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Comment by anshumankmr | Hacker News Reader

> Finding an active wallet is hard, but not impossible. Every time you open a random page, you have a chance of finding someone else's fortune.

Good to know I have a 1/2^256 chance to find a bitcoin billionaire's wallet. This feels only slightly more ludicrous than the guy who lost his bitcoin in a hard drive and went looking for it in a dumpster.

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This guy? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/uk-man-makes-last-ditch-effo...

Russ Hanneman did it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKXqZh43OH8

Oh it's even crazier. He's trying to excavate the entire land fill now.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hard-drive-lost-bitcoin-landfil...

I think he's in the same category as those startups that try to make a technology that has been repeatedly proven to be nonviable, like wireless power transmission or ducted windmills. His plans don't make sense. The government has made it clear that there will be no excavation. But that doesn't seem to matter, it's such an attractive story and there's such a mania for bitcoin that he can find backing anyway.

At this point, I hope he finds it.

Plot twist: it turns out to be the only key every found using this website. A user finds it 4 hours and 20 minutes before he excavates the hard drive.

It is not 1/2^256. It is "number of wallets with balance"/2^256.

Not that different...

actually its "number of wallets with balance"/2^160.

You don't need to find a specific private key, anyone will do that yields a public key that hashes to the BTC address.

A quick search shows there are a little over 30M addresses with a nonzero balance, which is just under 2^25.

That means the actual probability would be about 1/(2^135).

At a million hashes per second, that means you would likely find one after about 10^27 years.

I have had a crappy life, abused sexually and physically when a child, but trust me whenever I re-hear about that guy losing his hard drive with BTC in it, I am like, yikes.

I've had both, and I'd promptly forget about the bitcoins for the ability to have lived an un-fucked life (which would pay for itself more readily too).

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