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191 points aorloff | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.227s | source
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mattlondon ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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 ◴[] No.44467180[source]
It's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
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onlyrealcuzzo ◴[] 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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kristopolous ◴[] No.44469911[source]
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

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1. dperrin ◴[] No.44471471[source]
Just speculating here, but isn't it quite possible someone wasn't intentionally sitting on it for 14 years and instead just couldn't access it? For example, if they've been sitting in prison this whole time. Something like that seems (statistically anyway) more plausible to me than getting lucky on guessing a key.