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

wired.com

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

#151

Post by baobabKoodaa »

gobindoriu wrote: post #149
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FYI he's not gambling the bitcoin, he's holding onto it This is the type of cultish speak that makes it insufferable to listen to your sermons. Yes, he is "holding onto" his Bitcoin. But based on the interview it represents something like >90% of his net wealth. Putting >90% of your net wealth onto an extremely volatile asset like Bitcoin can fairly be called "gambling". Some gambles have positive expected values a…

Its not risky if you understand it. If you don’t…then it is gambling

That's not how words work. Or risk. Or anything else, really.

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

#152

Post by ipython »

koliber wrote: post #146
udev4096 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the most random and wildly known way, apart from time based, to pick a seed value then?

Combine the time with some other incremental hard-to-predict inputs. Start with the time, in the milliseconds (not seconds, i.e. epoch time). Use that seed to create a random number. That random number is now your master_seed. Once every 10 seconds, measure the temperature of the CPU, and every other temperature sensor in the system, and put that into a new random seed. Create a random number using this seed. XOR it…

just like anything else with cryptography, please don't roll your own. all major OSes and programming languages provide primitives to generate cryptographically strong random numbers- use that instead.

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

#153

Post by framapotari »

"Michael... now has 30 BTC, now worth $3 million, and is waiting for the value to rise to $100,000 per coin."

Can someone help me understand this? If his 30 BTC are now worth $3 million, that comes down to $100,000 per coin. But he's waiting for the value to rise to... $100,000 per coin?

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

#154

Post by koliber »

ipython wrote: post #152
koliber wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combine the time with some other incremental hard-to-predict inputs. Start with the time, in the milliseconds (not seconds, i.e. epoch time). Use that seed to create a random number. That random number is now your master_seed. Once every 10 seconds, measure the temperature of the CPU, and every other temperature sensor in the system, and put that into a new random seed. Create a random number using this seed. XOR it…

just like anything else with cryptography, please don't roll your own. all major OSes and programming languages provide primitives to generate cryptographically strong random numbers- use that instead.

Yes!

I was hoping to illustrate the the grandparent post where more entropy can come from.

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

#155

Post by kube-system »

shakow wrote: post #133
kube-system wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I specified 'electronic'. Moving physical items around the globe is obviously within the ability of an independent state, but it has logistical overhead. ETH/BTC is comparatively cheap to move.

But dictators don't want electronic things – especially the one whose very design imply them being fully traceable such as ETH/BTC. If you are in the circles where having to move $10M illegally is a common occurrence, paying a guy $10k to take a train between Russia and China with a bag of cash and bribe the border guards another $10k is much better than trying to weasel your way through the KYC process of Coinbase.

No dictator is using Coinbase. Often they get their digital currencies directly, through other illicit activities. e.g. theft, scams, malware, etc.

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

#156

Post by subpixel »

o0-0o wrote: post #59

Oh gosh, I need help with this. It's not nearly that much, but damn I need this.

Last I checked my lost-password fortune was about $8k.

Now, had I spend the same amount of money on bitcoin that I did on the janky underpowered miner setup I put together by not quite understanding the math, my lost-password fortune would approach $1MM.

Either way, I lost my password.

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

#157

Post by kube-system »

fallingsquirrel wrote: post #143
kube-system wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because most of the transfers happening are speculative investment trades, arbitrage, etc. People moving money around, without paying for anything. That source says, when it comes to the demand in terms of spending crypto for goods or services: > 46% of transactions are due to illegal transactions

The 46% is a quote from an obsoleted paper, and it then goes on to explain why their methodology was flawed.

It’s a difference of opinion between the authors.

If Bob transfers $10 back and forth between both of his bank accounts 99 times and then buys $10 worth of crack, would you say that 1% of Bobs money was used for illegal purposes or 100% of it was used for illegal purposes? Depends on what specifically you're trying to measure.

There are two things here that are simultaneously true:

1. A small percent of BTC transactions are for illicit purposes.

2. A large percentage of the goods and services purchased with BTC are illicit.

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

#158

Post by unusualmonkey »

fallingsquirrel wrote: post #142
unusualmonkey wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how you quote that, but not other lines like: "We first document that 90% of transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is not tied to economically meaningful activities". How much of the actually meaningful use is legal? E.g. buying good and services, not evading laws, regulations, sales taxes etc.

Moving the goalposts. GP was only talking about illegal activity. But since you brought it up - Global GDP is $101T. Global yearly forex volume is $2738T. So by this logic you should conclude that 96% of transaction volume in the traditional financial system is also not tied to economically meaningful activities. You're going to be disappointed if you want to believe society as a whole is any less financialized than…

I think it's absurd to say that only say 3% of crypto transactions are criminal, if the majority of other transactions are meaningless.

Surely what we actually care about is how many useful, legal, meaningful transactions there are.

For example if for every 1 legal transaction there is 3 illegal transactions and 96 speculative or maintenance transactions... it starts looking like this is predominantly for criminal uses even though only 3% of transactions are criminal.

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

#159

Post by demondemidi »

fallingsquirrel wrote: post #88
demondemidi wrote: post #62

That is super lucky. They didn’t break the crypto, they broke the PRNG. Amateur wallet design. Any security programmer with a passing knowledge of NIST entropy requirements 800-90 a/b/c would have never done this.

To be fair, this was not a wallet bug. It was a bug in an unrelated password manager.

Ah good point. Thanks.

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

#160

Post by RealStickman_ »

GrantMoyer wrote: post #114
mindcandy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Math is mixed up. He's got 43.6 BTC. Currently worth $68K each, for a total of $2.9 mil. He's waiting for it to be worth $4.4 mil. I'm betting his retirement math worked out to $4.4 mil before taxes. And, $100k is a human-bias round number that BTC is widely expected to hit in the next year.

Considering bitcoin call options for March 2025 are going for only about 12k, I think it's fair to say the consensus is that bitcoin exceding 100k in about a year is unlikely.

He hasn't needed them the last 10 years so he can probably hold out 10 more years.
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