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A MacBook Pro laptop is the newest acquisition in the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection, the collection of record for the United States monetary system. Though it may appear ordinary, its story is not: This MacBook helped the U.S. government trace and seize billions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency. The laptop and the case around it reveal how our understanding of cryptocurrency has changed since its inception and why this evolution matters.
Since the emergence of Bitcoin in 2009, cryptocurrencies have become a global phenomenon used by millions of consumers and businesses to make payments and move and store money. Cryptocurrencies are often in the headlines because of their volatility, their role in illicit trade, their lack of regulation, and the personalities of their leading investors and advocates.
As the curator of the National Numismatic Collection (NNC), I am responsible for collecting objects that document major developments in money today for the museum visitors and researchers of tomorrow. But throughout the meteoric rise of cryptocurrencies over the past decade I have struggled with a curatorial conundrum: How do I collect physical objects to document a digital currency? It’s a challenge, particularly for a self-proclaimed Luddite like me whose job involves curating a collection that spans more than 4,000 years and contains items such as fragile cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, exquisitely engraved silver coins from ancient Greece, flimsy colonial-era notes designed by Benjamin Franklin, and shiny gold ingots and coins from the American Gold Rush.
Each object in the collection is like a miniature time machine, able to unlock a door to the past to reveal information about the place it was made, the values and beliefs of the people who used it, and the transactions it enabled as it traveled in pockets and purses and changed hands in marketplaces, businesses and homes. With so many compelling historic objects in the collection’s vault, it is easy to overlook what is happening with money in the present.
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Indeed, collecting historic objects is at the heart of what we do at the Smithsonian, and we have training and procedures that guide us as we assess what to acquire. When we acquire an object, we are committing to care for it forever, and that brings with it cost and responsibility. Thus, collecting something from the past is often safer territory for a curator. The luxury of distance gives us the confidence that we know how a story played out, the impact that something had or the meaning it has taken on over time. It may seem counterintuitive that collecting something brand new is often more fraught when we have such an abundance of information about the things that make up our world today. But collecting on live issues inherently means taking a risk, placing a bet that what we think is important today will be useful and meaningful to people in the future. Yet it is crucial that we not turn away from the challenge of collecting the present and instead work toward creative methods of collecting objects associated with the digital world to document how it is actively reshaping our lives.
In 2014, when I first became curator of the NNC, housed at the National Museum of American History, cryptocurrencies were so new that most of the museum’s visitors and staff knew little about them. One Bitcoin was worth about $500, compared to about $90,000 as of today, and it would have been financially feasible for the Smithsonian to acquire a Bitcoin. I didn’t pursue that because, while digital collecting is an exciting and active new frontier, it was not well developed at the Smithsonian at the time. My priority was to select physical objects for a new gallery, “The Value of Money,” which we were preparing to open in 2015.
Instead of collecting the currency itself, I acquired a handful of objects that reflect how people were making the digital into something tangible and engaging with this new form of money beyond simply transacting. I collected a copy of Bitcoin magazine (a print magazine for a virtual currency), two “physical” Bitcoins that had a hologram on the back containing private keys (ours had the holograms removed before donation), and two pieces of 3D-printed Bitcoin jewelry. Known as the “Bitcoin engagement ring,” a silver ring with a small stylized “B,” and the “Bitcoin bling,” a gold necklace with an oversized “B,” each contains a QR code that links to a digital wallet and shows how much money the owner has stored there. The Bitcoin engagement ring was a particularly significant acquisition because, by offering a creative alternative to a diamond engagement ring, it represented a rejection of conventional practices, much like the cryptocurrency itself.
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While these artifacts brought a human and somewhat humorous perspective to documenting cryptocurrency, they did not capture the essence of what made cryptocurrency a desirable alternative to existing online payment systems, leading to its increasing use and growing market value. Bitcoin emerged in January 2009 during the greatest global financial crisis since the Great Depression. As people lost their savings and homes, many lost trust in banks and governments, especially the U.S. government, and by extension the currencies it issued. Bitcoin provided a compelling alternative because it was not controlled by a government or other central authority and could not be easily manipulated by political officials or financial institutions. Instead, the currency relies on a computer protocol secured by cryptography and operates through a peer-to-peer network. Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public ledger called a blockchain. But its blockchain does not record who made the transactions or what the transactions were for, so early adopters touted that Bitcoin could offer users something banks did not: anonymity.
