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Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

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31–40 of 196 posts

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#31
post #7

Time for a new investment strategy that involves buying whatever (index funds?) then losing your password to force a hold till the encryption algo has been cracked or compute power makes it easy to brute-force. Call it the Moore’s Law Fund.

Best if you just try to lose half the password so you have an advantage on cracking it.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#32

"Michael... now has 30 BTC, now worth $3 million, and is waiting for the value to rise to $100,000 per coin." What the ? You presumably go from not a millionaire to having $3,000,000, and you decide to risk it to triple it? That's some next level greed right there.

How do you know he isn’t hedged? NOT keeping it in Bitcoin is some next-level stupidity, by the simple analysis of trends over the time he’s held it. And the inflation produced by the creation of broad money over the last 3 years hasn’t even come home to roost, yet. I’d say he’s being ruthlessly analytical, not greedy.

Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#33
post #3

> Michael says he was lucky that he lost the password years ago because, otherwise, he would have sold off the bitcoin when it was worth $40,000 a coin and missed out on a greater fortune. This is so true for stocks too

Yes but stocks are usually tied to a business producing some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value. Crypto is tied to, checks notes nothing.

I’m no shill for crypto, but you can’t with a straight face claim that all non-crypto financial instruments are ‘tied to … some sort of service that people want’.

There’s a whole world of shady crap going on in the ‘legitimate’ financial space.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#34
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting but not entirely practical offshoot of this idea is a fund that buys (collects legally?) wallets with lots of crypto & lost passwords and tries to crack them over time.

Or just buy random used digital storage devices in bulk and scan them for potential wallets, or other marketable data. Half the "broken" USB drives out there still have plenty of retrievable data on them. It would be like the "Storage Wars" show, but digital. (Fyi, one very marketed video tape was discovered when the contents of a certain celeb's storage locker was put up for auction. Imagine the possibilities if one…

I don't think it's necessarily legal (at least in some jurisdictions) to collect bitcoin that way, even if you've legally obtained the storage device.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#35

"Michael... now has 30 BTC, now worth $3 million, and is waiting for the value to rise to $100,000 per coin." What the ? You presumably go from not a millionaire to having $3,000,000, and you decide to risk it to triple it? That's some next level greed right there.

You want him to swap absolutely scarce Bitcoin for something that can be printed infinitely out of thin air? Swapping to dollars would be the risk here.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know he isn’t hedged? NOT keeping it in Bitcoin is some next-level stupidity, by the simple analysis of trends over the time he’s held it. And the inflation produced by the creation of broad money over the last 3 years hasn’t even come home to roost, yet. I’d say he’s being ruthlessly analytical, not greedy.

Past performance does not guarantee future results.

True, but if he were looking for guaranteed returns he picked the wrong investment. I presume this person is has some level of risk tolerance far exceeding zero.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#37

It's not clear how datetime was used and why that became a weakness? Doesn't it improve the password security by taking some bytes from /dev/random and salting it with ?

yes so knowing the datetime that was used to salt reduces the search space.

Salt is not the same as seed.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#38
post #3

> Michael says he was lucky that he lost the password years ago because, otherwise, he would have sold off the bitcoin when it was worth $40,000 a coin and missed out on a greater fortune. This is so true for stocks too

Yes but stocks are usually tied to a business producing some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value. Crypto is tied to, checks notes nothing.

I hate on crypto any chance I get, but crypto has damn near a monopoly in facilitating black and/or grey market electronic transactions.

It is very in demand, for instance, in helping dictators evade sanctions, or helping criminals extort or trade illegally.

Re: Researchers cracked an 11-year-old password to a $3M crypto wallet

#40
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but stocks are usually tied to a business producing some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value. Crypto is tied to, checks notes nothing.

I’m no shill for crypto, but you can’t with a straight face claim that all non-crypto financial instruments are ‘tied to … some sort of service that people want’. There’s a whole world of shady crap going on in the ‘legitimate’ financial space.

Oh absolutely. Money is the root of all evil.

But crypto bros are often delusional about what intrinsical value exists in the normal market, compared to crypto coins where they invent the value. Therefore manipulation of value compared to real world markets becomes a lot more abstract.

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