Irish police recover 500 BTC worth $35 million after nearly 10 years of inactivity

A stash of 500 BTC valued at roughly $35 million moved on-chain on March 24 after sitting idle for nearly a decade. The coins were linked to convicted Irish cannabis grower Clifton Collins, whose 6,000 BTC holdings had been widely viewed as irretrievable since 2017. The transfer was not a "whale" coming back to life. Irish authorities said it was the result of a law-enforcement operation. Ireland's Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), working with Europol, accessed the wallet and moved the Bitcoin to Coinbase. Collins, a Dublin native, previously worked as a security guard and beekeeper before moving into cannabis cultivation. He bought most of his Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012, when prices were still in the single digits, using proceeds from cultivation operations he ran across multiple Irish counties over more than a decade. As his crypto holdings grew, Collins split 6,000 BTC across 12 wallets, placing 500 BTC in each. He printed the private keys on an A4 sheet and hid them in a fishing rod case at his home in Galway. He was arrested in 2017 after police found cannabis in his car during a traffic stop. His landlord later emptied the rental property and sent the belongings to a landfill. The fishing rod case—and what was believed to be the only copy of the private keys—was likely destroyed. Collins later suggested a burglary at his home may also have contributed to the loss. Ireland's High Court ordered the Bitcoin confiscated in 2020, but with the keys presumed gone, CAB could only wait. At the time, the 6,000 BTC was estimated at about €53 million. It has since climbed to around €360 million. BeInCrypto reported on the missing Bitcoin in February 2020, when the keys were still thought to be lost permanently. CAB and Europol have not disclosed how access was obtained. Europol said only that it provided "highly complex technical expertise and decryption resources." The reference to "decryption" has fueled speculation. One possibility is that the keys were stored in an encrypted wallet file protected by a weak password that investigators could brute-force. Another theory is that Collins generated the 12 key pairs with a flawed tool, such as a weak random number generator that produced predictable outputs, enabling investigators to reconstruct the keys—more akin to cryptanalysis than decryption, though the terms are often used loosely in official statements. Investigators are reportedly confident the method used here can be applied to the remaining wallets. If successful, Ireland would recover the full 6,000 BTC, making it the largest seizure the CAB has ever brought to market.