[HN Gopher] Eight dormant Satoshi-era Bitcoin wallets reactivate...
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Eight dormant Satoshi-era Bitcoin wallets reactivated after 14 yrs
Author : amrrs
Score : 118 points
Date : 2025-07-04 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| ETH_start wrote:
| April 2011 is not Satoshi era. Satoshi had dropped out of public
| Bitcoin forums by late 2010.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Imagine finding a file on an old laptop from when you were just
| futzing around 15 years ago. And it was worth $9 billion.
| bravoetch wrote:
| It's not that. These are addresses with 10k BTC each. That's
| very intentional storage even for 2011.
| bombcar wrote:
| Wasn't 10k bitcoin the price of a pizza or something back
| then?
| qqqult wrote:
| BTC ranged between $0.30 and $27 back in 2011 so not quite
| mattlondon wrote:
| Maybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD
| finally found it!
|
| Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly
| spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the
| keys for old wallets?
| bravoetch wrote:
| I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of
| being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| It's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's close enough.
|
| There are 200 million+ BTC wallets.
|
| They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of
| wallets - in how many years?
| handfuloflight wrote:
| How does the equation change with $100m of cloud or GPU
| compute as GP speculated? These are all hobbyists.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It changes that if you attempt to liquidate that much
| BTC, BTC crashes and you've got 90% less money than you
| hoped for.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Do you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why
| would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?
| cj wrote:
| They could also do a private party transaction to sell
| the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the
| sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.
|
| This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark
| pools" [0]
|
| > Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block
| trading by institutional investors who did not wish to
| impact the markets with their large orders and obtain
| adverse prices for their trades.
|
| [0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/050614/
| introdu...
| phil21 wrote:
| The vast majority of BTC transactions are done this way.
| Anything of any size is traded via OTC desks or other
| more private avenues.
| usrusr wrote:
| Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that
| after the transaction, both sides would know the key to
| the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up
| a transaction first.
| cj wrote:
| After the transaction, you can still send the bitcoin to
| the purchaser's wallet.
|
| But since the purchase itself happens off exchange,
| there's no record of how much the coins were sold for, so
| no impact on market price.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Just the fear of future liquidation would eventually
| severely crash BTC.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Like it's crashing now on this news?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| There's ~$188B in Satoshi era wallets.
|
| While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all
| ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably
| expected it was not prior to this - or at least the
| probability was low enough to barely factor, it's
| unlikely to crash BTC.
|
| Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of
| liquidation is another.
|
| That much _should_ be able to get liquidated
| intelligently without moving the market.
| paulpauper wrote:
| It depends how it's sold. Market orders would have more
| impact than OTC .
| paulpauper wrote:
| yeah, people think it's the selling that makes the price
| fall. it is the anticipation . markets are forward
| looking
| paulpauper wrote:
| if someone could brute force a key, they would target
| small inactive wallets , rather than big wallets and
| drawing attention to it
| nottrueatallz wrote:
| Not true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the
| crypto algorithms and implementations which agencies use
| to achieve any objective they may have. On top of that
| there are also holes across the software and hardware
| stacks of various implementations. Just because they run
| all the researchers and fund a lot of it does not mean
| there are no holes.
|
| Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an
| amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.
|
| Just because they are not published, does not mean they
| are not using them, someone else found them and are using
| them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day.
|
| Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other
| risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it
| starts making leaps above Moores Law.
|
| There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That
| researches and generates keys in unconventional ways,
| different than the ways they are being generated now.
| Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be
| Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows
| the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they
| cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first
| instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing
| across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my
| folks!
| celticninja wrote:
| You dont understand bitcoin or the math or the
| cryptography ehind it.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Can you look me in the eye and state that you understand
| Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it?
|
| Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to
| narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to
| a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It would take approximately 6B H100 GPU days to crack
| every active BTC wallet.
|
| So if you had 10,000 H100s running, it'd only take ~1500
| years.
|
| You'd have a high probability to find key in under ~1000
| years, though.
|
| Even if I'm off by 3 orders of magnitude, it would take a
| decade and cost billions, and not make financial sense.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Active addresses have less entropy too
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| *at most ... years.
|
| People always forget those numbers are worst case
| scenarios. I mean, you can get luck on the very first
| guess too.
| volfonibros wrote:
| For anyone else who's been vaguely following the story as it
| popped up every few years, the latest news came out a few days
| ago : he finally gave up.
