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How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

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Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#191

Post by jimmaswell »

sudosysgen wrote: post #189
jimmaswell wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making people want more stuff is socially negative I don't really think so in the general case. Personally I've eaten a lot of food I found out about from ads and wouldn't have known I wanted otherwise, and I'm glad iit happened.

If you want to try new foods, that's cool, I do too. Read local food reviews. But if ads convince you to try 47 different restaurants and that otherwise you would have been perfectly happy to eat at home, then the ads did a disservice to society.

Relatively nobody goes out of their way for local food reviews. If advertising was suddenly banned I feel like people would end up much less likely to try anything new and life would be more stagnant overall. New businesses would struggle to attract customers and everyone would gravitate to McDonald's and Wal Mart even more than they already do.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#193

Post by jodrellblank »

metaweta wrote: post #73
jodrellblank wrote: post #66

@metaweta: The technical side is interesting, but seems like the admin side would be too; how did the administration and contract side play out? Someone needed to front an estimated $100k of GPU costs, without being sure it would work - and then pay for your work on top; who risked that? You had no proof the claimed Bitcoins inside were real, or as many as claimed. You're in New Zealand(?) and the customer is in Russ…

I'm in the USA. He paid us for some work up front and agreed to pay the rest on delivery of the key. He expected to spend most of the $100K he'd budgeted on GPU costs, so we got much less than that for the work; we took the job because it sounded like fun. We didn't need the information in the archived files, just the encryption headers, so he set most of the bytes to zero. I couldn't have spent the coins even if I w…

Thank you, that is interesting; he's wealthy enough and technically capable enough to make that all go a lot easier. (I guessed from going back to check on the process ID on his laptop that you must have had his laptop, and didn't know you could do that with just headers).

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#194

Post by sudosysgen »

jimmaswell wrote: post #191
sudosysgen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to try new foods, that's cool, I do too. Read local food reviews. But if ads convince you to try 47 different restaurants and that otherwise you would have been perfectly happy to eat at home, then the ads did a disservice to society.

Relatively nobody goes out of their way for local food reviews. If advertising was suddenly banned I feel like people would end up much less likely to try anything new and life would be more stagnant overall. New businesses would struggle to attract customers and everyone would gravitate to McDonald's and Wal Mart even more than they already do.

I disagree. I and I lot of people I know go out of our ways for local food reviews, and word of mouth is also incredibly powerful.

And you must remember that for every local food ad there are 300 ads for McDonalds or Walmart, and they are just as effective, altough likely for another demographic.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#195

Post by naveen99 »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #41

I always assumed that the encryption used on zip files was relatively trivial and could be broken given the right software and hardware. Well, it looks like it's a lot harder than I thought. You still need the right software and hardware but you also need the right person to do it. Most of what I read was above my understanding but it was good reading anyhow. Good job on the recovery and good job writing about it.

Wonder if he tried hashcat first: https://hashcat.net/hashcat/

We won’t really know the true value of bitcoin until options are widely available on retail exchanges like fidelity or at least tdameritrade using people’s normal brokerage and ira accounts.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#196

Post by bitcoinmining »

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Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#197

Post by afiori »

Thorrez wrote: post #179
aazaa wrote: post #24

> Recovering the key was usually instantaneous, but to help people feel like they’d gotten their money’s worth, we’d put on a little animated show like a Hollywood hacking scene with lots of random characters that gradually revealed the right password. and later ... > 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 optimizat…

The animated show isn't useful. This article is useful because it actually reveals information about the author. Also even if you're not interested in the author, it has useful information about cryptography, cryptanalysis, and optimization.

the animated show is useful, it is part of the UX and it can be focal in communicating the intention and expectation behind the software.

it is not part of the main business logic but neither are well designed icons.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#198

Post by blazespin »

sireat wrote: 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…

Wasn't Einstein a patent clerk? Can't imagine working on glue code at Google is all that bad.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#199

Post by brailsafe »

dkersten wrote: post #169
joncrane wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two thoughts: 1) I generally take the higher paying gigs but mostly so I can accelerate retirement 2) Even in the crappiness of high paying jobs (I often think I'm essentially being bribed to put up with all the BS) I can generally maneuver myself into doing interesting work. It takes about 1.5 years of concerted effort, but once I understand how stuff works, I can generally start nudging stuff in the right di…

I'm only commenting on 1, not on the rest of your comment: > I generally take the higher paying gigs but mostly so I can accelerate retirement My problem with this outlook is that sacrificing my current well-being for increased future well-being is risky. I don't know how long I will live or what my health will be like. I have to make the best of the time I have now (without sacrificing too much future well-being, of…

It's a tricky balance to strike. I used to think that you should just work if it's available to you, but now I'm much more inclined to work so you can afford to not work in the near-term rather than only at the hypothetical end. If you can afford to be laid off or quit and just willingly chill and do whatever for a while, that's a good option to take.

Re: How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin

#200

Post by dkersten »

brailsafe wrote: post #199
dkersten wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only commenting on 1, not on the rest of your comment: > I generally take the higher paying gigs but mostly so I can accelerate retirement My problem with this outlook is that sacrificing my current well-being for increased future well-being is risky. I don't know how long I will live or what my health will be like. I have to make the best of the time I have now (without sacrificing too much future well-being, of…

It's a tricky balance to strike. I used to think that you should just work if it's available to you, but now I'm much more inclined to work so you can afford to not work in the near-term rather than only at the hypothetical end. If you can afford to be laid off or quit and just willingly chill and do whatever for a while, that's a good option to take.

Absolutely. I’m painfully aware that I didn’t offer any solution either, because it is a balance that everyone must find for themselves. The main thing I was trying to get across is that sacrificing now for a reward in the possibly distant (relatively speaking) future is too risky for me since I don’t know what the future holds (and given how many people I know who have died young makes me reluctant to take for granted that I would reach retirement age (even early))
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