I am once again asking: Where are the BTC? What are the addresses of the hot and/or cold wallets? Can we please get any proof of reserves/funds?
Why don't you check from which addresses on freebitco.in you received the payment to your address? I've already checked mine, and it's empty. The wallet was emptied around the time when
wetsuit logged into the network. It seems he wanted to tell everyone about it that day, but someone possibly talked him out of it.
I have checked, and I guess I'll now explain here for everyone to see what I have gathered.
The addresses they use for payout are the hot wallets. Freebitcoin doesn't reuse addresses and so each time you get paid, part of the money gets transferred to a new never-before seen address (this is good practice). I have dug around, but it seems to be awfully hard to find the cold wallet with the 1000+ BTC.
What I know: they start with an address with 10 BTC and then they make their payouts, the remaining of the money gets transferred to a new address under their care to make other payouts again and again until the money runs out. Then they feed the scraps back into a 10 BTC address.
You can track the payouts by looking at the details of the transactions they make as you can see
here. In that specific transaction they start with 5.4 BTC, they make a transaction with multiple outputs and then the majority of the coins gets transferred to a different address (majority in this case, sometimes it's hard to figure out which is the new freebitcoin address and which is just a whale withdrawing a lot of BTC). Then they do the same with the remaining coins again and again, until they end up with close to 0BTC and they feed that remaining coin back into a 10 BTC hot wallet (like
this).
It's tricky (but in theory doable) to find the cold wallet because there is always an uncertainty on which wallet belongs to who and I don't know how much they actually need to draw money from the big pile of cash they are sitting on since the flow in is probably ~equal to the flow out, meaning that it's rare they need to refill the hot wallet using the cold one.
I wish I had better tools to explore the blockchain, anyone here know any good tools to do this sort of investigations?
But I'd like to re-iterate than freebitcoin just giving us the cold wallet address would be much better than the community going spelunking in the depths of the blockchain.