Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

First there's no practical way btc can be deflationary given the current interest. The currency pool hasn't kept up with the amount of fiat in the markets at all.

Anyway, second part:

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... is a good list. What you're looking for are wallets with a really early first in and no first out (or not one in a really long time).

#4 is a good one! https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQ... This wallet was last touched in 2011 and has $1,008,433,581.88 in it (yes, ba-ba-billion) Either this is the most disciplined investor ever or it's a lost file.

This person dropped $1,000 in 2010 on a few btc and it's now worth $245million (https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/1PeizMg76Cf96nUQrY...) ... again, that's either super discipline or just a misplaced file.

The untouched wallets are sadly really really common, especially when you get a few pages in ... you see things like this: https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/13DyBwhpDw6152q1dr... ... this person put in $8 (100btc), then $21 (400), then $122 (1700) and that was their july, 2010. Now it's $26.3 million.

Nobody ever believed the fantasy talk in 2010 that 1 btc was going to be worth a dollar, yet alone 12,500! Lots of people were really careless.

I'm there somewhere and have millions of dollars of bitcoins in a lost wallet. Weee, how fun!

Seems morbid but my guess is that they died. Would be a shame, since their family should have it, but it makes the most sense to me.

At least that's how I'd like to think of it, otherwise some poor sod is having to think about this every single day.

Not really! After I realized I had lost my wallet, I just went out and bought more bitcoins. So I predict most of these people that lost that wallet in 2011 don't have a zero balance today.

My question is: why isn't someone brute-forcing those lost wallets? I imagine a billion dollars would be worth it.

Because it would theoretically take an insane amount of time? It's cryptographically secure, so unless you have a quantum computer laying around for the factorization.... Might have to wait a little bit for the brute force to complete

Layman question: there is no way to brute force access to these accounts?

Yes, maybe, kind of?

With quantum computing it's expected that the ECDSA public-key cryptography used in bitcoin addresses will be broken. However, the ECDSA public key is only exposed when your first transaction out of the address is signed. If you only use addresses once (recommended practice), an attacker would have to break your private key faster than it takes for your transaction to propagate to the entire network in order to steal your coins. It would take a long time between the first cracking of ECDSA to nearly instantly being able to crack it. For example, the first publicly-disclosed attack on SHA1 took 110 GPU-years.

If the accounts listed by the OP have sent transactions in the past and reused addresses (which was common back in 2010/11), it's possible the private keys can be bruteforced in the future.

If not, we don't know the ECDSA public key for the address. Bruteforcing it gets a LOT harder--but never say never.

No, we don't know where the wallets are located physically. I'm not sure it is possible to brute force a wallet even if we did know where it was.

A lot of people track and watch these wallets to see if anything moves, it would cause a lot of panic if these lost coins started moving.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com