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All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

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Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

#251

Post by krallja »

400thecat wrote: post #234
brabel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know the private key already, you just need to know which "page" it falls in, which should be documented somewhere as the pages are procedurally generated.

what does procedurally generated mean in this particular context ?

The data on a page are the results of running a function on the inputs of that page, not connecting to a database or anything.

view(coins = coins_with_prefix(query.page_num))

so, the site operator doesn’t need to go buy 2^256 bytes of hard drive space to store all the pages.

Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

#252

Post by folli »

hnbad wrote: post #202
folli wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a decentralized system, 'theft' is only a moral construct, not a legal one. And who will enforce any repercussions?

Wait, do you also think international companies are above the law? States very much care what's going on within its borders, if its via services hosted outside them or not. And in some cases states will even care about what their citizens do outside their borders. For example, engaging in child sex tourism can have legal consequences even if the actual abuse happens in a foreign country. Decentralization isn't magic.…

I don't see how that relates to my statement.

In the trustless and decentralized system of Bitcoin (and other blockchain implementations), there is no concept of theft. If you misplace your private key you're on your own. There's no central authority to turn to. Similar if someone cracks your private key. That's the entire idea of the technology.

If you use bitcoin for money laundering, you're not gonna get in trouble with any bitcoin nodes. What a nation state will do if they find out is however a very different topic.

Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

#253

Post by Havoc »

globular-toast wrote: post #241
Havoc wrote: post #45

I'm surprised by the amount of wallets its hitting that have had transactions. Like ~5% perhaps. Would have guess a far lower number. Almost suggests bots would have perhaps luck at hitting a live one. Which seems somewhat counterintuitive.

It is a far lower number. Are you checking random pages or browsing from the beginning? If you check random pages you're unlikely to even find a single page with a tx.

Started at random point and then clicked next. I checked a dozen or so and most had around 5-8 orange addresses each.

Maybe I just hit a range that is especially busy. Which in a way is even more ominous though since it should be random

Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

#254

Post by bspammer »

grumple wrote: post #231
bspammer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A private key is basically just a number between 1 and 2^256 It's like saying "I'm gonna pick a random number between 1 and a trillion", and then picking 999,999,999,995. Probably not a smart idea given that you don't want anyone else to be able to guess your number.

But the values are generally generated pseudo randomly by machine. This seems similar to the birthday problem, where the odds of encountering a value in a given range is higher than you'd expect.

The birthday problem means that the number of values you have to choose to have a 50% chance of a collision scales approximately with the square root of the size of the space. [0]

2^(256/2) is way, way bigger than the number of used bitcoin addresses, which is about 33 million according to this csv [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack#Mathematics

[1] https://bitkeys.work/download.php

Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

#255

Post by mjr00 »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #137
metanomicon wrote: post #126

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.

Legally stealing you still committed theft. Just because you have the technical ability to pick a lock doesn't give you the right to enter a room and take someone else's stuff. And there is a lot of legal precedent that hacking weak passwords is still hacking (also an illegal act even if you don't steal anything) and the theft of digital goods is still theft. Practically speaking, if you actually managed to get hundr…

> Legally stealing you still committed theft. Just because you have the technical ability to pick a lock doesn't give you the right to enter a room and take someone else's stuff. And there is a lot of legal precedent that hacking weak passwords is still hacking (also an illegal act even if you don't steal anything) and the theft of digital goods is still theft.

No, it's not so clear cut. Using a hacked password is illegal because it's unauthorized access to a computer[1]. The hacked passwords themselves are not illegal, otherwise sites like haveibeenpwned couldn't operate. In the BTC/crypto scenario, there's no unauthorized access occurring.

More than that, there's no link between a BTC address and a real identity. If I log into your bank account with a hacked password and get caught, law enforcement can quickly determine that I was trying to access something I didn't own because the bank has many details on the identity of the account owner. If I use a guessed private key to transfer BTC out of your wallet, how would you dispute my claim that I was the original owner of the wallet? Where's the proof that your private key wasn't the guessed copy?

> 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.

lol This is just pure fantasy. People haven't even gotten their coins back from Mark Karpelès[2], and he's a very visible and public figure. If an anonymous person randomly generated a private key and moved coins, nobody's going to be sending thugs after them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Karpel%C3%A8s

Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

#256

Post by FabHK »

grumple wrote: post #231
bspammer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A private key is basically just a number between 1 and 2^256 It's like saying "I'm gonna pick a random number between 1 and a trillion", and then picking 999,999,999,995. Probably not a smart idea given that you don't want anyone else to be able to guess your number.

But the values are generally generated pseudo randomly by machine. This seems similar to the birthday problem, where the odds of encountering a value in a given range is higher than you'd expect.

1. yes, generally and ideally the private key is generated pseudo randomly. But at the beginning or for testing, people might have manually picked a private key.

2. the birthday problem basically halves the exponent security wise. The rule of thumb: If you have N possible outcomes, then after around sqrt(N) guesses the probability of a collision approaches 0.5. So, for birthdays, it's 365 outcomes, so with 19 or 20 people your risk of collision already approaches a half. For BTC private keys, there are 2^256 possible, so with 2^128 guesses you'd approach a likely collision. Fortunately, that's still 1e38, so if you check 1e10 per second, you'd still need 1e20 years to get there.

Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

#257

Post by FabHK »

albert_e wrote: post #201
wirelesspotat wrote: post #64

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?

I am interested on the simple technical answer for this. Is it possible to simply take funds out if you stmble across or happen to randomly generate a valid private key? So if I were developing such a website as posted here ... I would obviously put an automated code that transfers any funds to my own wallet (if there is a non zero wallet discovered when rendering a page on the fly). Effectively just using the millio…

you can do that now, and without a website, obviously. You probably need to do it more than trillions of years, but go ahead. You might be lucky (though it's more likely that you crash in a plane, or, for that matter, that a plane crashes on your house, in the meantime).

Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

#259

Post by skeyo »

cromulent wrote: post #238
bspammer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a rare care where "astronomically low" is actually underselling how unlikely something is.

By many orders of magnitude, I think. There are only estimated to be 10^24 or so stars, which is a lot less than 2^256, right. Astronomical is not in the same league.

...so you're saying there's a chance

Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website

#260

Post by jkhdigital »

400thecat wrote: post #237
Pawka wrote: post #51

Reminds me pretty popular torrent from old times named something similar to "List of all IPv4 addresses - every hacker must have". Sadly I am not able to remember exact name and find it anymore. Backstory is that ~15 years ago when upload ratio was important some person decided to generate a list and upload a torrent with such click bait name just to increase his/her ratio. It worked well.

that is hilarious I remember people used to share their C:/program Files/ directory

The Internet was so cheeky and fun 20 years ago… now it’s just tears and fistfuls of cash
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