Anonymity was not only part of Bitcoin’s appeal but also a key part of its origin story, with its creator—or creators—known only by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, still unidentified to this day. This creates another barrier to documenting the currency’s history, because we can’t acquire objects from its inventors as the Smithsonian has done for other digital pioneers, such as Ralph Baer, inventor of the home video game, whose home workshop is on display at the National Museum of American History.
With an unknown creator and the growing use of Bitcoin for illicit activity in the 2010s, it is easy to see why cryptocurrencies became so strongly associated with anonymity. But more than 15 years later, research and criminal investigations have shown that cryptocurrency transactions are, in fact, traceable, and users can be identified. The NNC’s latest acquisition, a seemingly mundane 2019 MacBook Pro, captures this shift in our knowledge and the real-world implications of Bitcoin’s traceability. The laptop was part of an IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) case that led to the largest financial seizure in U.S. history—a whopping $3.6 billion dollars of stolen Bitcoin from the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange.
In 2016, Ilya Lichtenstein hacked into Bitfinex and stole nearly 120,000 Bitcoins, worth around $70 million at the time. He then worked together with his wife, Heather Morgan, to launder the stolen cryptocurrency. IRS-CI Special Agent Chris Janczewski, working closely with Department of Homeland Security investigators and prosecutors from the Department of Justice, traced the stolen Bitcoins. He treated the blockchain as a digital crime scene that eventually allowed him to identify the suspected perpetrators, search their home and seize their digital files onto his laptop. Within the tranche of seized files, Janczewski discovered the digital keys to the majority of the Bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex, enabling him and his law enforcement colleagues to seize funds worth approximately $3.6 billion, as valued at the time of the seizure in February 2022, and arrest Lichtenstein and Morgan. Today, those funds are valued at about $8.6 billion.
This landmark case was significant not only for the amount seized, but also because the perpetrators could be apprehended. While many cryptocurrency crimes take place across international borders and involve actors from hostile governments or terrorist organizations, Lichtenstein and Morgan lived in an apartment in New York City and could be identified, arrested and prosecuted. Both have pleaded guilty and Lichtenstein was sentenced to five years in prison last week. Morgan was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday, November 18.
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The laptop came to the Smithsonian as a transfer from the U.S. Department of the Treasury after Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, who had previously worked as a federal prosecutor focused on money laundering, wrote to the NNC to raise our awareness of the significance of the Bitfinex case and the role of Janczewski’s laptop in solving it.
The sensational case has been made more sensational by the identities of the perpetrators. Morgan is a self-styled rapper who goes by the name Razzlekhan and calls herself the “Crocodile of Wall Street.” Her lyrics oscillate between proclaiming love for her husband, who is now incarcerated, and touting her eclectic professional endeavors with profane lyrics, such as “I’m many things: a rapper, an economist, a journalist, a writer, a CEO, and a dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty ho.” They have been called “Bitcoin’s Bonnie and Clyde,” and Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have all announced plans to feature their story in documentary films and dramatic retellings.
While the public may be enthralled by these larger-than-life personalities, to me the real story is how their case helps reshape our understanding of cryptocurrency from an anonymous to a pseudo-anonymous form of exchange. Most people can still use cryptocurrency to make transactions without sharing the details with their families and banks, but criminals cannot rely on cryptocurrencies to hide their crimes and shield them from prosecution. Over time this may change who uses cryptocurrency, what it is used for, how it is valued and how governments engage with it. This case is a reminder that we are still in the very early stages of understanding what this new currency really is and what role it will play in the global economy of the future.
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Recently, we installed Chris Janczewski’s laptop in “The Value of Money” gallery, set to reopen later this year after being closed for updates. Positioned alongside seashells, tea, stones, silver, gold, paper and plastic, it may seem, at first glance, out of place. But to me, contextualized within the diversity of forms of money over the last four millennia, the laptop and the cryptocurrency it represents look less like a radical departure from the past and instead like a continuation of human beings defining and redefining value relative to the world around them.
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