
6⃣️ Interestingly, foreign media reports suggest that the LuBian mining pool has long since 'rebranded' itself as Roadside Mining. The 127,000 BTC stolen from LuBian resembles a 'perfect crime' of the blockchain era; it has no ending and no answers, leaving behind a heavy question: in this decentralized wasteland of the blockchain, when wealth no longer needs security, banks, and courts, does it also mean that there is never truly any justice to be found?$BTC $ETH #加密项目 #以太坊ETF连续12周净流入 #加密市场反弹