I’m fully aware behind the math of finding a wallet actually holding anything… but I was fairly weirded out to come across 10 wallets that quickly. Most had their last txn out roughly 2019.

I'd say odds are that the website is wrong, but you can always load those keys in a wallet and see if they give you control over the actual address.

If that works, I'd assume it's the case that some people have used weak keys (for example, a popular Ethereum wallet would actually generate 256 bits of entropy but accidentally truncate it to 32 bits in an operation), and any funds in those wallets will have been snagged long ago.

Point being: generate a private key properly, and no one will ever find it.

EDIT: I realize this is another page then the one I've seen previously, but I think the same idea applies. That one had support for Ethereum, too, and on the final page was an account with a balance.

EDIT: the aforementioned wallet can also be found as the 0x00 wallet on the very first page. Interesting collision?

EDIT2: it's hardcoded https://github.com/SjorsO/keys-generator/blob/master/ethereu...

That or someone is actually using the site to come up with wallet keys.

But one of them was 1337, another some variant of 420-420xxx +-2 pages, another some variant of 1000000-1000000,xxx,xxx,xxx +-2 pages on those.

I can tell you there was nothing on 8008135 though

There’s a singular emptied walled on 1337 and nothing else +-25 at a minimum from it, I didn’t look any further.

You’re telling me that other people had exactly the same idea, but out of everyone in crypto, ever, it was only a singular person?

That seems more outlandish than the fact there’s one there IMO.

If it were, we'd be finding keys left and right every second.

It is estimated there are 10^80 atoms in the observable universe.

Sooo... what's 4 astronomicals?

You don't need the f.close() here - the context manager does it for you.

Better avoid surprising things.

It's like being in the world's biggest ever lottery syndicate, except if you pick the winning numbers it gets sent to a specific other person who's website you're on. If someone, eventually, hits the jackpot then the owner of playxo.com is going to be very, very rich.

I mean, I'd assume, cynically.

The chances of anyone hitting a green wallet are still incredibly narrow, but you never know.

fgsfds

    >>> import pandas as pd
        df = pd.read_csv("btc_balance_sorted.csv")
        df['balance'].apply(lambda x: x * 36902.7 / 100e6).describe()

    count    3.359206e+07
    mean     1.838824e+04
    std      2.819739e+06
    min      3.690270e-04
    25%      2.871768e+00
    50%      2.943913e+01
    75%      2.652168e+02
    max      1.063263e+10

df["balance"].mul(36902.7).div(100e6)

See [0] for explanations

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/52674448

    %time df['balance'].apply(lambda x: x * 36902.7 / 100e6).describe()
    Wall time: 12.6 s

    %time df["balance"].mul(36902.7).div(100e6).describe()
    Wall time: 2.33 s

Top 100 Richest Bitcoin Addresses:

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/

What do you usually call someone who takes a thing from its owner without permission?

Yeah, someone was silly to pay hard earned money in exchange from useless tokens. It was a gamble. If the useless tokens get stolen, I'm sorry to say, but whoever paid for BTC already lost their wealth in the first place when they converted whatever they had before for it.

It's true that information is infinitely abundant. However, unlike copyrighted works, private keys are not supposed to be shared. There should never be more than one copy of that number in the entire universe. If people can brute force keys by guessing, we've probably got bigger problems.

Obtaining that number without authorization is already a crime. Accessing computers illegally to exfiltrate data is already a crime. Breaking into a physical safe in order to obtain a paper key is already a crime.

Sure thing. Hence, the importance of analyzing each case individually. If unauthorized computer access is used, sure thing a crime was committed. If someone created a wallet using a stupid wallet generator which used this website to "create" private keys, and someone else also had this silly idea, and someone deposited Bitcoin on a wallet created by this mean and and someone else took it, then no crime was committed.

You don't even need the website. Cryptographic keys are just numbers. All data is just numbers. You can write simple code to generate all numbers from zero to infinity and it will eventually generate all cryptograhpic keys, all computer files, all copyrighted works, all hate speech, all child abuse material, everything that can possibly be represented as data.

The thing is the search space is so unfathomably large that such a program will never produce useful results. This is central to cryptography. If a private key is copied, it must have been done so illegally or accidentally. Any other option means the cryptography is defective.

This is the complete opposite of copyrighted works whose entire purpose is copying. The data is already known and they're hopelessly trying to regulate access to it.

I agree if you're talking about an evidence such as a high-quality video or even photo with everything leading us to believe it's legit. However, we can not be as confident if we're talking about a BTC token. While extremely unlikely, there might be faulty algorithm implementations, problems with the algorithm, etc., that might lead to this situation.

Very unlikely? Sure, but we've to give the benefit of the doubt.

And these days, they way society is using traditional currency is become less tangible all the time. It’s is 100% possible to live life with never touching physical currency. Get paid via direct deposit, credit cards for your daily expenses, ACH your housing bill and credit card expenses. All just information flowing around.

