Bitcoin Forum

Let's assume that you guess the correct private key of Huobi's cold wallet. What would you do?

35hK24tcLEWcgNA4JxpvbkNkoAcDGqQPsP (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/35hK24tcLEWcgNA4JxpvbkNkoAcDGqQPsP) right now has 255,502BTC

If you steal them, there are many bad cases. First of all (I'm not sure), they may find your IP address that you did that. If you send an information of 255kBTC the node that will receive it (if you use a wallet) will know your IP address. It's a matter of time to find you. (if you're unlucky too)
If you are a node, the first node(s) that will receive it will know you're the guy.

The other bad case is that bitcoin price will drop DRAMATICALLY! Imagine yourself reading the news that some hackers stole 255kBTC, wouldn't you be a bit afraid? Especially the other rich addresses, that knew how much Huobi was protecting it. We would forget the possible $20k of 2021.

So even 1 satoshi or 255kBTC would make you a thief that could end up in a difficult situation.

On the other hand, you only live once, hah?

For me, I can't imagine what I am unable to do ever. It's impossible to assume private key of Houbi's cold wallet. Personally, I believe most of big exchange are using the multising cold wallet. So even you assume single private key, then you will not able to transfer funds alone. However, if in case someone able to hack this wallet, then bitcoin price would fall due to FUD. But believe it will never happen.

I am wondering are there any block explorer or anything that we could check the address if its multising? I am not a tech guy so I am unable to use any script.

Having such guilt of stealing money from thousands and millions of people won't be worth it. Unless you're a psychopath and don't feel any guilt at all. And along with that, you're going to be digitally on the run your whole life because a lot of people will be watching and doing chainalysis every time the funds moved.

Both downsides heavilymassively outweigh the riches you gain from stealing that amount of money in my opinion, assuming you even get to actually spend them in the first place.

Let's assume that I guess the correct private key.Yeah,but guessing the correct private key will take millions of years. ;D
This post is seems like pointless fantasizing.Are you suggesting that you know the private key of Huobi wallet? ;D
This is something like a philosophical dilemma.Do you choose to be a very rich guy with big problems for the rest of you life,or you choose to be a poor guy with small problems and a clean conscience?I'll choose the second option.
OP,can you share with us why did you come up with the idea of writing this forum thread?

With so many blockchain analysis company and private bitcoin address trackers out there, it will be very difficult to get away and stole that huge amount of bitcoin in one get go. You can probably can get away with it in the beginning, maybe around 2010-2013, but we evolved already, so it's not going to be easy. On the contrary it will be a burden on your end to hide your track, so it is not worth it.

You can't guess a private key. It's like asking "what if you won all lotteries, casino and sports betting bets every day for the rest of your life".


Hackers use ToR and other tools for hiding their identities. If it was like you're saying, we'd track every single exchange hacker.


It would be quite bet, but in some time Bitcoin would recover.


Now, what I would have done if I knew their private key, is notifying them about the flaws in their security. They'd likely give me a few BTC as a bug bounty, and I'd be more happy with it than with 250k stolen coins.

If anyone guess the correct private of Huobi's or any exchange's cold wallet than all other exchanges will block/freeze your wallet address to protect the users funds because it's the bond of the exchanges. Whenever any exchanges hack and analyzers finout the hacker's addresses , than all other exchanges block/freeze the addresses so that hacker can't convert that stolen funds.So, it's useless even if anyone guess the correct private key and also price of btc won't drop dramatically because only newbies will sell out their crypto and real crypto users won't do that. Besides, whales always try to protect the ecosystem , even they are making profits sometimes, imo.

In such case I will stop imagining, cuz that is the only solution to all the proposed problems. Guessing their private key is impossible and well illegal and fraudulent. Live the 200+K BTC and hustle to make use.

Days when exchanges use hot wallet to store their exchange and customer funds gone away too far. After many terrible hacks in the past and simultaneously supported by the development of Bitcoin and wallets, they use multisignature wallet and cold wallet to have better security.

