Chinese Mining Pool Looted of $14B in Bitcoin—LuBian’s Ghost Haunts Crypto History! 🤖💸

by

Arkham Intelligence, stoic and watchful, poked the slumbering beast of Blockchain, only to awaken a tale so grand that even Bybit’s $1.5 billion blunder seems like a child’s forgotten lunch money. The virtual night of December 2020: from the heavy gray fog of LuBian’s servers, 127,426 Bitcoins vanished as quietly as a Petersburg snowflake. Did anyone hear a sound? Only the ledger noticed, and it wept cold digital tears.

Untangling LuBian’s Siberian Winter: Hackers or Hungry Spirits?

Arkham pronounced, with a sigh echoing Tolstoy’s resignation, that this was the largest abduction of its kind—$3.5 billion in Bitcoin, then, and now, as if blessed by some Tsar’s folly, $14.5 billion. The mining pool, once a giant rolling through the steppe, was left with air and empty servers. The digital bandit, like a Dostoevskian villain, sent not a whisper nor a mocking letter, choosing instead to dance unseen with his loot for years. Only in 2024, like the unhurried passage of Russian trains across endless plains, did the tale surface in the public’s teacup.

The plot thickens with the addition of a paltry $6 million, plucked almost as an afterthought while the world was still staring at the first theft. Meanwhile, Bybit, whose name translates to “Bit Who?” in the epic poetry of crypto scandals, could only look on and clutch its wounded pride after losing its own fortune to hackers who preferred Ethereum and social engineering. One imagines bored cybercriminals at a smoky café, swapping stories—“You took how much? Only 400k ETH? Amateurs.”

LuBian’s Telegrams to the Lost: “Dear Thief, Return My Fortune, Please!” 🥲

With a gesture as futile as Zhivago chasing a departing train, LuBian’s administrators cast 1.4 Bitcoins into the winds—over 1,500 times—via OP_RETURN messages, pleading with the wily hacker for mercy or, if not mercy, at least some spare change. Their messages went unanswered, lost in the static ether.

But the cruelty of fate does not end there: as Arkham notes, this wasn’t some outside sorcerer conjuring keys from thin air, but an inside job—LuBian’s own careless equations exposed their secrets, as if leaving Pushkin’s love letters draped over a lamppost for all Moscow to read. Today, LuBian clutches its last 11,886 Bitcoins like a babushka hoarding the last potatoes of winter; the thief, undeterred and perhaps sipping vodka somewhere, counts their riches still—now the 13th largest Bitcoin baron, above even Mt. Gox’s infamous pilferer.

In the end, as the river flows and the ruble tumbles, all that remains is silence—and a chart, cold and immutable as the earth in November.

A somber visualization of the $14 billion LuBian theft, the Mona Lisa of crypto blunders.

Read More

2025-08-04 17:11