As part of the investigation into the theft of more than 200 BTC from bitcoin developer Luke Dash Jr., the FBI requested the personal data of the participants of the CoreDev Atlanta meeting. This was announced by Brink co-founder Mike Schmidt.
A screenshot of his letter was posted by the creator of the Bitcoin Car Talk video blog under the nickname Mike In Space.
Schmidt recalled that the event took place in October 2022, a few days before the TABConf 2022 conference.
In January 2023, Dash Jr. announced the loss of bitcoins due to the compromise of the PGP key. He did not specify the amount of damage, but the wallet address he shared contained 216.9 BTC. At the time of the attackers' transactions on December 31, 2022, the assets were worth ~ $3.3 million, at the current exchange rate — ~ $15.4 million.
Schmidt stated that he disclosed to law enforcement the names of CoreDev Atlanta members, GitHub nicknames and email addresses. He was required not to tell anyone about the request for a year. After the deadline, he decided to notify the affected people about the incident.
"I don't have any details about the investigation and whether the request was related to a specific suspect or whether it was a general collection of information as part of the investigation," the Brink co—founder wrote.
In a conversation with The Block, he clarified that he has not been in contact with the FBI since.
"Good job, Luke. The guy who wants to tell you how to use bitcoins couldn't even protect his own and, as a result, forced the FBI to disclose the data of everyone who attended the conference," commented Mike In Space.
Recall that Dash Jr. is known as an implacable opponent of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens. He believes that they contribute to the spread of spam on the bitcoin network.
However, the Ocean mining pool, co-founded by the developer, left it up to users to decide whether to process blocks with similar non-financial transactions.