Laptop computer That Helped Convey Down Bitcoin Thief ‘Razzlekhan’ Is Now within the Smithsonian

The Nationwide Numismatic Assortment on the Smithsonian Museum is a catalog of cash. It homes gold bars, 600,000 Accomplice banknotes, and gold cash from the 14th century. Now it additionally homes a MacBook, one which once contained the keys to $3.6 billion in stolen Bitcoin.

Quickly, the laptop computer shall be on show on the museum as a part of its “The Worth of Cash Gallery” the place it should sit subsequent to tea, stones, silver, gold, and seashells. The laptop computer as soon as belonged to Chris Janczewski, an IRS Legal Investigator who was concerned in bringing down Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan [aka Razzlekhan].

Lichtenstein and Morgan are Bitcoin’s Bonnie and Clyde. In 2016, Lichtenstein hacked into the cryptocurrency change Bitfinex and stole virtually 120,000 in Bitcoin. On the time it was value round $70 million. Morgan had helped him launder it. Once they had been arrested in 2022, the worth was greater than $3 billion. It was the most important monetary seizure in DOJ historical past.

Janczewski’s laptop computer was instrumental in bringing down the pair. Proponents of cryptocurrency swear by its anonymity, however the Blockchain by no means forgets. A gifted digital forensics professional can map wallets, join them to individuals, and create a historical past of use and spending that proves legal conduct. That’s precisely what Janczewski did.

When the case was sturdy sufficient, the Division of Justice raided Lichtenstein and Morgan’s NYC house and seized their digital belongings. Janczewski used this laptop computer to root via their recordsdata the place he found the keys to the stolen Bitcoins. For a short interval, the investigator’s laptop computer held the keys to a $3.6 billion fortune.

In response to a blog about the laptop from Nationwide Numismatic Assortment curator Ellen Feingold, the museum has lengthy understood that cryptocurrency was essential however has struggled with easy methods to show it in a museum.

This isn’t the one piece of cryptocurrency ephemera the museum owns. “I collected a replica of Bitcoin journal (a print journal for a digital foreign money), two ‘bodily’ Bitcoins that had a hologram on the again containing non-public keys (ours had the holograms eliminated earlier than donation), and two items of 3D-printed Bitcoin jewellery. Referred to as the ‘Bitcoin engagement ring,’ a silver ring with a small stylized ‘B,’ and the ‘Bitcoin bling,’ a gold necklace with an outsized ‘B,’ every accommodates a QR code that hyperlinks to a digital pockets and reveals how a lot cash the proprietor has saved there,” Feingold said.

For Feingold, the laptop computer helps seize the second when illusions in regards to the anonymity granted by cryptocurrency shattered. “The NNC’s newest acquisition, a seemingly mundane 2019 MacBook Professional, captures this shift in our information and the real-world implications of Bitcoin’s traceability,” she stated.

The U.S. Division of Treasury had custody of the laptop computer earlier than handing it over to the Smithsonian. Justice of the Peace Choose Zia Faruqui took discover of the unusual object and reached out to the museum to inform them how essential it was.

Lichtenstein and Morgan plead guilty to the theft. Lichtenstein was sentenced to five years in prison. Morgan got 18 months. Morgan, along with being a thief, was additionally the self-styled “Crocodile of Wall Road” who rapped underneath the title Razzlekahn. Netflix made a documentary about them.

“Whereas the general public could also be enthralled by these larger-than-life personalities, to me the true story is how their case helps reshape our understanding of cryptocurrency from an nameless to a pseudo-anonymous type of change,” Feingold stated in her weblog. “Most individuals can nonetheless use cryptocurrency to make transactions with out sharing the small print with their households and banks, however criminals can not depend on cryptocurrencies to cover their crimes and defend them from prosecution.”