Sleeping beauty Bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2B

Maybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD finally found it!

Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?

I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.

For anyone else who's been vaguely following the story as it popped up every few years, the latest news came out a few days ago : he finally gave up.

It's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies

Source?

https://x.com/howelzy

> he finally gave up

Sounds like something someone who found few billion USD on a thumb drive would say :)

That’s definitely also what I would publicize if I actually found the HDD. :)

It's close enough.

There are 200 million+ BTC wallets.

They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of wallets - in how many years?

How does the equation change with $100m of cloud or GPU compute as GP speculated? These are all hobbyists.

> what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?

Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet. Not eight wallets closely related to each other.

It changes that if you attempt to liquidate that much BTC, BTC crashes and you've got 90% less money than you hoped for.

Do you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?

I wouldn't say anything.

Not true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the crypto algorithms and implementations which agencies use to achieve any objective they may have. On top of that there are also holes across the software and hardware stacks of various implementations. Just because they run all the researchers and fund a lot of it does not mean there are no holes.

Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.

Just because they are not published, does not mean they are not using them, someone else found them and are using them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day.

Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts making leaps above Moores Law.

There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my folks!

They could also do a private party transaction to sell the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.

This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0]

> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/050614/introdu...

He lost his court battle to force the local government running the dump to allow him to dig the last I heard. So I doubt it, he wasn't even allowed to really try.

Just the fear of future liquidation would eventually severely crash BTC.

Like it's crashing now on this news?

It would take approximately 6B H100 GPU days to crack every active BTC wallet.

So if you had 10,000 H100s running, it'd only take ~1500 years.

You'd have a high probability to find key in under ~1000 years, though.

Even if I'm off by 3 orders of magnitude, it would take a decade and cost billions, and not make financial sense.

There's ~$188B in Satoshi era wallets.

While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.

Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another.

That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.

this would be highly improbable. the odds of only remembering enough of the key to brute force it, is slim.

guessing a whale's key? zero

The vast majority of BTC transactions are done this way. Anything of any size is traded via OTC desks or other more private avenues.

Active addresses have less entropy too

if someone could brute force a key, they would target small inactive wallets , rather than big wallets and drawing attention to it

You dont understand bitcoin or the math or the cryptography ehind it.

yeah, people think it's the selling that makes the price fall. it is the anticipation . markets are forward looking

It depends how it's sold. Market orders would have more impact than OTC .

Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that after the transaction, both sides would know the key to the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up a transaction first.

Can you look me in the eye and state that you understand Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it?

Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.

Keys created with an RNG that turned out to be a little too predictable?

Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?

Kinda like what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195493

(Or exactly that but nobody tried to attack this again with moar power?)

*at most ... years.

People always forget those numbers are worst case scenarios. I mean, you can get luck on the very first guess too.

After the transaction, you can still send the bitcoin to the purchaser's wallet.

But since the purchase itself happens off exchange, there's no record of how much the coins were sold for, so no impact on market price.

One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel created Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he presented:

In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla.

Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.

In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.

By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.

In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.

Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.

His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.

If that’s the plan you can guess a number for free, no outlay needed.

> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.

> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.

This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.

They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.

Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.

PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.

If your guess is generated by a QRNG and many worlds is true, than one version of you is very happy although the expected value is 1.03×10−66 USD.

Has he opened a bar instead?

Perhaps plausible until you mention that they hired a team to build it.

There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I could perhaps believe it.

Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy, wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?

A large wallet that’s been dormant for years suddenly becoming active will tend to pressure the price lower from the implied increase in liquid supply and fear that the wallet will continue to distribute coins.

It’s not just the printing of transaction price that can affect the market.

People are actively doing it. Mostly using clore.ai on their 4090x bundles.

I used to work in the gpu rental space up to about a month ago.

I talked to multiple people dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on looking for those keys.

I'd put house odds at say 20:1 that someone cracked it over someone holding for 14 years and deciding now is strike time.

Also if it's a true crack, then Bitcoin price could collapse swiftly if someone just snatched a wallet for 200k of compute or whatever.

