341–350 of 398 posts
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When you visit a page, they generate all the private keys on the page and check for balances. If you happen upon a key that actually has a balance, they will clean it out before you can.
I kind of doubt it, the browser makes a request to blockchain.info to check the balances. If they wanted to do what you are saying they'd make that request somewhere one the backend.
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Same with private cryptocurrency keys. Otherwise, accessing non-public APIs with weak security by playing around with the URL would be legal.
No. Invalid comparison. If you legitimately discover a cryptocurrency wallet private key by sheet lucky, and such cryptocurrency has no backing = is based in pure thin air, such as the case of Bitcoin, and there are public nodes which doesn't require you to abide by contracts that would forbid you to do so (which is supposedly all nodes), you're good to use that as you wish and it won't be a crime. It's unethical to…
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…
This is a rare care where "astronomically low" is actually underselling how unlikely something is.
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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
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It derives the public keys from the private keys and then check these.
Thanks. So each of these potential private keys that show up on a page would only have one corresponding public key? I guess I forgot how basic private/public key encryption works (again).
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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
what range? i feel you're joshin'
Just re-checked...the answer is a lot less mundane than theorized.
I wasn't clicking on next button I was repeatedly hitting last page button...and last page for whatever stats reason has does indeed have a freakishly high high number of used addresses
So interesting but of no real consequence
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I don't know if "code is law" has to be invoked here. Isn't that a HN-specific strawman argument? Anyways, of course you can take those coins as when you're running Bitcoin you're strictly speaking not signing a TOS and nobody ever owned those coins. What people keep private are signing keys for a transaction output. But if you found the key independently, they should be yours too.
Of course it depends on jurisdiction, but it would be really interesting to see what would happen if someone got their hands on keys of some commercial organizations’ wallet and then publicly announced (according to the premise that they are the rightful owner). E.g by using a PRNG-weakness in some HSM or something, i.e no entry into their networks etc. My guess is that the court would recognize the first owner as th…
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A bit too busy to navigate that (just got an iPhone for the first time in my life, not good at navigating safari history in bulk yet) But one of them was 1337, another some variant of 420-420xxx +-2 pages, another some variant of 1000000-1000000,xxx,xxx,xxx +-2 pages on those. I can tell you there was nothing on 8008135 though
So not random at all, other people had exactly the same idea as you and picked the same numbers. I would have been more surprised to see zero traffic at those addresses to be honest.
There’s a singular emptied walled on 1337 and nothing else +-25 at a minimum from it, I didn’t look any further.
You’re telling me that other people had exactly the same idea, but out of everyone in crypto, ever, it was only a singular person?
That seems more outlandish than the fact there’s one there IMO.
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https://github.com/TheDen/btc-heist/blob/5cf0ef73857277f1321... You don't need the f.close() here - the context manager does it for you.
What's wrong with explicitly closing it though?
Better avoid surprising things.
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?