FBI Subpoenas 2022 Event Attendees After Theft From Bitcoin Core Dev

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has taken an interest in a Bitcoin core developer event held in October 2022, during which someone stole more than 200 BTC from developer Luke Dashjr.

Dashjr, co-founder of the Ocean mining pool, publicly disclosed the theft.  At the time, the Bitcoin was valued at around $3.3 million. But now, given the pre-Bitcoin halving volatility and ETF fueled price rallies, the stolen BTC would be worth more than $14 million.

Mike Schmidt, co-founder of the Bitcoin non-profit Brink, revealed through an email that the FBI issued a subpoena demanding the personal information of attendees at the CoreDev Atlanta event, which took place just before TABConf in 2022.

The subpoena sought first and last names, GitHub usernames, and email addresses of the attendees, under the premise of investigating Dashjr’s claim. Schmidt, following legal advice, complied with the request, although the subpoena included a confidentiality clause that expired a year later, shortly before Schmidt’s disclosure.

The Bitcoin dev community has been none too happy about the notion of being doxxed.

“The guy who wants to tell you how to use Bitcoin couldn’t even secure his own Bitcoin and, as a consequence, got everyone at a conference he attended doxxed by the FBI,” Schmidt wrote on Twitter.

The specifics behind the FBI’s investigation remain unclear, with Schmidt noting his uncertainty about whether the subpoena aimed at identifying a specific suspect or was part of a broader information-gathering effort. Since complying with the subpoena, Schmidt has not had further interactions with the agency and has remained tight-lipped on additional details.

The FBI has had its hands full with crypto investigations. Earlier this year, the agency investigated the origins of a bogus tweet sent from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announcing that all Bitcoin spot ETFs had been approved a day early. The hypothesis had been that it was a draft of a tweet that accidentally got sent early.

But in a statement shared with Decrypt at the time, an SEC spokesperson said that no elements of the Twitter post were created internally at the agency.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.