That's always been the real existential risk. I talked about it as the DES problem over a decade ago. Let's see if this is it

He had only 7500. The recent move involves 60,000 according to some Reddit threads

My counterpoint is that if Elon were involved in any way at all, he would have taken credit for it publicly by now.

Those people were wasting their money. They could be running those GPUs from now until the end of the universe and still have approximately 0% chance of finding a single used key.

> closely related to each other.

Like, sequential? Because if you were brute forcing...

Right. Those were the ones I talked to, just by random chance. It means that there are a lot of them.

This implicates a few things - (1) people win the lottery every day and (2) it's highly unlikely that the best techniques are publicly known.

Perhaps there's something that requires $1,000,000 in investment to yield a 1:100 chance of finding a particular targeted wallet using some clever shortcuts.

The other explanation is very implausible: a human sits on wallets without splitting up the funds or derisking exposure, has wallets with a billion dollars sitting it in.

Now I only have a few million, but even I have something like 6 brokerages and 12 banks. Even when I was a btc holder, I didn't keep over $100k in a single wallet.

The snatching theory requires no new revolutionary math, no substantial breakthroughs, just some clever people with a lot of resources and a goal.

Either explanation is speculative. I think the "lucky researchers at some University" theory is more likely then the "let's wait 14 years until this $1,000 becomes $1,000,000,000."

Especially because (1) we're not exactly at some high water mark and (2) if this was just a person with a wallet trying to do something like pay for life's uncertainties, you can do basically 100% of that with like 4btc.

However if you successfully snatched the wallet, you're on a clock before someone else gets it. This is exactly the kind of movement you'd be doing

Also if some old bitcoiner comes out and says "hey that was me", we're still up in the air. If I had snatched a billion dollar wallet, the first thing I'd do is payoff an old btc'er to claim its there's to prevent market panic.

This isn’t like lottery odds. The space of keys here is vast. Like unimaginably so. 2^256 is a lot of keys.

If someone had a faster method for breaking elliptic curve keys, fast enough to have a realistic chance on GPUs, the repercussions for that would be waaaaaay larger than merely stealing some bitcoin. This is the same math upon which nearly all digital security in common use today is based. It’d be full-on cryptopocalypse.

Because maybe this isn't satoshi waking up, but finally those kidnappers hit that poor guy in the latest "we found satoshi" documentary

I do not think that Elon would not claim he is the inventor by now. The team theory makes this entirely unbelievable. Something like this can only be pulled of by 1-2 person's whith exceptional self-restraint.

It was jack.

He named it Puzzles.

It’s quantum computer.

It’s the quantum computer.

Fun personal fact - the only reason I didn't invest more in Bitcoin (which would have definitely been enough to be FU money) was because I had some E-Gold when it was shut down.

"larger than merely stealing some Bitcoin"

It's US$2 billion. I can't imagine a better way of monetizing such an exploit than to convert it into cash by using Bitcoin.

The US govt can't pay you US$2 billion without it showing up as a line item in the federal budget. That's like 20% of the NSA's funding. You'd have to get authorization from the President and hold some emergency session of Congress. Other governments would pay less.

Hacking the normal banking system is also challenging. If you steal US$2 billion someone is going to notice and simply undo the transaction because banking doesn't believe in "code as law".

You're looking at it wrong. There doesn't need to be a generalizable, embarrassingly parallel, computationally lower class, key reduction.

Just this specific implementation with these specific wallets maybe using a version of the btc code with a small recently discovered bug that existed say for 3 months in 2011

You can have something extremely localized and get this result. And this is exactly the behavior people have long game theoried would happen under such a scenario.

You're implicitly making the claim that just because you can't find something widely discussed in literature than any optimization of any kind is impossible and nobody would ever dare to keep an advantage in stealing bitcoin wallets secret.

Stuxnet is way less plausible than this yet that happened.

People have been trying to do this for a decade and have in aggregate thrown probably north of $100 million into it through separate efforts. The idea of someone finally succeeding is kind of expected.

Again the only claim I'm making here is that this is not only a non-zero chance, but, in my mind, an over 90%.

> They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.

Interesting, need to read about it. So similar story as with Tesla? Existing opinion nicely confirmed.

