Back in December 2020, something went down in Bitcoin history that barely made any noise at the time… but it turns out it was the biggest theft ever recorded, not just in crypto, but in all of finance.

I’m talking about the LuBian mining pool hack.

LuBian was a Chinese mining pool, ranked among the top in the world back then. Huge hashrate, big reserves, and apparently… some really bad security. Their wallet system was using 32-bit private key entropy (basically the equivalent of locking Fort Knox with a bike lock).

On Dec 28–29, 2020, someone brute-forced those weak keys and swept 127,426 BTC into their own wallets. At the time, that stash was worth about $3.5 billion. For context:

Central Bank of Iraq robbery (2003) → $1B

Mt. Gox collapse (2014) → $450M

Ronin hack (2022) → ~$620M


LuBian’s loss was triple the size of any confirmed theft in finance up to that point.

Here’s the crazy part: instead of going public with a scandal, LuBian just quietly shut down in early 2021. They even tried something desperate — sending 1,500+ OP_RETURN messages on the blockchain begging the hacker to return the coins (costing them 1.4 BTC in fees). No luck, of course.

Fast-forward to today, those 127k BTC are worth around $14.5 BILLION. That’s more than any bank robbery, gold heist, or cyber attack in history. The coins haven’t moved (except some consolidation in July 2024), and the address is now one of the top 13 biggest in Bitcoin.

This is wild for a few reasons:

1. It was a single hit, pulled off in hours.


2. The loot is visible on-chain for everyone to see.


3. Nobody’s been caught, and the funds are basically untouchable without triggering worldwide alerts.



This is the ultimate “perfect crime” in crypto, not because it was smart (their security hole was embarrassingly bad), but because the thief is still sitting on the largest untouched fortune in history.

More details here:
https://rekt.news/the-one-that-got-away