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?
throw310822 · 4h ago
> 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?
Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet. Not eight wallets closely related to each other.
Scoundreller · 3h ago
Keys created with an RNG that turned out to be a little too predictable?
Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?
(Or exactly that but nobody tried to attack this again with moar power?)
pyman · 2h ago
One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel created Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he presented:
In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla.
Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.
In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.
His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.
FireBeyond · 48m ago
> Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.
They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.
Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.
PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.
volfonibros · 5h ago
For anyone else who's been vaguely following the story as it popped up every few years, the latest news came out a few days ago : he finally gave up.
nixass · 5h ago
> he finally gave up
Sounds like something someone who found few billion USD on a thumb drive would say :)
stavros · 4h ago
I wouldn't say anything.
nothrabannosir · 5h ago
That’s definitely also what I would publicize if I actually found the HDD. :)
rtkwe · 4h ago
He lost his court battle to force the local government running the dump to allow him to dig the last I heard. So I doubt it, he wasn't even allowed to really try.
They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of wallets - in how many years?
handfuloflight · 4h ago
How does the equation change with $100m of cloud or GPU compute as GP speculated? These are all hobbyists.
onlyrealcuzzo · 4h ago
It would take approximately 6B H100 GPU days to crack every active BTC wallet.
So if you had 10,000 H100s running, it'd only take ~1500 years.
You'd have a high probability to find key in under ~1000 years, though.
Even if I'm off by 3 orders of magnitude, it would take a decade and cost billions, and not make financial sense.
1oooqooq · 3h ago
*at most ... years.
People always forget those numbers are worst case scenarios. I mean, you can get luck on the very first guess too.
relaxing · 1h ago
If that’s the plan you can guess a number for free, no outlay needed.
paulpauper · 4h ago
Active addresses have less entropy too
No comments yet
onlyrealcuzzo · 4h ago
It changes that if you attempt to liquidate that much BTC, BTC crashes and you've got 90% less money than you hoped for.
handfuloflight · 4h ago
Do you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?
cj · 4h ago
They could also do a private party transaction to sell the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.
This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0]
> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades.
Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that after the transaction, both sides would know the key to the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up a transaction first.
cj · 3h ago
After the transaction, you can still send the bitcoin to the purchaser's wallet.
But since the purchase itself happens off exchange, there's no record of how much the coins were sold for, so no impact on market price.
phil21 · 4h ago
The vast majority of BTC transactions are done this way. Anything of any size is traded via OTC desks or other more private avenues.
onlyrealcuzzo · 4h ago
Just the fear of future liquidation would eventually severely crash BTC.
handfuloflight · 4h ago
Like it's crashing now on this news?
onlyrealcuzzo · 4h ago
There's ~$188B in Satoshi era wallets.
While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.
Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another.
That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.
paulpauper · 3h ago
It depends how it's sold. Market orders would have more impact than OTC .
paulpauper · 4h ago
yeah, people think it's the selling that makes the price fall. it is the anticipation . markets are forward looking
paulpauper · 4h ago
if someone could brute force a key, they would target small inactive wallets , rather than big wallets and drawing attention to it
nottrueatallz · 4h ago
Not true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the crypto algorithms and implementations which agencies use to achieve any objective they may have. On top of that there are also holes across the software and hardware stacks of various implementations. Just because they run all the researchers and fund a lot of it does not mean there are no holes.
Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.
Just because they are not published, does not mean they are not using them, someone else found them and are using them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day.
Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts making leaps above Moores Law.
There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my folks!
celticninja · 4h ago
You dont understand bitcoin or the math or the cryptography ehind it.
cluckindan · 3h ago
Can you look me in the eye and state that you understand Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it?
Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.
paulpauper · 4h ago
this would be highly improbable. the odds of only remembering enough of the key to brute force it, is slim.
guessing a whale's key? zero
creatonez · 5h ago
> Satoshi-era
Not true in the slightest. Satoshi was already gone by 2010, and in 2011 there were ~8000 transactions per day from folks outside of Satoshi's circle.
An old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I am almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs.
