Bitcoin Forum

Have u ever found a private key, randomly, that had some Bitcoin in it?

I think this rarely happens,   and gladly so.

~CfA~

All ive ever found are brain wallets that at some point had something in them. I spent a while going through different ones but they where all emptied well before i got anywhere near them. As for collisions there shouldnt be even one case where someone has been assigned an address and it had bitcoin in it unless it was a website who gave someone another users address. Im sure a few people on heremay have found brainwallets with some value left in them though.

I haven't found any private key randomly, or by any chance at all. Let alone those that have any value in it.
It would be great for me though if that could happen to me but I don't have any idea how that will happen at all.

Till now i have not stuck that luck that i got any private key with bitcoin, why even in lottery system also i a have never got any draw with prize, i am a very unlucky person.

I have never found neither tried to find a bitcoin address with a private key, but when I wanted to learn about vanity addresses I came acrros and found an address with a private key but no bitcoin there even though it gets funded sometimes.
Here you go: https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen

I think it would be more likely you would find a smartphone or some device with an unlocked wallet-
Coinbase, etc
than you would randomly discover a private key.
It could happen, but I think the odds are like winning the lottery one in a few hundred million?
(I'm sure someone on the forum knows the actual percentage chance of guessing a key)

The chances of that happening are extremely extremely small. unless ofcourse, you misplace your own private key somewhere and find it again later on.

your question is the way of asking the same question that has been getting asked for as long as bitcoin exists (2008-2009). everybody wants to know if it is possible to find a private key of another person and the answer to that is not in a million years.

There was some website which was tracking a lot of Bitcoin addresses listing their private keys as well so random people could log in and sweep the wallets clean but I can't remember the name of it now. I think it was some kind of a joke though because there were millions of addresses in there and like 99% of them were empty so I doubt it that you would have found anything worthy in there  ;D

It would be great if i found one but alas, I havent found one ever since I started with bitcoin. I think the possibility of founding someone's private key is little to impossible.  Unless you found some lost smart phone and the private key is saved in it.  Well that will be one in a million too i guess :D

Yes, got a number private keys sometime ago with bitcoins in it (somebody just posted them publicly).  The thing is I can't get the bitcoins because of too many small inputs or something.  It was too complicated for me so I gave up.  They're gone after a day.

But if by 'random' you mean random generation then no.  I don't think I'll ever generate a private key with bitcoins in it in my lifetime.

The chance of getting a loaded random bitcoin address is basically 0. I do not think anyone has ever found any. However, you chance may be better if you try to generate a random brain wallet- who knows someone out there might think just the same as you!

that was a sheduled / prepared attack vs the blockchain and i remember that some services got stucked especially blockchain.info

@OP, it is so hard and you need to be lucky or patient (for years)

how did you do that? i mean, how can you find a brain wallet? were you just guessing the mnemonic seeds or what did you mean by that? 

Hmm pretty lucky, never had this happen to me unfortunately :(

that has never happened for me and i dont think that this is possible (at least the chance is near to impossible) to happen so in my opinion if a person doesnt give it to anyone then he or she is really safe

nope and will never find as it is practically impossible!

Yeah, I've found a private key with Bitcoin in it before. My own private key ;D

but for real though, I haven't found any private addresses that have ever been used aside from my own because I haven't ever gone and tried to find  private key, simply because I think it would be useless for the most part. The chances of finding one are basically 0, and I really don't care enough.

i think is nearly imposible to find a private key with btc on it,
i mean the odds are something 0.1% ? maybe less ?
and i bet if it was possible there should be guys that will have made a program running random private keys and importing them, instead of mining generating private keys 24/7 and we should have read a thread like that..even from a newbie account ! testing our temper control  :D