Because Elon is so humble…

> what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?

I've been wondering the same. But in this case it's multiple wallets, so it's very unlikely.

Good chance those coins are 100% traceable. They were lost in the days before good privacy tools like mixers, and the database of the biggest exchange MtGox was fully leaked so everyone knows the real name, email, bank details, and date of birth of the owner of every old coin.

Very pleased I disposed of all mine long ago, and the Blockchain shows that so nobody tries to kidnap me for the keys.

Seems fairly humble to me in that he's always thanking the team and giving them most of the credit.

At that scale self-hosted compute probably offers a decent roi.

How do you get that?

BTC private key space is 256 bit. Let's say a billion wallets, that's 30 bits, so you need to check 226 bits to hit one wallet.

A H100 does about 1000 TFLOPS at the very most, that's 10^15 or 50 bits per second (generously assuming we can check on key per FLOP).

6B days of that will give you an additional 50 bits (6 = 8 = 3 bits, B = 1000^3 = 30 bits, day = 10^5 seconds = 17 bits).

Now we're talking 100 bits. But as discussed above, you need to check 220 bits to hit a key. There's still quite a gap.

For comparison, the entire Bitcoin network (using 1% of world electricity) does about 1000 EH/s at the moment, that's 10^21 or 70 bits per second (so, roughly equivalent to a million of H100, using the rough overestimating sketch above).

Per year, that's 70+25 = 95 bits. Still far.

Worse fun personal fact. I was planning to buy 5000 bitcoins on a Friday after work. A coworker convinced me and it made sense. Bitcoin was less than 2 a coin at that point.

Then I go down the elevator in my building and there is a huge crowd of people. It ended up being 50 cent the rapper and a few other famous people.

It was so surreal and unexpected I completely forgot about Bitcoin for a few months. And by then I could stand the fact it had tripled (or something) and I had missed it.

Would have been hundreds of millions. Could have lost the hdd or had sold later but I'd always hold some.

Lol so now I blame 50 cent that I didn't buy Bitcoin

I went back to the (french) articles making that claim in headlines and it turns out to be false, thanks.

He lost his appeal in his case against the city authority to search the landfill, so he can't ever search for it. It's a bit buried in his feed in between the announcements about tokenizing part of these legally inaccessible coins.

I've got a Confinity Paypal tshirt from a job fair I went to in 2000 or 2001 from back when they envisioned people using palm pilots to transfer money. I always think it's hilarious that people give Elon any credit for doing anything at the company.

Or maybe someone just got out of prison!

Ross Ulbricht?

You would’ve sold it way before it became FU money

If this at least involved Len Sassaman somehow, I'd find it at least worthy of digging in to this. Pass. Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks? Come on. Musk hasn't had a single idea on his own, Thiel is way too busy coming up with ways to enslave everyone. No way they had anything to do with creating Bitcoin.

In the early days, a pentium 486 in your garage could have made these coins in a few months.

And you don't need an exchange to transfer coins.

No one knows who owns these wallets... yet. That's why they are mysterious.

Any team involved would have long ago spilled the beans.

Conspiracies are impossible to maintain, once more than one or two people are involved.

the most likely weakness is in the ECC implementation. i don't understand the math (who does?) but what the debate over https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ tells me is that very few people know what a "weak curve" is but people agree that they exist. this has always made me sketch on ECC in general, especially since it is also used in Tor. Another possibility is compromising the RNG used for creating the pvt sig? which since these are early addresses they would have been from a very early version of the software, and might have used a shitty RNG. If this is a crack it could definitely be state level actors (who has the US pissed off lately? who have they not?). Whether it is state/private the goal would be to extract as much real money as possible before creating a panic, so will be interesting to see where the money goes.

Peter Thiel said in one of his podcast he believes it was the E-Gold team who created Bitcoin under the alias of Nakamoto. He also confirmed he knew the team. But no one knows the names of the engineers or who financed them.

All we know is that Elon and Peter revolutionised the finance industry with PayPal.

Indeed. That's what so many miss.