Some people don't know the technically wallet migrations of exchanges, and they said "Oh, look at it, my bitcoin was sent out immediately when I sent them to my exchange address and got some confirmations. My bitcoin is hacked on that exchange!"

Lessons learned that if exchange fund is stored in a single wallet and only the owner has access (with non-multisignature wallet), if owner passes away, the fund will be gone too.
I have not heard any of bitcoin explorers provide the feature. You can recheck all explorers in the List of useful Bitcoin block explorer (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5197909.0)

l'd just park it somewhere and gain the rightful access to the interest until they require me to return the funds. Even 1 week is good enough to earn a sum ;D

My friend also asked me a question close to this and its funny since he answered it himself,  he said that it is a dillema.

I ask him how is this a dillema? He answered that knowing the consequences of what will happen, you are also considering the good possibilities of what can happen to you. Either you tell it to the owner, you rob all of it and that also means robbing the people's money or just take out small parts of it for you to use it.

For me, you have a choice but it is not a dillema since you already know the key and doing nothing or telling them you know it is the best thing to do rather than stealing people's hard work.

The best option is to tell Huobi that you actually could get it and receive some bounty for this

Is this post for fun? Lol
Or this is something like gathering idea of how to run away without getting caught when someone hacked into a huge amount of Bitcoin.

Well, Houbi's wallet is indeed stored with ridiculously huge amount of Bitcoin. If "I" have their private keys, I will distribute fractions of Bitcoin into different addresses randomly. Like playing the Robinhood role. Lol
Since, It's almost impossible that you're not being caught when all of the people are trying to locate you and the IP addresses that you're using.

Hacks happen every now and then so it's not always impossible to run away ;D

If I did know the private key of the aforesaid person , I would not touch the coins at the end of the day we are responsible for the image of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoins and also our image in our own soul.

There is no way that I would like to think otherwise plus this is really a bad idea and I don't really like the intentions you might have had while posting this comment.

I have a local Bitcoin community , most people I know , acquaintances and they do need help sometimes with buying/selling of Bitcoins so they transfer their money to me or their cryptocurrencies in my wallet. It have never ever crossed my mind to do something pity. All am worried about is their money being safe.

If there is any money that a person should claim and respect is their own hard-earned money .

I hope the person did keep his Bitcoins safe and maybe he should shift the Bitcoins in a hardware wallet securely and these kind of information should not be posted , where did the privacy in cryptocurrencies went ?

Let's be responsible 💪

there is a big difference between "guessing" the private key and "hacking" the wallet of some centralized service. the later is happening too often and even though it affects the price but in the end nobody cares about it. there has been lots of cases and many of them huge.

the former on the other hand is simply impossible and it is worth nothing discussing about it. if that happened it would be the end of bitcoin, it won't matter what the price was before or how much balance that address had! but the difference is that long before "guessing" becomes a possibility we will have had switched algorithms.

Why so doom about guessing? I didn't say that it is possible and I read replies kind "You can't do that", "There's no point to discuss it since it's impossible". I say IF. I know it's not possible.

well i said there is no point because it has been discussed a million times under different disguises such as collision, creating the same wallet as someone else, finding the same private key twice,... otherwise if you like we can repeat it all over again!

I'm not a thief so I'd probably try to contact them and tell them that I could have made use of that but didn't, saving them a lot of trouble and money and ask for a reward.
I'd prefer a few thousand dollars of honest money than millions and a lifetime of looking over my shoulder and taking pills before going to bed.


No, I wouldn't. It's still money in the network just like Mt.Gox money or DPR's money. They all belonged to criminals at some point. All bitcoin in circulation will at some point go through the hands of criminals just like most dollar bills you use every day were one day used to buy drugs or even snort them.

