NiceHash’s Planned Return on December 20, 2017

Waiting for the miners to start again

It was cold outside, and since NiceHash had gone offline, the heating inside had come back on too. That was the mood when I wrote this update on December 20, 2017: the service was expected to return that evening after the breach earlier in the month.

The original announcement I referenced put the planned return at 11 p.m. in the Netherlands. That was the schedule being discussed in 2017, not a current service announcement.

Questions about the missing funds

While the developers worked on restoring the platform, users were still speculating about unpaid balances and what would happen next. I was waiting to see how the situation would develop, too.

In my earlier article on the transaction trail, I had discussed an address associated with the public analysis. By the time of this update, the balance I was observing had changed, with roughly 1,000 BTC reportedly remaining there.

That was a historical observation, not a current balance. Movement between addresses didn’t establish who controlled the funds or prove that they had been recovered.

Avoid turning rumors into findings

The original post repeated social-media discussion about a possible reward and suspected links to exchange transactions. Those comments weren’t a verified identification of the attacker, so they should not be treated as one.

For users, the immediate question was simpler: would the service work again, and what would happen to their balances? This article preserves the anticipation at the time rather than supplying an outcome that the original post didn’t document.