Good news everybody – prison terms have dropped to just 12 months for every $1 billion you steal!

Photo above - Hiding in plain sight. Bitcoin hacker Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife "Razzlekhan", a TikTok personality and rapper, pose for posterity before being sentenced.

Ilya Lichtenstein. Remember that name. He’s the guy who stole 120,000 bitcoins. Which were worth $5 billion when he was found guilty. $7 billion today, as Bitcoin keeps soaring under the premise that Donald Trump will relax regulations on crypto currency. Ilya is going to prison for 5 years. 1 year for every billion. Wait . . . it’s not even 5 full years. He was in custody awaiting trial for 2 years 9 months, and gets credit for that. So the actual sentence will be just 2 more years. Unless Ilya gets more time off for good behavior, or the prison is overcrowded or something. See link below.

Who says the American system of justice is too harsh? It’s true that you can go to jail for 20 years just for ATTEMPTED bank robbery, even if you didn’t use a gun, and even if you didn’t make it out the front door with your loot. But 5 years for hacking $5 billion? Hey kids, stay in school, and take coding 101. No need to be selling $10 bags of Dragon’s Breath (Fentanyl) on the street, when a few keystrokes can net you billions.

Where did Ilya learn HIS computer skills? Details are vague. He was born in Russia, but at some point came to Chicago and passed our rigorous citizenship test (“When is Independence Day? Where is the White House?”)

As far as we can tell, Ilya did not pull his heist until AFTER he was fully assimilated.

I sure hope that stealing $5 billion worth of Bitcoin – and successfully “laundering” it – is the only thing Ilya got away with. But I am concerned about his Russian origins, and his PhD in money laundering. We can’t prove it, of course, but it seems there’s a probability greater than zero that Ilya could also involved in laundering drug cartel proceeds, and for, terrorists and Russian arms dealers.

Once he's paid his 2-year debt to society, will Ilya become a model citizen, and live a crime free middle-class life? Return to Moscow? Resume money laundering, but with more precautions? We’ll have to wait and see. But not that long evidently.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Bitcoin hacker sentenced to five years in prison