A total of 500 BTC worth around $35 million moved on-chain on March 24 after nearly a decade of dormancy. The funds belonged to convicted Irish cannabis grower Clifton Collins, whose 6,000 BTC fortune had been considered permanently lost since 2017.
But this was not a mystery whale awakening from dormancy — it was a law enforcement operation. Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) worked with Europol to crack the wallet and move the Bitcoin into Coinbase.
A Fortune Hidden In A Fishing Rod Case
Collins, a Dublin native, worked as a security guard and beekeeper before turning to cannabis cultivation. He bought most of his Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012, when prices were still in the single digits. He funded the purchases with proceeds from cannabis cultivation operations he ran across multiple Irish counties for over a decade.
As the value of his holdings grew, Collins distributed 6,000 BTC equally across 12 wallets, allocating 500 BTC to each. He printed the private keys on an A4 sheet and hid them in a fishing rod case at his Galway home.
Collins was arrested in 2017 after police found cannabis in his car during a traffic stop. His landlord then cleared the rental property, sending all belongings to a landfill. The fishing rod case — and the only copy of the private keys — was likely incinerated. Collins later claimed that a burglary at his home may also have played a role in the loss.
The Irish High Court ordered the Bitcoin confiscated in 2020, but with the keys gone, CAB could do nothing but wait. At the time of seizure, the 6,000 BTC was worth roughly €53 million. It has since ballooned to approximately €360 million.
BeInCrypto reported on Collins’ lost Bitcoin fortune in February 2020, when the keys were widely believed to be gone forever.
How Did They Crack The Wallet?
Neither CAB nor Europol has disclosed the specific technique used. Europol stated only that it provided “highly complex technical expertise and decryption resources” during the operation.
Europol’s use of the word “decryption” offers a clue but leaves room for more than one reading. One possibility is that Collins stored his keys in an encrypted wallet file with a weak password. In that case, investigators may have simply brute-forced the password — a textbook decryption job.
Another scenario is that Collins generated all 12 key pairs using the same flawed tool. A weak random number generator could produce predictable outputs, letting investigators reconstruct the keys. That would technically be cryptanalysis rather than decryption, but law enforcement press releases often blur the distinction.
Investigators are reportedly optimistic that the technique used on this wallet can be applied to all others. If successful, the Irish state would recover the full 6,000 BTC — a seizure that would dwarf every other asset CAB has ever sold.