121–130 of 398 posts
This one has a more condensed ui: https://keys.lol/bitcoin/random
Several wallets with balances here, one with more than 10 ETH, what does that mean? https://keys.lol/ethereum/9046256971665327767466483203803742...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The magnitude of 2^256 is close to the count of atoms in the entire observable universe. I've always heard that even 2¹²⁸ is significantly larger than that number (which is closer to 2⁸⁰). This page seems to support that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...
Look more carefully, the estimation according to Wikipedia is 10^80, which is roughly 2^266. (BTW, when converting 10^x to 2^x, times 3 is what I use for very rough back of the envelope estimations. Times 10/3 is actually almost precise, as log2(10) = 3.32…)
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 page has almost all of them used. 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://playxo.com/bitcoin/1 https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1EHNa6Q4Jz2uvNExL497m... https://playxo.com/bitcoin/0
Anybody can throw money and watch which robot will catch it.
Sometimes the addresses are reloaded (anybody can reload them by sending money to them). And usually when they are reloaded somebody grab the coins on the next block. The amount of money are not important ~1 USD.
Anybody that has guessed the private key can grab the money if he is aware that it has been reloaded, and then it has to pick the fees higher than the other so that his transaction get preferentially chosen by the miners.
The following address for example seems to be one of those bread crumbing bot : https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1q0ct0pus328qv2veln... (Note that the public address begins with (bc1q0ct0pus), (so presumably someone has searched for a private key whose public key has a fitting name for a bitcoin grabbing bot) that has managed to grab a few times recently from 1EHNa6... (the address whose private key is the first possible private key).
Presumably it has found other feeding spots as it has so far collected from different sources over the course of 1 year : 0.01274447BTC
It's like passively playing the world's worst lottery in terms of odds, but hundreds of thousands of times every second. It's fun but the odds are astronomically low. I have a script[1] that generates a pub+private key and checks against a massive file of addresses with BTC[2]. The list of addresses is loaded in memory as a python `set` so checking is O(1), but I feel like optimisations at increasing the rate are fut…
That's what mining is too, basically. It's just that a mining rig can "buy a lot more tickets".
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.
> Finding an active wallet is hard, but not impossible. Every time you open a random page, you have a chance of finding someone else's fortune. Good to know I have a 1/2^256 chance to find a bitcoin billionaire's wallet. This feels only slightly more ludicrous than the guy who lost his bitcoin in a hard drive and went looking for it in a dumpster.
It is not 1/2^256. It is "number of wallets with balance"/2^256.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you guess someone’s bank details and steal their money, in many jurisdictions the account owner would have some recourse against the bank and is likely to be made whole (not an easy or enjoyable process I’ll admit) - so I guess that’s one key difference.
Yeah, it's the bank you would be stealing from, through fraud (impersonation, I guess). But Bitcoin is decentralized, so you wouldn't be stealing from anyone?