But why would they split these wallet into thousands of new wallets? They created more than 20000 new wallets within a few days. Is
that some kind of coin mixing? Why all that effort? Aren't they busy setting up a new website? These thousands of new wallets make it
much more complicated to refund the users.
When the the FBI seized the Silk Road wallet, didn't they move all the coins at once to a new address? That's not what happened here. I don't think spreading inputs to many addresses makes it much more complicated to refund users, but I'm also not sure why they would be split this way, either. It reminds me of the Bitfinex hacker, actually.
Cold wallet address of BTC-e was probably well known to the sharks. Owners of BTC-e were afraid that miners could block that specific address forever if they just
run with the coins. And they would have had a hard time cashing out in any exchange. So they set up the story of refunding everyone,
which gave them the time to mix the coins, making it impossible for miners and exchanges to block all of the new addresses. It's done now and
all what's left is silence.
Please tell me I am wrong! But I can't imagine any other story at the moment...
Your story doesn't make much sense. Miners are unlikely to collude as such, and even if they tried, a minority of miners would eventually publish the transactions. Your story also doesn't address the FBI seizure page and indictment from the DOJ...