One of the doge creators sold all his early doge for a used car. He'd hit the jackpot, a $5k return on something he rolled out in under a day's work, for fun.

He didn't make the wrong decision. All his coin was worth 5 bucks, then 5900. What would you do?

Yeah - assuming this was not the rightful owner (which it might well be), my gut is that perhaps someone found an implementation flaw/quirk in some old wallet code/keygen/RNG that effectively reduced the keysize down to something more manageable for brute-forcing. In ye olden days Bitcoin was still something of a curio for geeks and nerds and not the industry it is now, so it would not be unreasonable IMO for there to be some slightly-less-than-perfect implementations floating around from hobbyists or open source etc - the stakes were lower then.

If there was say a vulnerability in a specific wallet version it would be quite possible to narrow down search space to only the wallets/addresses around that point in time etc as well, making it easier to target your brute-forcing efforts.

It will be interesting to see if any other dormant wallets from around the same era wake up too.

Better odds: old man theory.

Some dude had the wallets on a usb drive. Maybe he mined in the very early days, never really thought of it, and ended up aged and not cognitively aware, his memory wonky.

Recently, he just passed on.

His offspring cleaned out his garage or whatever, found a usb stick, looked on it for photos, and found this.

> wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?

That's not how business works. You borrow, then borrow some more, and focus on having a long term plan to cover the interest, so you don't upset the banks or end up broke again.

Doesn't Elon sell Bitcoin whenever he needs a few hundred million these days?

The fact that we don't understand how someone could've come up with something like PayPal or Bitcoin might be exactly why Elon and Peter are the richest people on the planet.

> There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent.

JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day. Would you sleep at night knowing you publicly admitted being involved in a project whose only mission is to bring them down?

JPMorgan moves $10 trillion a day, according to Jamie Dimon. So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks because that's the last thing you'll ever do.

So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not crazy.

Video where he said he knew the team? In the main video, he just speculates that some people at the conference made bitcoin. Never provided even a claim to having evidence.

The definition of humility is not "doing the bare minimum."

Some of the history between the two companies is covered in a book, "Paypal Wars.[0]

Among other things it happens to spotlight Musk's fascination with having "X" as the company name, especially for a bank.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PayPal_Wars

Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Peter Todd, and Adam Back were definitely part of the team after the paper was published. But Len Sassaman? I don't think so.

> Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks?

Even cypherpunks had bills to pay.

And who was hiring in 2007? The same people who disrupted the banking and oil industry with PayPal and Tesla.

Being seriously serious, if it was even statistically unreasonable to accomplish this once in this amount of time, it would be apocalyptic. A whole lot more than bitcoin would crumble.

I've personally always been a fan of the idea that the only reason it exists in the first place is to be a 2-trillion-pound canary for sha256

So you are contradicting what Luke Nosek, the co-founder of PayPal, said?

Luke: "Many people don’t know this, but the initial mission of PayPal was to create a global currency that was independent of interference by these, you know, corrupt cartels of banks and governments that were debasing their currencies.”

Why should we believe you and not the person who created PayPal?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paypal-originally-aimed-creat...

The people who give him credit are the same people who sold PayPal for $1.5 billion in July 2002:

Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Ken Howery, Jeremy Stoppelman, Russel Simmons.

Elon was removed as CEO in 2000, but he remained the largest individual shareholder when PayPal went public.

You've just created an account to ask that question? Wow :D

https://kqmarkets.co.uk/article/did-peter-thiel-meet-satoshi...

https://protos.com/is-peter-thiel-inner-circle-behind-the-sa...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/peter-thi...

"Peter Thiel met with the e-gold team in February 2000 on the Caribbean island of Anguilla to discuss making PayPal interoperable with e-gold. The goal was to challenge central banks by creating a system where PayPal and e-gold could work together. Thiel believed this collaboration could spark a revolution against traditional financial institutions."

Actions speak louder than words.

- Thiel met with digital currency pioneers in 2000.

- Thiel chose not to partner with E-Gold because he needed to stay compliant and bank-friendly.

- A few years later, Bitcoin quietly appears, solving the exact problems E-Gold ran into.

