←back to thread

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

(www.marketwatch.com)
189 points aorloff | 2 comments | 04 Jul 25 18:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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?

replies(12): >>44467081 #>>44467123 #>>44467396 #>>44467750 #>>44469927 #>>44470471 #>>44470497 #>>44470630 #>>44470975 #>>44471691 #>>44471790 #>>44472481 #
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.
replies(2): >>44467180 #>>44477232 #
handfuloflight ◴[04 Jul 25 19:26 UTC] No.44467180[source]▶
It's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
replies(1): >>44467374 #
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?

replies(2): >>44467393 #>>44469911 #
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.
replies(3): >>44467531 #>>44467563 #>>44467650 #
onlyrealcuzzo ◴[04 Jul 25 20:31 UTC] No.44467650[source]▶
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.

replies(3): >>44467768 #>>44468076 #>>44470499 #
1oooqooq ◴[04 Jul 25 21:40 UTC] No.44468076[source]▶
*at most ... years.

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

replies(1): >>44468679 #
1. relaxing ◴[04 Jul 25 23:04 UTC] No.44468679[source]▶
If that’s the plan you can guess a number for free, no outlay needed.
replies(1): >>44469417 #
2. kelseyfrog ◴[05 Jul 25 01:28 UTC] No.44469417[source]▶
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.