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| Source?
|
| https://x.com/howelzy
| nixass wrote:
| > he finally gave up
|
| Sounds like something someone who found few billion USD on a
| thumb drive would say :)
| stavros wrote:
| I wouldn't say anything.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| That's definitely also what I would publicize if I actually
| found the HDD. :)
| rtkwe wrote:
| He lost his court battle to force the local government
| running the dump to allow him to dig the last I heard. So I
| doubt it, he wasn't even allowed to really try.
| throw310822 wrote:
| > what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending
| 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys
| for old wallets?
|
| Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet.
| Not eight wallets closely related to each other.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Keys created with an RNG that turned out to be a little too
| predictable?
|
| Or some other flaw found in a wallet's key generation?
| pyman wrote:
| One of my students believes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel
| created Bitcoin. Here's the summary of the 5 page doc he
| presented:
|
| In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold
| team in Anguilla.
|
| Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had
| plans to build a similar digital currency.
|
| In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the
| digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their
| bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a
| bigger dependency on banks.
|
| By 2004, there were over a million E-Gold accounts. Banks
| weren't happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter
| understood exactly how much potential this new kind of
| digital currency had.
|
| In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for
| running an unlicensed money-transmitting business. That
| same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.
|
| Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke
| and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going
| bankrupt.
|
| They probably hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold
| team to build blockchain and start mining Bitcoins and paid
| them from 2007 to 2010.
| paulpauper wrote:
| this would be highly improbable. the odds of only remembering
| enough of the key to brute force it, is slim.
|
| guessing a whale's key? zero
| coolspot wrote:
| Someone just got out of jail.
| jedberg wrote:
| Ross Ulbricht got out a few months ago. Could be his.
| paulpauper wrote:
| he only had $40 million . if he had $1 billion the feds would
| have known about it
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| lol. Did you read the whole wired piece on how the feds
| couldn't find anything under their nose on that case?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| An old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I
| am almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs.
|
| It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many
| Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have
| known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much
| anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check
| this, but it's too far fetched.
|
| I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made
| optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever
| lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts
| and darknet market users.
| Stevvo wrote:
| Most addicts would likely not hold Bitcoin in wallet, but
| spend it on getting their next fix as soon as they buy it.
| It's not like you're thinking long-term, invest in Bitcoin so
| you can buy more drugs down the line. There would be leftover
| change but not big amounts.
| Xss3 wrote:
| You'd be surprised how many of these addicts would be
| buying for multiple other less tech savvy addicts and
| essentially becoming small time dealers themselves to fund
| their own habit. If they got locked up or ODd at the right
| time there could've been a few thousand usd in btc in a
| wallet at a time when each btc was worth less than 10usd.
| jedberg wrote:
| If you have $8B in BTC, is there any reasonable way to turn that
| into any fiat currency? USD, EUR, anything? Can you even buy that
| much USDC?
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Loans using the BTC as collateral.
|
| Buy good / commodities with BTC and resell them.
|
| Sell the BTC.
|
| Probably not all $8 gigadollars at once, but is there any
| reason you would immediately need that much?
| jedberg wrote:
| > but is there any reason you would immediately need that
| much?
|
| Because you worry that BTC will crash and want it in
| something more stable?
| PoshBreeze wrote:
| BTC is volatile but it isn't going to crash tomorrow or any
| time soon at least not by the amount that would make sense
| to sell with a wallet this old.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Well, one way to lower the price would be to put eight
| billion on the market all at once.
| bgwalter wrote:
| If the Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund scam that was announced
| after Trump's election is launched, there will be a price
| bottom that is financed by public funds.
|
| I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his
| own coins:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uae-fund-buys-100-m...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-07-02/donald-tr...
| pawelduda wrote:
| Sure you can. If you do it over a few months, it will get
| absorbed by market because there are buyers (as of today).
| Though this is kind of unprecedented, so markets could find
| this kind of event bearish and front run your sells which tanks
| the price. But I can't imagine I'd care if I held for 14 years.
| There is also USDT which is much bigger than USDC.
| diggan wrote:
| Also if you approach Coinbase/Kraken/$exchange and tell them
| you have X million to offload, they'll probably let you do it
| off-market, so no one (except for the ledger, obviously)
| would really notice.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| yes, that's why the exchanges are nearly $100bn companies
|
| between multiple corporations buying $1bn per week, retail, and
| nation states, there is a large appetite for this amount with a
| few phone calls
| paulpauper wrote:
| nah, they are worth that much because of inflated valuations
| dist-epoch wrote:
| If you don't want to bother, you can auction it and some hedge
| fund which wants to buy will take it from your hand.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| F word is what caught my eye first
| duttish wrote:
| Whoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good
| security company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who
| they are. Seems like wrench attacks been been happening a lot
| more the last year.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| looking at the address types this just looks more like a
| security rotation to a stronger hashing method
| Marsymars wrote:
| I don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference
| between using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of
| Bitcoin vs using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of
| any other liquid asset that could be used to buy bitcoins.
| andylynch wrote:
| Bitcoin doesn't ask questions when you unexpectedly want to
| make a very large transfer to a new payee. Your banker will.
| paulpauper wrote:
| But exchanges will if you deposit that much, and will
| freeze your $ if they don't like your response.
| BJones12 wrote:
| If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a
| transfer order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a
| branch, make sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches
| escorting me in, and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed
| off.
|
| And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or
| weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during
| which time I could call and cancel.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Also, for the rest of your life, you'd be able to get the
| people arrested who stole the money.
|
| So they'd either to kill you after, and it would be obvious
| why, and there'd be an easy lead on who.
