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.

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

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.

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?

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...