It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
Stevvo · 3h ago
Most addicts would likely not hold Bitcoin in wallet, but spend it on getting their next fix as soon as they buy it. It's not like you're thinking long-term, invest in Bitcoin so you can buy more drugs down the line. There would be leftover change but not big amounts.
Xss3 · 3h ago
You'd be surprised how many of these addicts would be buying for multiple other less tech savvy addicts and essentially becoming small time dealers themselves to fund their own habit. If they got locked up or ODd at the right time there could've been a few thousand usd in btc in a wallet at a time when each btc was worth less than 10usd.
jedberg · 5h ago
Ross Ulbricht got out a few months ago. Could be his.
paulpauper · 3h ago
he only had $40 million . if he had $1 billion the feds would have known about it
1oooqooq · 3h ago
lol. Did you read the whole wired piece on how the feds couldn't find anything under their nose on that case?
duttish · 5h ago
Whoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good security company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who they are. Seems like wrench attacks been been happening a lot more the last year.
Marsymars · 5h ago
I don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference between using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of Bitcoin vs using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of any other liquid asset that could be used to buy bitcoins.
BJones12 · 5h ago
If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a transfer order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a branch, make sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches escorting me in, and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed off.
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
onlyrealcuzzo · 4h ago
Also, for the rest of your life, you'd be able to get the people arrested who stole the money.
So they'd either to kill you after, and it would be obvious why, and there'd be an easy lead on who.
Your odds of getting away with stealing that kind of money conventionally are essentially zero.
Marsymars · 2h ago
Alright, so I can see it as a matter of scale.
Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people by leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people’s houses down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.
But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections in place to ensure that it can’t be easily transferred away, given the associated upside/downside? That’s... roughly as foolish as keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems (notwithstanding the logistical problems with the size/weight) under your mattress.
paulpauper · 3h ago
But the criminal's stolen BTC are tainted. Exchanges will not accept them. procession of them is a crime
jhasse · 1h ago
Mixers will though.
yieldcrv · 4h ago
> And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen
or you get a better bank to begin with
most banks that call their slow processes "security purposes" are actually just putting up barriers to maintain liquidity. the banks that go bust are the ones that got clientele based on making it convenient to transfer
jedberg · 4h ago
This is the other edge of that double edged sword of "no regulations". It's a lot easier to steal bitcoin with no consequence because there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged.
diggan · 4h ago
> there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged
It's not the "financial system" that comes and hunts criminals with guns, but police, acting based on what laws they seen has been broken. And stealing $3 billion is as illegal if it was Bitcoins, as if it was Euro or USD.
Larrikin · 11m ago
There are essentially no criminals that are stealing crypto where the police will have jurisdiction. It's main use case outside of speculation is committing international fraud and theft with no consequences.
dist-epoch · 4h ago
You are confused. The people with guns will come for you if you steal bitcoin and they know who you are.
> Bitcoin thief sentenced to 5 years in prison for stealing $1 billion in crypto and laundering it with his social-media rapper wife ‘Razzlekhan’
Bitcoin doesn’t ask questions when you unexpectedly want to make a very large transfer to a new payee. Your banker will.
paulpauper · 3h ago
But exchanges will if you deposit that much, and will freeze your $ if they don't like your response.
sampl3username · 5h ago
You just need to swap them for monero and then monero for litecoin or bitcoin again. Now you have anonymous, untraceable coins.
onlyrealcuzzo · 4h ago
I doubt there's enough liquidity to swap that kind of money...
drexlspivey · 4h ago
Monero daily volume is like $50m lol
yieldcrv · 5h ago
looking at the address types this just looks more like a security rotation to a stronger hashing method
jedberg · 5h ago
If you have $8B in BTC, is there any reasonable way to turn that into any fiat currency? USD, EUR, anything? Can you even buy that much USDC?
pawelduda · 5h ago
Sure you can. If you do it over a few months, it will get absorbed by market because there are buyers (as of today). Though this is kind of unprecedented, so markets could find this kind of event bearish and front run your sells which tanks the price. But I can't imagine I'd care if I held for 14 years. There is also USDT which is much bigger than USDC.
diggan · 4h ago
Also if you approach Coinbase/Kraken/$exchange and tell them you have X million to offload, they'll probably let you do it off-market, so no one (except for the ledger, obviously) would really notice.
nandomrumber · 5h ago
Loans using the BTC as collateral.
