Historic laptop that helped seize stolen BTC goes to a museum

A 2019 MacBook Pro, which was used to investigate a crypto exchange hack and facilitate the "largest ever financial seizure" of bitcoin (BTC), will be displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The laptop, which stored the data necessary to trace and recover nearly 120,000 stolen bitcoin (BTC) from the Bitfinex crypto exchange in 2022, was used by Chris Janczewski, an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent. According to the museum, the computer was used between 2021 and 2023 and is now part of "The Value of Money" gallery, set to reopen later this year.

The laptop was sent by the US Department of the Treasury after Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui wrote to the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection, emphasizing the significance of the Bitfinex case and the pivotal role Janczewski’s laptop played in solving it.

Ellen Feingold, curator of the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian, said "The laptop and the case surrounding it reveal how our understanding of cryptocurrency has evolved since its inception and why this evolution matters.Do

According to Feingold, this historic computer "captures this shift in our knowledge and the real-world implications of Bitcoin’s traceability."

Feingold has also collected other items representing the crypto industry, including industry magazines, physical coins engraved with holograms for accessing BTC, bitcoin-themed jewelry, and other related objects.

She noted that the laptop, displayed alongside seashells, tea, stones, silver, gold, paper, and plastic, is "a continuation of human beings defining and redefining value relative to the world around them."

As reported by Cybernews, last week, the Bitfinex hacker Ilya Lichtenstein, 35, was sentenced to five years in prison. His wife, Heather Morgan, 34, received an 18-month sentence for helping her husband launder the stolen funds.

Today, the stolen bitcoin is valued at more than $11 billion.