He stole 50,000 Bitcoin from Silk Road, hid it for 9 years, and the feds found the keys in a popcorn tin 😅

I mapped the James Zhong seizure. 2012 he exploited Silk Road’s payment system and walked off with \~50k BTC. Then he sat on it for almost a decade.

November 2021, IRS-CI hits his Gainesville house and pulls \~50,491 BTC (\~$3.36B at the time) off devices in a floor safe… and a single-board computer stuffed under blankets inside a popcorn tin in a bathroom closet.

Also in the house: $661k cash and 25 Casascius coins (1 BTC equivalent each).

The on-chain part is what got him. Years later he mixed a Silk Road-linked address into a spend with a wallet that already had his name on it. One clustered transaction. That’s the whole movie.

I traced the consolidation into the seizure wallets. Watching billions sit still for years and then dump into one place is insane.

Moral of the story: you can outrun Silk Road. You cannot outrun a popcorn tin. 😂

What do you guys think?