Buy good / commodities with BTC and resell them.
Sell the BTC.
Probably not all $8 gigadollars at once, but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
jedberg · 5h ago
> but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
Because you worry that BTC will crash and want it in something more stable?
PoshBreeze · 5h ago
BTC is volatile but it isn't going to crash tomorrow or any time soon at least not by the amount that would make sense to sell with a wallet this old.
nandomrumber · 3h ago
Well, one way to lower the price would be to put eight billion on the market all at once.
bgwalter · 5h ago
If the Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund scam that was announced after Trump's election is launched, there will be a price bottom that is financed by public funds.
I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own coins:
If you don't want to bother, you can auction it and some hedge fund which wants to buy will take it from your hand.
yieldcrv · 5h ago
yes, that’s why the exchanges are nearly $100bn companies
between multiple corporations buying $1bn per week, retail, and nation states, there is a large appetite for this amount with a few phone calls
paulpauper · 3h ago
nah, they are worth that much because of inflated valuations
dofubej · 55m ago
The day Satoshi finally decides to move some btc around, I wonder how many automatic emails, api calls, etc will be performed because of so many people setting up alerts.
alecsm · 4h ago
I wish I had access to my old wallet. I mined around 1.5BTC with my laptop and I deleted the wallet after a while because it was worthless.
paulpauper · 4h ago
you probably would have sold it at $100 or something anyway
twright · 4h ago
This is definitely something I remind myself of for any investment I sell and later on explodes. For bitcoin there were way too many highs that I definitely would have sold at.
alecsm · 1h ago
I know, that's why I'd like to have the wallet now :)
Even if BTC hits 1 million in the future, 150k now would be life changing.
freedomben · 4h ago
Yep. I used to pay my Dish Network bill with BTC. Youth is wasted on the young and hindsight is 20/20
EGreg · 4h ago
I have been saying for a decade
Satoshi isnt gonna move wallets 1 through 10
But he probably had wallet 55, 182 and 281-290 and has been spending this whole time. Any founder of a crypto project can do that.
p0w3n3d · 5h ago
F word is what caught my eye first
barkingcat · 4h ago
Probably North Korea.
ETH_start · 6h ago
April 2011 is not Satoshi era. Satoshi had dropped out of public Bitcoin forums by late 2010.
EGreg · 4h ago
On a side note, if quantum algorithms break elliptic curve cryptography, then wouldn’t Satoshi’s wallets and others be flooding the market with coin transfers?
The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large Bitcoin UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-resistant, by a certain date, or lose the ability to move that money.
notnullorvoid · 3h ago
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no proof that a general solution to elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem can't be found.
It's reasonable to assume that a solution hasn't been found yet though, otherwise that would be the world's best kept secret.
wmf · 2h ago
That's downstream of P vs NP.
dzhiurgis · 4h ago
Can they be spending sidechain coins quietly or is that visible too?
IncreasePosts · 5h ago
Imagine finding a file on an old laptop from when you were just futzing around 15 years ago. And it was worth $9 billion.
bravoetch · 5h ago
It's not that. These are addresses with 10k BTC each. That's very intentional storage even for 2011.
bombcar · 5h ago
Wasn’t 10k bitcoin the price of a pizza or something back then?
qqqult · 5h ago
BTC ranged between $0.30 and $27 back in 2011 so not quite
bix6 · 4h ago
Where did they transfer them? I see fck in a few lol.
