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

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190 points aorloff | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 18:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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mattlondon ◴[04 Jul 25 19:06 UTC] No.44467062[source]▶
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?

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bravoetch ◴[04 Jul 25 19:09 UTC] No.44467081[source]▶
I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
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handfuloflight ◴[04 Jul 25 19:26 UTC] No.44467180[source]▶
It's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
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onlyrealcuzzo ◴[04 Jul 25 19:54 UTC] No.44467374[source]▶
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?

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handfuloflight ◴[04 Jul 25 19:57 UTC] No.44467393[source]▶
How does the equation change with $100m of cloud or GPU compute as GP speculated? These are all hobbyists.
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nottrueatallz ◴[04 Jul 25 20:19 UTC] No.44467563{3}[source]▶
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!

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1. celticninja ◴[04 Jul 25 20:52 UTC] No.44467801{4}[source]▶
You dont understand bitcoin or the math or the cryptography ehind it.
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2. cluckindan ◴[04 Jul 25 20:58 UTC] No.44467833[source]▶
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.

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3. celticninja ◴[05 Jul 25 10:54 UTC] No.44471797[source]▶
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.