- No names. No funding trail. No way for banks to know who the enemy is. Just Bitcoin wallets full of money.

It doesn't sound like a bunch of idealistic cypherpunks building tech to save the world. It sounds like a few smart, well-connected people who understood how money moves, got frustrated with the banking system and their fees, and built a way to create wealth and move value without paying commissions.

The cypherpunks laid the groundwork for the encryption banks, governments, and corporations now depend on. They were never interested in dodging taxes or avoiding bank fees.

That’s what someone who hasn’t disposed all of the coins would say.

Back in the real world, plenty of people publicly associated with running major cryptocurrencies (and Craig Wright!) are walking around talking about how they invented the cryptocurrency and how it revolutionises banking, and plenty of people inventing infrastructure for promoting Bitcoin are doing deals with banks, whilst Elon is the sort of guy who goes to extreme lengths to piss off both political parties in the country that he and his businesses and his lucrative government contracts are based in, including ranting into the void about the most powerful and most sensitive man in the Western world is in the Epstein files when they had a fallout...

Len went on for years about what a stupid idea Bitcoin was.

I saw people using PalmPilots to transfer money on PayPal in 02001.

Just speculating here, but isn't it quite possible someone wasn't intentionally sitting on it for 14 years and instead just couldn't access it? For example, if they've been sitting in prison this whole time. Something like that seems (statistically anyway) more plausible to me than getting lucky on guessing a key.

Except for the secrecy of Colossus, Crypto AG, the 9/11 hijackings, Bill Cosby drugging and raping dozens of women, Peter Thiel funding lawsuits against Gawker, the Manhattan Project, the CIA-funded coup against Mossadegh, Stuxnet, the Five Families, most of what the NSA does, the Stealth Bomber, and so on.

Almost all of those remained secret longer than the 17 years we're talking about here, and due to selection bias, I am forced to omit the much more successfully kept secrets, because I don't know about them yet.

Just applying Occams Razor here, this whole story makes more sense if the E-Gold engineers just bootstrapped this project without Musk/Thiel involvement.

E-Golds most talented 1-2 engineers weren’t poor people, and could definitely afford a 5 year career break.

FYI the “safe curves” charts are garbage self-promotion for his own crypto algorithms. I generally respect DJB, but he didn’t even try to be unbiased with that analysis.

People always forget about the great Wei Dai, who like Nakamoto is already sort of pseudonymous, he also created Bmoney which is allot like Bitcoin. He is also the creator of the Crypto++ cryptography library for C++ (bitcoin is written in C++) From all the OG Cypherpunks he ticks allot of the boxes.

Martin Shkreli has been spending the past month or so on Discord streaming himself doing literally exactly that.

Bitcoin is designed with clever incentives to prevent this kind of thing. If you can afford to bruteforce wallets the incentive would be to just mine bictoin which is more probable and it also help secure the network. If you can bruteforce wallets bitcoin is effectively worthless. Or you could even use all of that compute to mine something else for example Monero.

I understand the math and crypto behind it to a degree. I don't profess expert knowledge however. But I know enough to know the GP is wrong and I'm happy to point that out. If I thought there was any value in correcting GP claim by claim I would do so. But in reality it will just end up in me wasting my time trying to educate someone who doesn't want to be educated, and if they did they could go and research the math and cryptography for themselves.

As someone once said, I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.

> So there's the unwritten rule: you never upset the banks because that's the last thing you'll ever do.

What are they going to do? Whack him mafia style and make it look like an accident? Here’s a more realistic rule: “If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem”.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/214064-if-you-owe-the-bank-...

> So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not crazy.

You mean the guy who is so insecure he constantly lies, even about the most inconsequential things…

https://archive.ph/20250127023632/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

The guy who is so uninformed and gullible he falls for any conspiracy theory…

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u8_fp1TtJE

The guy who jeopardised billions by buying into a random tweet accusing a business partner without proof…

https://voz.us/en/world/250308/21932/mexican-tycoon-carlos-s...

The guy who invested all his time and energy electing someone like him, only to then (predictably) have a falling out…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Musk_feud

I mean, maybe he isn’t crazy, but that isn’t really an effective defense. Crazy people at least have an excuse.

