Best of This Week: Feb 14th

**Sam Parr** (0:13)
Hello, welcome to another episode of My First Million Best of the Week edition. This is Ben Wilson, also known as Producer Ben, and this episode is some of the best clips from our episodes throughout this last week. Nothing new, just a short, rapid fire recap of everything that went on. To start off with, we've got a clip about the billion-dollar Bitcoin thieves. So, Shaan had written about this on Milk Road, his newsletter, which you should go subscribe to, it's really good, and he had the full backstory about these people who had stolen billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, and then strangely, Sam had actually met one of them.
It was a husband-wife team, and Sam had run into one of them at a party back in the day, and many of you pointed out that it seems like a strange coincidence that Sam also met Ross Ulbright, another billion-dollar criminal, and so is Sam actually a criminal mastermind? Is he a real-life Danny Ocean? I don't know, but enjoy this clip where Sam and Shaan break down the story of the billion-dollar Bitcoin thieves.
I don't even entirely understand what happened, but I have a backstory about the people.

**Shaan Puri** (1:11)
If you read today's edition of The Milk Road, you will get the full backstory and 10 bullet points. So here's what happened. 2016, this crypto exchange called Bitfinex got hacked, and at the time, I think like 120,000 Bitcoin got stolen. That was like $70 million got stolen, and it was like it was bad. That was like a big hack. The price of Bitcoin that week dropped by 40%. So it was like it caused like this huge fear shock in the market.
But the thing about Bitcoin is Bitcoin is on a public ledger, right? Like it's a public blockchain. So everybody could see the coins. Everybody saw, oh, the coins are in this wallet.
And so all the other exchanges were like, look, this is bad for the industry. We will try to prevent like if that wallet tries to cash this out, we won't let them cash out the money. So for many years, that money kind of just sat in those wallets or was moving in like really small transactions back and forth between like a web of wallets. Clearly, somebody was trying to like launder the money. Essentially, they were trying.
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**Shaan Puri** (2:38)
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**Sam Parr** (2:47)
How did they even get it in the first place?

**Shaan Puri** (2:50)
I don't know what the exploit was that let them hack the accounts. And they didn't hack all the accounts on Bitfinex. They actually just hacked some of the whale accounts. So they were able to take 120,000 Bitcoin from not all the accounts. And the funny thing is, Bitfinex didn't have the money to make those users whole. So what they did was they reduced everybody on Bitfinex's balance by 33% or something to balance it out. Imagine if your bank did that. That would be insane. I'd be like, oh, they robbed that guy's vault. And you're taking my money away to even it out for everybody? No, thank you. So anyways, it was bad. And this is the reason why Bitfinex is not the biggest exchange now.
So anyways, the money kind of sat there. Now fast forward five and a half years go by.
Last week, people start to notice bigger transactions coming from the Bitfinex hack wallets.
And so there's these alerts on Twitter, like whale alert. Whale alert, it's like the coins are moving. The coins are moving. $100,000, $1 million of the coins are moving. $10 million, whatever. And so the Fed, or not the Fed, sorry, Department of Justice goes, kicks down a door in New York into this husband and wife couple's house.
And they look like your complete average Joe clean cut.
This is not like, doesn't look like a grimy, criminal mastermind operation.
And I'll explain a little bit more about that in a second, the funny bit about that.