|
| Your odds of getting away with stealing that kind of money
| conventionally are essentially zero.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > And if it was still legit after that, there would be days
| or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen
|
| or you get a better bank to begin with
|
| most banks that call their slow processes "security
| purposes" are actually just putting up barriers to maintain
| liquidity. the banks that go bust are the ones that got
| clientele based on making it convenient to transfer
| paulpauper wrote:
| But the criminal's stolen BTC are tainted. Exchanges will
| not accept them. procession of them is a crime
| Marsymars wrote:
| Alright, so I can see it as a matter of scale.
|
| Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people
| by leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people's
| houses down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.
|
| But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections
| in place to ensure that it can't be easily transferred
| away, given the associated upside/downside? That's...
| roughly as foolish as keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems
| (notwithstanding the logistical problems with the
| size/weight) under your mattress.
| jedberg wrote:
| This is the other edge of that double edged sword of "no
| regulations". It's a lot easier to steal bitcoin with no
| consequence because there isn't an entire financial system
| backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| You are confused. The people with guns will come for you if
| you steal bitcoin and they know who you are.
|
| > Bitcoin thief sentenced to 5 years in prison for stealing
| $1 billion in crypto and laundering it with his social-
| media rapper wife 'Razzlekhan'
|
| https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/15/bitcoin-thief-
| sentence...
| paulpauper wrote:
| No, he was changed with laundering.
| diggan wrote:
| > there isn't an entire financial system backed by people
| with guns to help you if you are wronged
|
| It's not the "financial system" that comes and hunts
| criminals with guns, but police, acting based on what laws
| they seen has been broken. And stealing $3 billion is as
| illegal if it was Bitcoins, as if it was Euro or USD.
| sampl3username wrote:
| You just need to swap them for monero and then monero for
| litecoin or bitcoin again. Now you have anonymous, untraceable
| coins.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I doubt there's enough liquidity to swap that kind of
| money...
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Monero daily volume is like $50m lol
| creatonez wrote:
| > Satoshi-era
|
| Not true in the slightest. Satoshi was already gone by 2010, and
| in 2011 there were ~8000 transactions per day from folks outside
| of Satoshi's circle.
| MaxPock wrote:
| It pains me because I learnt about bitcoin way back in 2010 and
| sixQuarks wrote:
| I learned about it here, but everyone said it was a scam and
| not to buy
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| A superposition of wrong and right if there ever was one.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Easy to kick yourself in retrospect but if we could see the
| future we'd all be millionaires. AAPL was $0.28 in 2002
| (adjusted for splits, something like $12 at the time).
| rasz wrote:
| It is still a scam. Its just that critical mass of delusional
| people bought into it like Gamestop or Tesla stock. Even
| super obvious scams like Nikola take years to register price
| wise.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I learned about it from my friend, but couldn't bother with
| downloading a wallet client and mining etc
| pixelpoet wrote:
| ... and? What is happening with people's attention span?
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| You're supposed to be able to fill in the second half of the
| sentence based on context. They consider it to be obvious
| from the first half.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| They must be an expert in number theory. I have a marvelous
| continuation of this sentence which
| paulpauper wrote:
| You probably would have sold or lost them anyway. Probably a
| tiny percentage of people from 2011 still held
| hdb385 wrote:
| The CIA are prepare for the final lap
| lazyeye wrote:
| Clearly Elon is in need of a cash injection..
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/s/IhC7VfG1Wp
|
| (No I'm not serious)
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Can they be spending sidechain coins quietly or is that visible
| too?
| EGreg wrote:
| I have been saying for a decade
|
| Satoshi isnt gonna move wallets 1 through 10
|
| But he probably had wallet 55, 182 and 281-290 and has been
| spending this whole time. Any founder of a crypto project can do
| that.
| EGreg wrote:
| On a side note, if quantum algorithms break elliptic curve
| cryptography, then wouldn't Satoshi's wallets and others be
| flooding the market with coin transfers?
|
| The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large
| Bitcoin UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-
| resistant, by a certain date, or lose the ability to move that
| money.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no proof
| that a general solution to elliptic curve discrete logarithm
| problem can't be found.
|
| It's reasonable to assume that a solution hasn't been found yet
| though, otherwise that would be the world's best kept secret.
| wmf wrote:
| That's downstream of P vs NP.
| bix6 wrote:
| Where did they transfer them? I see fck in a few lol.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Probably North Korea.
| moomin wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/WatcherGuru/status/1941167512491864554
| alecsm wrote:
| I wish I had access to my old wallet. I mined around 1.5BTC with
| my laptop and I deleted the wallet after a while because it was
| worthless.
| paulpauper wrote:
| you probably would have sold it at $100 or something anyway
| freedomben wrote:
| Yep. I used to pay my Dish Network bill with BTC. Youth is
| wasted on the young and hindsight is 20/20
| twright wrote:
| This is definitely something I remind myself of for any
| investment I sell and later on explodes. For bitcoin there
| were way too many highs that I definitely would have sold at.
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