$8 BILLION IN DORMANT BITCOIN HACKED ?! MARKET PANIC… BUT BITCOIN HITS NEW ATH

👹 In early July 2025, the Bitcoin community was shaken as 80,000 BTC (over $8 billion) — moved from wallets dormant since 2011, the stone age of Bitcoin a fossil has awaken!

😱 The sudden movement of such a colossal sum triggered widespread panic. Adding fuel to the fire, legal concepts around “abandoned property” created anxiety.

1️⃣ Before the Incident (July 1st)

Attackers sent tiny Bitcoin transactions (dust) to the dormant whale wallets with a huge threat (in OP_RETURN fields, at 2025-07-01T00:30:00 UTC)

“LEGAL NOTICE: We have taken possession of this wallet and its contents.”

“Not abandoned? Prove it by an on-chain transaction using private key by Sept 30.”

“NOTICE TO OWNER: see http://salomonbros.com/owner_notice.”

2️⃣ Legal Intimidation

The messages referenced a legal notice through a website link mentioning “adverse possession” or “abandoned property laws”, suggesting that if the owners didn’t act, the sender could claim the assets.

3️⃣ Frightening Move (July 4th)

At 2025-07-04T02:41:32 UTC, a single test transaction of ~10K BCH was executed from one of the dormant wallets to itself. The same private key controls both BTC and BCH wallets being a hard fork of the Bitcoin.

4️⃣ Nuclear Bomb ☢️

At 2025-07-04T03:43:33 UTC, the first sweep of 10K BTC hit the blockchain. Someone moved this colossal amount to a modern SegWit address then transferred the remaining 70K BTC too.

😱 The Rumors

The sudden movement of such a colossal sum triggered widespread panic. Bitcoin wallets might suffer from poor entropy during key generation, potentially reducing the effective keyspace and making brute-force attacks feasible with Quantum Computers. Could early wallets be vulnerable?

Some even feared that Satoshi Nakamoto’s legendary wallets—holding over 1.1 million BTC—could be next. If funds were sold, the market could collapse.

💥 What Really Happened?

Bitcoin’s cryptography wasn’t broken. This was a carefully crafted social engineering attack aimed at scaring dormant whale wallet owners into making mistakes.

The attackers sent transactions with intimidating legal language and links to a fraudulent Salomon Brothers site made just days ago and with legal notice full of English errors.

➡️ This was designed to trick victims into revealing their private keys or seed phrases.

⚡️Fortunately, the owner of the 80,000 BTC wasn’t fooled. Instead of interacting with the scam, they quietly verified their keys by testing a transaction on BCH and then swiftly swept their Bitcoin into new, more secure SegWit wallets—likely using hardware wallets and better entropy to eliminate any risk.

🚀 This bold move both defeated the phishing attempt and reassured the market: Bitcoin’s cryptography remains intact. Finally Satoshi wallet is safe for certain old wallet generation weakness adding to the assurance and trust in Bitcoin in general, markets reached a new ATH