Well, assuming if I guess that private key (which probably will not happen) then I guess that's not stealing right? Considering I just guess it by eg. creating a new wallet not some hacking since there's no way I will do that. But probably it's stealing once I starting to transfer the funds to another address since it's not mine literally.

If that happens then 100% I'd be nervous, it's just like I won a million-dollar lottery without having a lottery ticket. Sure I would ask someone I knew, or ask the community what actually happens. Probably they will suggest letting Huobi know about this and let them transfer the fund to another wallet they owned since I have a copy of the private key of that wallet addy.

Lets say it did happen even though this situation is nearly possible for it happen yet we know the  odds on hitting up a PK with a specific balance.
If you  do able to get Houbi cold wallet PK then you will surely think all of the things that you had wished for but the question is,
would you able to withdraw? All of  the eyes would be on you and moving funds will really be a hot issue.It will surely cause panic into the entire crypto market.

Its somehow pointless to discuss this topic though but this is just a what if.  ;D

What I would do if I'd get my hands on the money  ??? Hmm, I'd use that money to invest into property development as this is quite a lucrative industry. Apart from this I'd also re-invest some into crypto coins and perhaps a little spread towards stock investments.

Nearly anything can be done with money and there are so many ways to spend money but an investor always thinks about how to make more money with the existing money and that's investment for you!

People can think on what to do with the money. Let’s say you guess the key of a certain exchange I think you cannot withdraw it because of the process to make it happen. Unless you hack their wallet, in any case you successfully withdraw it all there are a lot of things that could do with your money investment, buy a property, and start a business. However, in reality, it is unusual to get the exchange private key through guessing.

The word is "almost", not always, and I hope you have read the whole context of my comment that I'm talking about the Huobi's wallet not with any random guy's wallet.
I'm totally aware about the scam and hack happening in crypto space, but don't you assume when someone hacks into Huobi's wallet and they just leave it at ease without going after the hackers? Do you think they dont do everything in their power to retrieve and track the hacker? They are a multimillionaire company, they can do what's impossible for an average person.
But, then again these are just scenario and far from happening.

It is impossible to guess nor crack the wallet, the only option is if you are able to find a backdoor to their system but it is not possible to run away with that much coins and you will end up in jail  :D.
 
The transactions are transparent and if you are hungry to eat the prison food then you can think about doing anything foolish like this but we might see a situation when all the hacks and scams will be traced in the future and every coin will have an identity and hopefully all the scammers and hackers will be behind doors.

My great grandfather  :P. It is an exchange.

Can I ask something a little off topic? Why do they keep 255kBTC on a single address? Why not on 100 for example.

You already know what will happen if ever and all consequences when you do that ,then why you are going to try to  steal the wealth of huobi or to try hacking their private key? Are you out of your mind? Much better to post here those news that can give knowledge to everyone.

Probably to be more organized and for the exposure, their address is shown at the top richest bitcoin addresses and if they will scatter it on several addresses probably they have it already and that address is the most that they have or the main wallet. The exposure is somewhat related to business that they have the guarantee that they have the funds so traders could come and go on their exchange. That's my wild guess.

honestly i would do absolutely nothing, i would pretend i don't know anything. Stealing other people is very bad especially when we know how difficult it is to get money in this world for that reason I would do absolutely nothing. I can not understand how someone can sleep and live knowing that he stole money from thousands of people? it's needed to be a monster of a person to do so much evil

possibly because handling 100 private keys securely is 10000 times harder than handling 1 key securely. and from the looks of it the address seems to be using multiple keys (multi-sig) if i am not mistaken so in a way it may look like one address but it is not really one key.

This isn't true at all, the IP that you are using don't get revealed when you are transacting on the bitcoin network, rather the transaction always comes through a proxy, moreover you can always use a proxy to actually hide your location. Moreover this is just a hypothetical situation of you finding that private key of this wallet having 255k bitcoins in it. Also the address to which these bitcoins will go most probably get blacklisted from the exchanges and then selling those bitcoins will be extremely difficult, but sure you will be living a pretty great life if you get that address's private key.

