Bitcoin Forum

Anyway to have my computer attempt to sweep random addresses?

I'd like for my laptop to attempt to randomly sweep bitcoin addresses.  How would I go about doing this?

Randomly generating a private key to a used address is virtually impossible. Therefore I can't imagine that anyone has published a program that attempts it. It's rather pointless, but if you insist on trying you will probably have to write it yourself.

Write some code to generate an address and private key and then if there is a balance there, create a transaction to send it to an address you control.  Repeat.  Unless you are exploiting flaws in an PRNG or poorly chosen brain wallets, it is pretty pointless though except for its educational value in learning how to do so.

Read this entire thread

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=107172.0;all

and this thread:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1573035.0

Historical search, note date.  There are many, many other threads on this subject - just do a search (pun intended).  No, you are not the first one to think of this.

State of the art sequential search.

It appears they expect to find the next largest prize from the puzzle transaction in the next few years.