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This website contains all Bitcoin private keys in the same sense that a Turing complete computer can solve any programming problem, or the way that a suficient quantity of certain chemicals in the right environment will eventually evolve into all possible life-forms that will ever exist in the universe.
Soo what happens if you're incredibly lucky and stumble across the private key for an active wallet? If you transfer the funds out, isn't that just theft? Is "guessing" a private key any different from guessing someone's bank details?
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.
A judge might easily make a ruling that you "stole" the money. Don't expect the legal system to accept the notion that crypto is outside their jurisdiction, nor expect them to appreciate your complex tech arguments about why it's not really stealing.
Just curious. Legally speaking. If someone was to "guess" the private key to an account with hundreds or thousands of bitcoin, could they legally move the bitcoin and take control of it? Or is it just as much an act of theft as guessing someone's car door code and driving off with the car? I can't imagine there is any legal precedent for such a thing.
Just curious. Legally speaking. If someone was to "guess" the private key to an account with hundreds or thousands of bitcoin, could they legally move the bitcoin and take control of it? Or is it just as much an act of theft as guessing someone's car door code and driving off with the car? I can't imagine there is any legal precedent for such a thing.
Just curious. Legally speaking. If someone was to "guess" the private key to an account with hundreds or thousands of bitcoin, could they legally move the bitcoin and take control of it? Or is it just as much an act of theft as guessing someone's car door code and driving off with the car? I can't imagine there is any legal precedent for such a thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make me wonder, at what point does brute forcing private keys become more lucrative than mining?
I mean...btc will eventually hit the supply limit. Sort of hilarious if all mining hardware was repurposed at that point to work on brute forcing instead
Just curious. Legally speaking. If someone was to "guess" the private key to an account with hundreds or thousands of bitcoin, could they legally move the bitcoin and take control of it? Or is it just as much an act of theft as guessing someone's car door code and driving off with the car? I can't imagine there is any legal precedent for such a thing.
Practically speaking, if you actually managed to get hundreds of thousands of bitcoin, you're going to have someone very interested in getting it back. The legal argument might not even concern you if the previous holder of those bitcoins thinks that most likely way to recover their money by hiring thugs to hurt you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, I found 10 used wallets not within 1000 pages of the first nor last page of his website in roughly 5 minutes. 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've noticed that there are a few hardcoded ones on the final page, where the account exists and the key is wrong. 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 ent…
> 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.
This guy? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/uk-man-makes-last-ditch-effo... Russ Hanneman did it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKXqZh43OH8
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hard-drive-lost-bitcoin-landfil...