Why? Are you hypothesizing that they used bad RNGs?

As Bitcoin increases in value, the reward for breaking into wallets grows. Satoshi’s is the ultimate target here, followed by wallets used to burn currencies. Some of these look like they’d only be brute forceable and that takes more time and energy than we think is plausible, but I suspect people will find the system isn’t as secure as expected in some weird and wacky ways as this bounty grows.

Although, I wonder if emptying the wallet is actually harder than breaking in, in some ways. Let’s say you get into Satoshi’s wallet (or they still have access), how do you move anything without spooking the entire market?

I doubt it, Ive held my Tesla shares since the beginning.

Can you name me a self made billionaire who is more humble?

This is the dumbest idea I ever hear smart people say.

Uhhh... nothing I said contradicts Luke Nosek.

Elon was working on a digital bank, not a global currency. His company was failing miserably.

Confinity, who made PayPal, and had a first version working, merged with them.

Elon gets no credit for a 'global currency' idea (nor do I think he and Thiel invented Bitcoin[1]), because Confinity was already working on that idea when they merged and became PayPal properly, in the four months before he was ousted.

My argument was that Elon wasn't all about the global currency.

[1] And Elon definitely didn't invent BitCoin. His ego would never permit him to have kept that a secret for a month, let alone a decade plus.

The selection bias, is discounting the endless conspiracies exposed daily.

People go to jail, are caught out, fired, relationships break up, governments fall, because conspiracies of even a few people fall apart. It's a regular thing.

You're mentioning some things, of which some were known during the time. The FBI had reports of the 9/11 hijackers, Bill Cosby was known by many but the women were paid off with cash or jobs (until they rightfully went public), and things such as the CIA and the Manhattan project are laced with highly patriotic people, and the death penalty or life in jail, along with people sequestered and watched by immense security.

Secrets are very difficult to keep.

The things you think of were enormously unusual in that they were kept.

They were the exception to the rule.

Very plausibly the identity of Satoshi is already known to more people than Cosby's rapes or the 9/11 hijacking plans, before everybody knew about them. The hijacking plans weren't even well-known inside the FBI! And it's also very plausible that the people involved in Bitcoin were either strongly idealistic, facing death penalties for disclosure (for example, if they work for the Mossad), or both.

I agree with your weakened claim that secrets are very difficult to keep, but much of modern society is built on institutions that are very good at keeping them: armies, intelligence agencies, and even companies with trade secrets.

I agree that Satoshi was probably just one or two people, and the difficulty in keeping secrets with more than a few people is one of my reasons for that. But you said it was impossible, not difficult, which is much too extreme to be justifiable.

(I think it's about 50% likely that it's one of a couple of dozen people I've met personally, but I wouldn't be able to convince anyone else. So you might be talking to one of the people in the position of Bill Cosby's friends before the news came out.)

Context matters.

The PayPal mafia (Musk, Nossk, Thiel, Levchin, Sacks, and the rest) spent years working closely, obsessing over banks, money, payments, and how to move value on the internet, questioning everything: What is money? Who controls it? How do you make it more efficient, global, and digital?

True. Nothing gets built in isolation. Bitcoin was the result of decades of work by cryptographers, economists, investors, and engineers

Agree. He was not impressed with Bitcoin

Plenty of address reuse happened back then

Yup. Also explains why X is trying to move into payments now.

Elon seems to need to finish a vision he didn't get a chance to finish back then.

>I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.

you are correct at first pass, but it's a fact wallets have been cracked many times, perhaps at least 100s of millions of dollars. The "keyspace" for the cracked wallet is a subset of the nominal keyspace - the much smaller space covered by either a flawed random number generator (RNG), or the whole brainwallet fiasco, or a RNG where a seed is crackable (e.g. milliseconds since 1970 or unix epoch - some cracks, whitehat, have used this method). That's all what we know in the whitehat space, surely other tricks exist in the blackhat space

Changing global politics (e.g. allowing the complete decryption of diplomatic messages) has a value and magnitude of impact that is not easily measured in dollar terms.