Cool way of releasing a message. The thief clearly has some familiarity with Bitcoin.
Familiarity with Bitcoin? Perhaps not so much... There's lots of more interesting ways to embed a message in Bitcoin transactions if you're familiar with the data formats and the protocol, such as the one described here for example:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34458Having the transaction amounts be binary seems a bit rudimentary, actually.
Sure it's blatant. One look at that list of numbers and it was pretty obvious what the 'code' was - a sequence of increasing mounts to enable ordering and then a string of 0s and 1s - what else could it be? But I wouldn't call it rudimentary. It's a good use of the tools at hand.
Sure, he could have coded a way more leet message which someone may have discovered at some point in a few months or years, but this was a way he could pass his message on and be sure interested parties would get the message almost immediately and achieve further notoriety without having to give up any more anonymity than he already has.