Bitcoin
Germany’s Bitcoin Balance Grows as Users Send BTC with Secret Messages
The German government received $420 in Bitcoin from a variety of portfolios since its $3 billion sales spree it has come to an end late last week — with some messages from Bitcoin users appearing more hateful than others.
The German government’s sale of seized Bitcoin spooked the cryptocurrency market weeks ago when it began unloading confiscated assets through several cryptocurrency exchanges and trading firms. On Friday, analytics platform Arkham flagged that those associated the coffers were dryafter billions of dollars in transfers in the previous days.
Since then, the German government has obtained a small stash of Bitcoin in more than four dozen transactions, the largest of which was a $118 transaction sent on Saturday, according to blockchain data which was reviewed by Decipher through the Arkham analytics platform.
“A good, happy life is yours,” OP_Return data of a $1.23 Bitcoin transaction on July 13. When translated from German, the apparent message from a Bitcoin user states: “You give us a beautiful, uncensored stage.”
If a Bitcoin user wants to convey a message, they can effectively do so using OP_Return, a field used for data storage. According to blockchain analytics firm Chain analysisany Bitcoin tied to OP_Return transactions is effectively lost forever because the so-called opcode marks the output of a transaction as invalid, making this spend purely symbolic.
However, it appears that Bitcoin users may be trying to send a message to the German government in other ways, including some that are potentially hateful. Several times, a Bitcoin wallet with Adolf Hitler’s Surname in his speech he sent the German government $0.88, a white supremacist numeric code for “Heil Hitler,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Another Bitcoin user sent $0.72 to the German government using a wallet address containing the owner of Twitter (aka X) Elon Musk’s full name. Additionally, $4 worth of Bitcoin was sent to the German government from an address that contained “Fuck you” inside the wallet address.
Instead of having 26 to 35 random characters, Bitcoin users can generate a so-called vanity address that features human-readable words. An early example is the Bitcoin address generator Vanitygenwhich was released through the GitHub developer platform.
Several of the transactions occurred, according to the Arkham platform, through a CoinJoin address. Described by the New York Department of Financial Services as a “significant gray area for regulators and exchanges,” the technique is used to preserve the pseudonymity of a Bitcoin sender and recipient by combining multiple payments from spenders into a single transaction.
While the German government has far less control over Bitcoin than it did a few weeks ago, perhaps some Bitcoin users who watched Bitcoin price plummeted I didn’t let it go. As of this writing, the German government has received an additional $1.33 in Bitcoin in the last hour.
Edited by Andre Hayward