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How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

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11–20 of 209 posts

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#11
post #2

I've always wondered what the development process looks like for these type of algorithms. If you have to run the program for a year to know if it will work, how can you have any confidence that what you've written is going to do the trick?

It brings interesting trade-offs for program design. You can write the code one way which may be 10x faster but harder to reason about, or another way which is more straightforward but takes an extra 5 days go execute. How confident are you in your code or debugging ability? How many iterations will you need? I'm assuming this was written in CUDA based on the block/thread ID mix-up.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#13
post #5

The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…

Getting paid $300k / year to work on CRUD apps seems pretty nice to me.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#14

excellent story. can you share the number of bitcoins that were retrieved and how the customer lost the password in the first place?

> Back in January of 2016, he had bought around $10K or $15K of Bitcoin and put the keys in an encrypted zip file.

Based on the price of Bitcoin back then, it seems like this was about 30-40 Bitcoin?

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#15
post #9
post #7

"I’m currently looking for work in a staff or senior staff engineering or data scientist role. If you’ve got interesting technical analysis or optimization problems, please reach out to me and let’s talk." That is probably the best CV I've ever read by accident. You should broaden your job hunt criteria to technical content marketing - seriously! Very rare to possess the skill to tell a story in an entertaining, appr…

Hahaha, thanks!

> If you’ve got interesting technical analysis...

FYI, not sure if english is your first language or not but this should be "If you have interesting technical analysis..."

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#16

excellent story. can you share the number of bitcoins that were retrieved and how the customer lost the password in the first place?

> Back in January of 2016, he had bought around $10K or $15K of Bitcoin and put the keys in an encrypted zip file. Based on the price of Bitcoin back then, it seems like this was about 30-40 Bitcoin?

Was the computer stolen or did he actually forget the password?

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#17
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha, thanks!

> If you’ve got interesting technical analysis... FYI, not sure if english is your first language or not but this should be "If you have interesting technical analysis..."

Native American English speaker. "If you've got" like this is perfectly idiomatic.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha, thanks!

> If you’ve got interesting technical analysis... FYI, not sure if english is your first language or not but this should be "If you have interesting technical analysis..."

"If you've got" may not be formal "correct" English, but everyone understands it and it's used quite commonly in daily speech (and writing). I would wager that "if you've got" may actually be preferable to "if you have," in order to engage the reader at a more comfortable, personal level.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#19
post #5

The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…

> How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go?

I think it goes something like the Open Source saying "that person doesn't owe anyone their intelligence to work on so-called important problems for free, just because it might be nice if they did".

Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to pay more for that, than for ads, or find a way they don't need to earn money to live at the standard they want.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#20
post #7

"I’m currently looking for work in a staff or senior staff engineering or data scientist role. If you’ve got interesting technical analysis or optimization problems, please reach out to me and let’s talk." That is probably the best CV I've ever read by accident. You should broaden your job hunt criteria to technical content marketing - seriously! Very rare to possess the skill to tell a story in an entertaining, appr…

> That is probably the best CV I've ever read by accident.

Exactly what I was thinking.

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