←back to thread

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

(www.marketwatch.com)
191 points aorloff | 1 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 #
1. xoralkindi ◴[05 Jul 25 10:52 UTC] No.44471790[source]▶
Bitcoin is designed with clever incentives to prevent this kind of thing. If you can afford to bruteforce wallets the incentive would be to just mine bictoin which is more probable and it also help secure the network. If you can bruteforce wallets bitcoin is effectively worthless. Or you could even use all of that compute to mine something else for example Monero.