I gotcha. Basically the funds have to go out from Huobi's wallet to some address.

But then there are mixers out there. Distributed to even more different addresses. Maybe some @ Binance, Okex, etc... to not trigger the alarm. Since KYC is usually required for large(r) trade volumes, the hacker(s) might just conduct smaller transactions or just cashout anonymously.

I'm not a hacker myself so who knows, they might have more ways to avoid capture.

Of course the company will do its best to prevent this from happening, but it's an interesting food for thought.

We have seen billions of dollars worth of hacks and scams and most of the time they were able to get away with it, sure the exchanges will be blacklisting the coins and the rest of the exchanges and mixers will work along with them, to be frank if we had that kind of unity to combat scam and hacks the market would have been better and we all know that is not the case.

I would contact Huobi and ask them how much BTC they are willing to donate to have the funds delivered back to them safely? What is it worth to you to have 255,000 BTC?  I don't need 255,000 hell 100 would be all I would ever want... I would sell 75 at the next ATH. Sit on 25 and buy back in after the next crash shortly after this next Bull Run.

Who needs that much money? Think of it like this. it would take a person 1000 years to spend 1 Billion dollars, If they were to budget their money and only spend 1 million dollars a year! I average like $400 a week every paycheck. I could liver EXTREMELY HAPPILY with only 100k a year. No one needs that amount of money. Only Satoshi himself deserves a salary that high!

I would message them ASAP and let them know about it. I guess they'd give out a sweet bounty as well for not stealing their BTCs. :) Stealing all that amount of BTC wouldn't be worth it in the long run. Imagine you steal it all and mistakenly reveal a little but crucial information enough for blockchain analysis companies and authorities to identify you. And then, imagine having to live forever the constant fear of being found out.

I'd rather enjoy a little $100 bounty (or even nothing) than strip their funds off.

I wonder what makes you think of knowing the private key of a whole exchange platform. Huobi is not daft not to protect their private key with their life. However, nothing is impossible and we can compare this with the bitfinex hacks that happened long time ago. Recent crypto whale alert shows that the stolen bitcoin from that hacks is still being moved from one wallet to the other and probably being mixed and sold. You have mentioned IP address but you should know that most of this hacker will make use of technology that we either hide their IP or provide fake one

OP was asking to speculate. I'm pretty sure he knows it's not possible to guess the key or just have it fall into our laps.

But yeah I'm like pixie on first page.

Make a grand announcement, sign from the address to write to their support, and tell them, if you like me for NOT stealing your btc and not making this public, I accept tips at this btc address etc;)

Make friends, it's much better long term and you don't have to watch your back spending bad money.

I prefer to be honest 255k is such a huge amount of money that they will do everything to run after you, this is not fiat where you can use right away and cannot trace any movement of that Bitcoin, you will be track and recorded and you will spend a lot of time trying to run and transact these Bitcoins, of course you can use mixer but they will eventually caught you.

That's way too tempting for anyone for have this huge amount of money. But, you can't ignore the guilt of stealing thousands of Bitcoin from people. Doesn't mater what you do with the money and there is no difference if you just steal one single bitcoin or thousands Bitcoin, in all cased it's called stealing and the person who do this is a dirty thief. However, people can always try to make the Bitcoins untraceable using tails os and onion network, plus a valid mixer. But, nothing can guarantee their security after doing such crime.

How about inside job? there's still possibilities that this key will be stolen by someone who
are also working inside this exchange right?
OP's point are valid in terms of tracing every movements that this hackers might take, especially
now that this not new anymore from this space.
Houbi teams will do everything to trace their missing BTC, and every sign regarding to this stolen
coins will be sort one by one.

