Germany's Bitcoin Balance Grows as Users Send BTC With Secret Messages

The German government has received $420 worth of Bitcoin from a variety of wallets since its $3 billion selling spree came to an end late last week—with some apparent messages from Bitcoin users being more hateful than others.

The German government’s selling of seized Bitcoin startled the crypto market weeks ago when it began offloading confiscated assets through various crypto exchanges and trading firms. On Friday, the analytics platform Arkham signaled that those associated coffers had run dry, following billions of dollars’ worth of transfers in the preceding days.

Since then, the German government has attained a small stash of Bitcoin across more than four dozen transactions, the largest being a $118 transaction sent Saturday, according to blockchain data that was reviewed by Decrypt via the analytics platform Arkham.

“Eine schoene, zensurfreie Buehne gebt Ihr uns,” OP_Return data from a $1.23 Bitcoin transaction on July 13 read. When translated from German, the apparent message from a Bitcoin user states, “You give us a beautiful, censorship-free stage.”

If a Bitcoin user wants to broadcast a message, they are able to effectively do so using OP_Return, a field used for data storage. Per the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, any Bitcoin attached to OP_Return transactions is effectively gone forever because the so-called opcode marks a transaction's output as invalid, making that spending purely symbolic.

However, it appears that Bitcoin users could be trying to send the German government a message in other ways, including some that are potentially hateful. Several times, a Bitcoin wallet with Adolf Hitler’s surname in its address has sent the German government $0.88, a white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Another Bitcoin user sent the German government $0.72 using a wallet address containing Twitter (aka X) owner Elon Musk’s full name. On top of that, $4 in Bitcoin was sent to the German government from an address that contained “FucKyou” within its wallet address.

Instead of being 26 to 35 random characters, Bitcoin users can generate a so-called vanity address that features human-readable words. An early example is the Bitcoin address generator Vanitygen, which was released through developer platform GitHub.

Several of the transactions came, according to Arkham’s platform, through a CoinJoin address. Described by the New York Department of Financial Services as a “significant gray area for both regulators and exchanges,” the technique is used to preserve the pseudonymity of a Bitcoin sender and recipient by combining multiple payments from spenders into a single transaction.

While the German government controls far less Bitcoin than it did weeks ago, perhaps some Bitcoin users that watched the selling dent Bitcoin’s price haven’t let it go. As of this writing, the German government had received an additional $1.33 in Bitcoin within the last hour.

Edited by Andrew Hayward