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