---

In terms of panics, this kind of news will reflect right away and it will be a turning point for weak holders
to panic and ride with the possible fall.

maybe not as easy as we would imagine, if the thief has done it means they have also learned how they can not be pursued. there is no thief who wants to be caught easily after doing so.

every action let alone its relationship with crypto is certainly not an arbitrary thief involved there and it is clear they have prepared what will be done so that it cannot be traced.
each thief is sometimes a step ahead of those who trace their path.

Indeed, I wonder what makes OP ask this kind of question.  Are you jealous of the amount that Houbi wallet is holding @OP?  Even if I know the private key of that wallet, I would not dare to steal the fund on it because I am sure that lots of people will be affected.  I am living a good peaceful life, why would I make my life miserable?  I won't exchange my peace of mind with that amount of money.  And it is wrong to longed for someone's belonging.

There's a lot of people claiming they wouldn't steal the money here.

But let's be honest. 99% of people are going to run off with the money. That's $2.9 billion right there.

There are a huge number of people living in third world countries on this forum, many of which suffer from struggles that we don't even understand.

If you're given the chance to save your family, at the expense of others, nearly everybody would do it.

The best scenario would be to just take a tiny fraction of it, such that Huobi can cover the losses—Binance SAFU fund style. This would only impact the Huobi shareholders, rather than the entire exchange userbase.

I wouldn't generalize that heavily.

Would you take the insane risk to take almost $3B out of one of the top crypto exchanges in the world and run away with it? I wouldn't. I wouldn't do it even if I was quite sure I'd do it so that I wouldn't be found out later. Besides the purely insane risk of being caught for the largest BTC heist in crypto history, karma would hit me hard as well. Definitely not worth it. :D

A while ago, I was asked what would I do if I knew there's a certain empty house around my city that holds $1M inside: steal it or leave it? I'd in all honesty rather choose the latter. In this case, it'd be so much more elegant, appreciated and risk-free to simply ask them for a bounty - and you wouldn't live your entire life under the constant terrorizing fear of being caught.

First of all, I don’t see why I should be taking or stealing what does not belong to me? If I’m in a position where I have the private keys to their wallet address, stealing it wouldn’t be a good thing for me to do. Depending on my mood, I might just give it back to them and also let them know what happened and tell them to be very careful next time. If not that, I might be making a deal with them, by letting them know that I would have stolen those coins but never did that, so I don’t see anything wrong with them tipping me right?

And just like you have said, in the other way round, if you steal the coin you’re going to eventually get caught. So it’s best you just leave it to them or you make some deal with them. It’s all your choice. As for stealing it? Nope, not a good idea. Even if I can get away with it, I still wouldn’t do that, because I have good values.

If ever we come to know and want those btc either you leave as it and do nothing and if want to use, I would sell some and distribute the required handy stuff to the needy people at this current situation. World is facing the major issue on this pandemic and millions of people are going through worst of their life. So atleast helping them would give some positive points in the life.

I'm probably one of those people who would choose to run with that amount of money. I just don't know how to hide though. Its just too easy to spot a person like me who looks like who has nothing in life but have money to spend lol. That would make me very suspicious to authorities.

My point is that I have no where else to go and cashing out bit by bit will only allow me being exposed everyday.

I was browsing all the answers and maybe this is a bit technical but the address mentioned is a P2SH address used, you need multiple private keys to unlock. So there is no single "Huobi's private key" that would give you access to the funds.

What? Why?

In short:

• The address starts with a 3, this means it is a Pay 2 Script Hash
• When a payout is done to a P2SH-address the output is locked in a way that says: Whowever can provide a script that hashes to this value and can provide the needed elements to run it successfully can  spent it.
• The content of the script itself is unknown (only the hash is) as long as there is nothing spent
• When using the address for spending the script gets revealed (in the ScriptSig) so you know exactly what the content is

In case of th Huobi address it's a Multisig script requiring 2 signatures, in other words you need 2 keys.

BTCBTCWhy so doom about guessing? I didn't say that it is possible and I read replies kind "You can't do that", "There's no point to discuss it since it's impossible". I say IF. I know it's not possible.