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?
Being seriously serious, if it was even statistically unreasonable to accomplish this once in this amount of time, it would be apocalyptic. A whole lot more than bitcoin would crumble.
I've personally always been a fan of the idea that the only reason it exists in the first place is to be a 2-trillion-pound canary for sha256
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.
As Bitcoin increases in value, the reward for breaking into wallets grows. Satoshi’s is the ultimate target here, followed by wallets used to burn currencies. Some of these look like they’d only be brute forceable and that takes more time and energy than we think is plausible, but I suspect people will find the system isn’t as secure as expected in some weird and wacky ways as this bounty grows.
Although, I wonder if emptying the wallet is actually harder than breaking in, in some ways. Let’s say you get into Satoshi’s wallet (or they still have access), how do you move anything without spooking the entire market?
You would have to arrange a bunch of off market transactions, Probably spread over several different exchanges. Doable, but I reckon you would end up with closer to 6 billion
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.
Personally I think that this can be considered on the "bug" side of Bitcoin's finite number coins: if, over time, they are lost, then there's a smaller quantity† of currency that is useable to actually do stuff with.
This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse:
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.
Price is dumping today, i wonder how much of a role this is playing. those coins will be hitting an exchange likely. This has always been the problem with bitcoin.. the implicit assumption is that many coins are lost , but if the early adopters start cashing out, prices will fall fast. Institutional buying and retail is still small relative to the early adopters. There are many people , miners who are quietly siting on huge fortunes.
Most interesting to me is that people are worried about a $2B transaction moving the market.
How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
I really wonder if Satoshi’s fortune is gone forever. Maybe the CIA found his real identity and uncovered his keys. Dumping that much BTC on the market would crash the market and probably even tank other financial markets.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 80.9 ms ] threadSeriously 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've personally always been a fan of the idea that the only reason it exists in the first place is to be a 2-trillion-pound canary for sha256
Although, I wonder if emptying the wallet is actually harder than breaking in, in some ways. Let’s say you get into Satoshi’s wallet (or they still have access), how do you move anything without spooking the entire market?
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.
This can make the 'rate of deflation' that occurs worse:
* https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
* https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2014/06/the-perils-of-bitcoi...
* https://crypto.bi/deflationary/
† I am aware of satoshis.
* https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-dormant_5y-bitcoin-address...
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.
How does that compare to the market depth of actual currencies or commodities? BTC, being objectively worthless, must be much more sensitive to people wanting to sell I'd expect.
Since we're on the topic of being objective, how is, objectively, something that trades at close to 110k USD per token, "worthless"?
I believe the word "objective" does not, objectively, have the same objective meaning for everyone.