Crypto is certainly overhyped and overvalued days, but it’s seems that at the core, crypto and modern banking are accomplishing the same thing: managing numbers(information) that people value.

It's unethical to steal something tangible. Bitcoin has no tangibility whatsoever. You can't steal it.

---

Property is legally defined as 'Not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth.'

That includes protectable ideas, digital files, financial instruments (like stocks and bonds, loans and credits), computer graphics, certain arrangements of words and quite a bit more.

---

What does tangibility mean to you? That allows you steal the examples in the second paragraph without legal reprecussions nor ethical dilemmas?

You may get lucky with KYC, but who in their right mind would gen a collision only to get caught on the cash out?

You're not in control once someone has your pk unless you can mobilize a 51% attack to fix your problem.

I find it rather revealing that so many anti-crypto blog posts offer no novel solutions, they only ramble on about how they know crypto isn't the solution. Seems rather uninspired to say you understand a problem domain but have no suggestions on how to solve the problem other than literally a solution that has already been tried at large scale and failed.

Sure, the gold standard in an alternate reality seems like a great idea, but we live in this reality where central powers were able to quite easily strip society away from this contract with barely any resistance.

There are actual laws in the US that if you find money, you are supposed to report it to the authorities, and if no one reports losing the money in some fixed time (30 days?) then you keep it.

How lucky for everyone that the crypto folks have specifically attempted to evade all the laws that apply to real money

Bitcoin's supposedly scarcity is a joke that doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Basically parroting the same thing other people have been saying for years, absolutely no unique insight. He is so angry he missed the train, he just had to let it all out.

Don't worry Henrique, Bitcoin will go to $0 any day now!

Tbh, I did get some early but I ordered sushi (thuisbezorgd.nl accepted btc) and raspberry pi stuff from Pi Hut for amounts that make me cry in retrospect. Still, I'm not that 10k BTC pizza guy so there's that.

If its scarcity isn't real, then why can't you conjure up an arbitrary number of bitcoins at will?

The whole point of cryptography is nobody could possibly guess these numbers within the lifetime of the universe. If this assumption is somehow proven wrong, we've probably got bigger problems than one person losing money.

Why wouldn't the same logic apply to any property?

You're reading the file in every process, this needs mem x N for N processes.

If you first read in the file, create the set, and then use multiprocessing, you will get forked processes sharing the parent's memory, i.e. only need 1 x N the memory.

Funny thing is even though it's throwaway code, ensuring everything worked as expected felt really high-stake since a bug would mean a found key would be lost!

Edit: Also not sure if shared memory would be slower in python3 (or if it was, whether it would matter in this use-case), but an interesting thing to profile.

multiprocessing also provides a way to access the OS' explicit shared memory usually used as an IPC mechanism.

multiprocessing's "shared memory" facility is for writable memory.

What I described is extremely handy as you simply move the parsing code up in the script, before your function definition, and "magically" gain memory efficiency.

Miners aren't brute forcing keys to existing wallets and stealing the bitcoin, as that's effectively impossible even for the biggest mining rig (like, a mining rig the size of the sun couldn't do it in a trillion years)

Technically miners could start mining by trying to guess private keys, but there's no reason to because the expected value is so so much worse.

Can quantum techniques allow one to more effectively search for a specific private key to a BTC account?

Best practice for secure bitcoin accounts is to always send the entire balance when making a transaction, and have the "change" go back to a new address

I haven't published the public key to my bitcoin wallet. If someone sends to my address how do they publish the public key?

There are new output formats with taproot but they aren't mandatory and you can still send to addresses with no published public key

BTC addresses that have never sent BTC are not vulnerable to quantum computers as the public key is only sent when a transaction is made. The address you send to is a hash of the public key and irreversible even with quantum computers

It's it the number of operations which is the square root? (Presumably the different types of computer don't take the same amount of time per operation)

Mining involves guessing a salt which, when added to data for a single block’s with of transactions, makes the hash have a certain sum of zeros.

They are only the same in that they are using randomness to search for some number satisfying a given criteria. But, for example, you couldn’t use mining hardware to search for wallets with open balances. The mining hardware is specially optimized for one thing only.

or more briefly: never

We've shown time and time again that our undefeatable algorithms aren't.

Would you be comfortable if the Blockchain was frozen in time for a hundred years, after which you could withdrawal your balance? Would it be impervious over that time frame?

If the sum of the block reward and the transaction fees decreases, then that would result in fewer groups willing to perform proof of work calculations, and would be followed by a decrease in the proof of work difficulty in order to maintain ~1 block every ten minutes. That lowered difficulty then results in a lower cost to attack Bitcoin.

So, there must always, always be profit in running proof of work calculations. Not only that, but to maintain the security of the ledger, any increase in Bitcoin valuation must result in a proportional increase in proof of work expenditure across the entire network. It's an absolute disaster of a system.

The opposite is true of finding private keys.