Archive / The bitcoin
A fresh address for every order
The shop accepted bitcoin and nothing else. It took roughly four million euros of it in fourteen months, and almost none of that has ever been accounted for.
How it worked
Every order was assigned its own bitcoin address. That was deliberate, and the operator explained why in the September 2014 interview: it avoided having one large pot. The practical effect is that there was never a single wallet to point at, and each payment arrived at an address used once and then abandoned.
For hackers there is nothing to take. The bitcoins flow straight into our pockets.
Motherboard Germany, September 2014, translated
It is a revealing boast. There was no escrow, no marketplace holding funds, and no intermediary who could be robbed or who could abscond - the failure mode that killed Evolution four months later, taking its users’ money with it. The shop had removed the middleman and, with it, the middleman’s risk. The interview is here.
The payment rail it depended on is almost entirely gone
Bitcoin in 2014 was not something a German teenager’s customers could buy from a phone app. Both FAQs devote real space to explaining how to obtain it at all, and the services they name are a fossil record of the era’s plumbing. This archive does not reproduce the instructions. The list of names is the interesting part, because of what has happened to them since.
| Named in the 2014 FAQ | What it was for | Status now |
|---|---|---|
| localbitcoins.com | Peer-to-peer cash trading, the shop’s first recommendation | Closed 2023 |
| bitcoin.de | German exchange, bank transfer | Operating |
| bitstamp.net | Exchange, bank transfer | Operating, acquired 2024 |
| virwox.com | Second Life currency, used to convert prepaid vouchers | Insolvent 2020 |
| alfacashier.com | Converted several e-money systems to bitcoin | Defunct |
| Perfect Money, OKPAY, LiqPay, EgoPay | E-money systems named as routes in | EgoPay collapsed 2016; others variously sanctioned or withdrawn |
| dagensia.eu | Exchange named in the FAQ | Defunct |
Two of the seven are still trading. The rest have closed, collapsed or been wound up. The shop’s FAQ is now, incidentally, a decent primary source on how ordinary people actually acquired cryptocurrency before exchanges were regulated, which is not a document type that survives in quantity.
The shop also warned customers away from the prepaid-voucher route on the grounds that the rates were poor. A small, unglamorous detail that tells you the operator was thinking about customer cost, not just his own.
Bitcoin was the evidence, not the shield
The assumption at the time, widely held, was that paying in bitcoin protected the buyer. For this shop’s customers it did the opposite, and for a reason that had nothing to do with cryptography.
The spreadsheet recovered from the laptop, Bestellungen.xls, carried a column of the bitcoin addresses buyers had paid from. Once investigators could tie an address to a person, they had proof of payment sitting alongside the name, the delivery address and the parcel tracking number. Motherboard reported that German exchanges were handing over user data on police request. The chain was complete before anyone had to do any blockchain analysis at all.
Why this archive does not trace the coins
It is the obvious thing to attempt and this archive tried it. It cannot be done from public material, for a documentable reason rather than a shrug.
Payment addresses were generated at checkout. Checkout sat behind a cart, and no crawler ever completed one. Searching every capture of this domain held by the Internet Archive returns no payment address at all; the only checkout artefact that survives anywhere in the record is a WooCommerce JavaScript file, cart-fragments.min.js, which dates the software and does nothing else. Because each order used a fresh address, even one recovered address would reveal a single payment rather than a wallet.
The addresses that would seed a trace exist in exactly one place: the bitcoin column of that spreadsheet, which is held by German prosecutors and has never been published. Without a confirmed starting point there is nothing to follow, and inventing one would produce a chart that looked authoritative and meant nothing.
If an address is ever published in a judgment or a court filing, the analysis becomes straightforward and this page will carry it. Until then this section stands as a statement of what cannot be known.
The money that was never found
Roughly €4.4m in bitcoin is cited as received across the trading period. Police found €48,000 or €49,000 in cash in the flat. Not every wallet was decrypted, and the asset-recovery side of the case generated its own litigation and its own reporting about what pursuing it cost the Leipzig authorities. German outlets were still asking where the millions had gone nearly a decade later.
There is an obvious question that this archive will not answer, which is what those coins would be worth today. It is unanswerable in any honest way: the amount is unknown, the proportion sold at the time to fund the operation is unknown, and the wallets were never enumerated. Any figure would be a headline rather than a fact.