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

Those people were wasting their money. They could be running those GPUs from now until the end of the universe and still have approximately 0% chance of finding a single used key.

Right. Those were the ones I talked to, just by random chance. It means that there are a lot of them.

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.

This isn’t like lottery odds. The space of keys here is vast. Like unimaginably so. 2^256 is a lot of keys.

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.

the most likely weakness is in the ECC implementation. i don't understand the math (who does?) but what the debate over https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ tells me is that very few people know what a "weak curve" is but people agree that they exist. this has always made me sketch on ECC in general, especially since it is also used in Tor. Another possibility is compromising the RNG used for creating the pvt sig? which since these are early addresses they would have been from a very early version of the software, and might have used a shitty RNG. If this is a crack it could definitely be state level actors (who has the US pissed off lately? who have they not?). Whether it is state/private the goal would be to extract as much real money as possible before creating a panic, so will be interesting to see where the money goes.