A huge stash of nearly £3billion in Bitcoin stolen a decade ago from the dark web has been uncovered, with some of it stored in a popcorn tin.
In what is one of the biggest Bitcoin busts of all time, police found the stash hidden in the home of 32-year-old James Zhong, who had stored the cryptocurrency on computer devices.
Zhong, who lives in Georgia, in the United States, pleaded guilty on Friday to committing wire fraud in 2012.
He had hacked more than 50,000 Bitcoin, worth £2.9billion, a decade ago from the dark web marketplace Silk Road.
He now faces up to 20 years in prison.
Police searching Zhong's room found the devices hidden in an underground floor safe and on a single-board computer that was concealed under blankets in a popcorn tin stored in the bathroom.
US Attorney Damian Williams said that for a decade, the whereabouts of the huge chunk of missing bitcoin had ballooned, becoming a $3.3billion (£2.9billion) mystery,
"Thanks to state-of-the-art cryptocurrency tracing and good old-fashioned police work, law enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache of crime proceeds," Williams said.
The digital currency Bitcoin is completely virtual and is outside the control of governments and central banks, like an online version of cash.
Its market value fluctuates wildly and just a year ago, value crashed below £17,000, down from £61,000.
Silk Road was an online black market where users could anonymously buy and sell illegal goods - this included drugs and fake driving licences.
But in 2013, a sting operation found a then 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht to be the mastermind of the operation and was given two life sentences for his role as the kingpin running the criminal enterprise.
A US court has rejected his appeal that the district court that convicted him violated the Fourth Amendment.
According to Ulbricht, the search warrant that was used to gather evidence from his laptop violated the amendment.
The court dismissed his appeal after deciding that search warrants issued for his laptop, Facebook and Google accounts were specific and in keeping with the constitution.
He was originally convicted for conspiracy and drug trafficking. When the FBI seized his laptop, they secured 30,000 bitcoins - roughly $70 million (£54.5 million).
At his trial Ulbricht admitted creating Silk Road but denied wrongdoing. He assumed the alias "Dread Pirate Roberts", a nod to the children's story The Princess Bride .
“I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have privacy and anonymity,” he said.
However, he recognised he had ruined his life by breaking the law, even if he disagreed with it.
"I wish I could go back and convince myself to take a different path," he said before the judge handed him the sentence after a three-hour hearing.
