The number of unconfirmed transactions has catapulted from ~9k to about ~50k right now, which means there's large amount of activity.
It will take a while for the dust to settle.
You can watch them here https://www.blockchain.com/btc/unconfirmed-transactions
chart https://www.blockchain.com/charts/mempool-count
A better graph of the current transactions sitting unconfirmed: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h
Note: I'm not saying that these are all from the hack, I'm saying that the activity on the Bitcoin blockchain has significantly spiked, and the hack was still ongoing at the time of writing this.
So basically rando's are sending famous people bitcoin because the famous people tweeted "send us $$ and we'll send you double back"?
And somehow the rando's haven't heard of the hack. Is this what's happening? Like are random people seriously sending them bitcoin? Or is it some weird form of money laundering?
Although since that's very weird behavior even if there was no hack, I suppose I'm not too surprised that those people sending the coin haven't heard of the hack.
Also number of transactions is in no way related to amount of money being transferred.
1) You submit transaction to the mempool. It may take a couple of minutes for a miner that "liked" your transaction to include it in a block. While in this stage, the receiver technically does not have anything yet, thus impossible to use them in any way.
2) The transaction get put inside a block. Generally, most vendors would say the transaction is "unconfirmed", although technically it is now in the ledger. There is a small chance that due to inconsistencies and network latency the block gets orphaned and the replacing block does not include the transaction. If you are a vendor and start shipping products immediately after your money is put into the ledger, you open yourself to a range of possible attacks. For this reason most wait two or three more blocks, just to be sure.
To answer your question: After a block gets created and the scammer receives his crypto, albeit still in an unconfirmed (read as "young") block, they can start using it however they decide to. Small chance that their actions get reverted exists tho.
Unconfirmed transactions cannot be withdrawn. Transaction that already is in at least one block is confirmed by definition - the act of being included in a block results in a confirmation.
Unconfirmed transactions can be "cancelled" by double spending the coins in the unconfirmed transaction.
I would say “taken” is fair; but “stolen” isn’t exactly right.
Plus there is no way it will be that much.
Well in this case people intended their money to go one place, but they got tricked and it ended up in another. I'd call that stealing.
Whether it got technically stolen from the charity or whatever they meant it to go to or from the original owner, that's debatable.
This was replaced by modern Fraud crimes this century. The new crimes reduce what prosecutors need to show somewhat. With "Theft by deception" there can be a problem if the prosecutor struggles to show that the defendant actually permanently deprived the victim of something of value, especially if the victim realised there was a problem in time to use some sort of "claw back" mechanism. With Fraud the prosecutor can show that the defendant intended to gain even if ultimately that didn't work, so long as the deception actually happened the crime was not merely attempted.
All these Tweets are Fraud by False Representation under that replacement law, because the tweet deliberately pretends to be from somebody (e.g. Apple or Bill Gates) when it's actually from the perpetrator of the crime and it's clear that they intended to gain from getting Bitcoin sent to this account even if a prosecutor can't prove how much they actually made.
That's all that's happening here, except in units of BTC and not USD...
