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?

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