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Curiously, after hitting a random page and >> twice, I came upon this page https://playxo.com/bitcoin/904625697166532776746648320380374... that had several keys in use in the past. I would expect this website, in the rare event of discovering some positive balance, to try spending it right away...
Hobbies of crypto millionaires?
Would have guess a far lower number. Almost suggests bots would have perhaps luck at hitting a live one. Which seems somewhat counterintuitive.
Curiously, after hitting a random page and >> twice, I came upon this page https://playxo.com/bitcoin/904625697166532776746648320380374... that had several keys in use in the past. I would expect this website, in the rare event of discovering some positive balance, to try spending it right away...
the first one having 7 BTC sent and received with the recent transaction in 2021-11-25 22:56. looks like its the wallet id 1.
also the 0 page haave some as well. looks like someone is monitoring those address.
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1EHNa6Q4Jz2uvNExL497m...
This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and generate private keys as fast as you can, how often do you find one that has a balance? Will there just be some ongoing very low but decidedly nonzero risk of all of your assets vanishing some day if you’re not using multisig?
I wonder if you could cut this down by focusing on know implementations and their random number generation. That is trying to figure out if weaker random number generation at any point was prevalent...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you check 1 billion addresses a second, and there are 100 million addresses with a balance, then it would take on average roughly (2^256 / 10^8) * 10^-9 seconds, which is 36717430630808027468154168254911183362909051 billion years. EDIT: Only 463439129036942 billion years, taking into account that there are effectively only 2^160 addresses.
You could check a lot more than 1B address per second.
Just don't lookup your private key in there. This would be like giving it to the website
If I had some coins on my machine and the fees were low enough I'd be tempted to put a few bucks on a new key and test this theory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey John - I came here to ask the same question. How is that possible. Same happened to me. >> leads to the "end" page, it's not as I though a "big jump" from some random page... thus I suspect it's simply addresses that are low entropy, at the end of the range.
They're the trivial wallet addresses (close to the beginning and end of the search space). I would expect them to be used for debugging and testing in the early days.