MaxPock · 5h ago
It pains me because I learnt about bitcoin way back in 2010 and
paulpauper · 3h ago
You probably would have sold or lost them anyway. Probably a tiny percentage of people from 2011 still held
sixQuarks · 5h ago
I learned about it here, but everyone said it was a scam and not to buy
charlieyu1 · 2h ago
I learned about it from my friend, but couldn't bother with downloading a wallet client and mining etc
CamperBob2 · 4h ago
A superposition of wrong and right if there ever was one.
SoftTalker · 4h ago
Easy to kick yourself in retrospect but if we could see the future we'd all be millionaires. AAPL was $0.28 in 2002 (adjusted for splits, something like $12 at the time).
rasz · 4h ago
It is still a scam. Its just that critical mass of delusional people bought into it like Gamestop or Tesla stock. Even super obvious scams like Nikola take years to register price wise.
No comments yet
pixelpoet · 4h ago
... and? What is happening with people's attention span?
AndrewDucker · 4h ago
You're supposed to be able to fill in the second half of the sentence based on context. They consider it to be obvious from the first half.
pixelpoet · 4h ago
They must be an expert in number theory. I have a marvelous continuation of this sentence which
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?
Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet. Not eight wallets closely related to each other.
Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?
Kinda like what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195493
(Or exactly that but nobody tried to attack this again with moar power?)
In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla.
Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.
In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.
His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.
> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.
They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.
Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.
PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.
Sounds like something someone who found few billion USD on a thumb drive would say :)
https://x.com/howelzy
There are 200 million+ BTC wallets.
They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of wallets - in how many years?
So if you had 10,000 H100s running, it'd only take ~1500 years.
You'd have a high probability to find key in under ~1000 years, though.
Even if I'm off by 3 orders of magnitude, it would take a decade and cost billions, and not make financial sense.
People always forget those numbers are worst case scenarios. I mean, you can get luck on the very first guess too.
No comments yet
This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0]
> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/050614/introdu...
But since the purchase itself happens off exchange, there's no record of how much the coins were sold for, so no impact on market price.
While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.
Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another.
That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.
Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.
Just because they are not published, does not mean they are not using them, someone else found them and are using them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day.
Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts making leaps above Moores Law.
There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my folks!
Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.
guessing a whale's key? zero
Not true in the slightest. Satoshi was already gone by 2010, and in 2011 there were ~8000 transactions per day from folks outside of Satoshi's circle.
It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
So they'd either to kill you after, and it would be obvious why, and there'd be an easy lead on who.
Your odds of getting away with stealing that kind of money conventionally are essentially zero.
Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people by leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people’s houses down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.
But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections in place to ensure that it can’t be easily transferred away, given the associated upside/downside? That’s... roughly as foolish as keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems (notwithstanding the logistical problems with the size/weight) under your mattress.
or you get a better bank to begin with
most banks that call their slow processes "security purposes" are actually just putting up barriers to maintain liquidity. the banks that go bust are the ones that got clientele based on making it convenient to transfer
It's not the "financial system" that comes and hunts criminals with guns, but police, acting based on what laws they seen has been broken. And stealing $3 billion is as illegal if it was Bitcoins, as if it was Euro or USD.
> Bitcoin thief sentenced to 5 years in prison for stealing $1 billion in crypto and laundering it with his social-media rapper wife ‘Razzlekhan’
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/15/bitcoin-thief-sentence...
Buy good / commodities with BTC and resell them.
Sell the BTC.
Probably not all $8 gigadollars at once, but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
Because you worry that BTC will crash and want it in something more stable?
I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own coins:
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uae-fund-buys-100-m...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-07-02/donald-tr...
between multiple corporations buying $1bn per week, retail, and nation states, there is a large appetite for this amount with a few phone calls
Even if BTC hits 1 million in the future, 150k now would be life changing.
Satoshi isnt gonna move wallets 1 through 10
But he probably had wallet 55, 182 and 281-290 and has been spending this whole time. Any founder of a crypto project can do that.
The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large Bitcoin UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-resistant, by a certain date, or lose the ability to move that money.
It's reasonable to assume that a solution hasn't been found yet though, otherwise that would be the world's best kept secret.
No comments yet
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/s/IhC7VfG1Wp
(No I'm not serious)