Bitcoin Forum

I've been toying with the idea of putting some spare 3090's to work and cracking wallets with hashcat. However, I'm unfamiliar with how to obtain wallets. I see some sites that "sell" them, but I'm weary they may be scams. Are there resources/groups I can contact where I can offer to try and crack a wallet?

They are all scam and some even give you trojans and stuff like that. If they were real and contained such massive amounts of bitcoin, they wouldn't have sold them in first place!

If you want to waste computing power and electricity it is much more profitable and productive to start mining some GPU minable PoW shitcoins and dump them in exchanges for bitcoin. There are a bunch of "whattomine" websites that can guide you and also there is a altcoin mining board (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=160.0) which you can read and learn more.

The only viable way I can think of is doing it as some sort of wallet recovery service. You get a certain percentage of the total bitcoin if you ever manage to crack a person's wallet. It's going to be pretty hard to gain reputation though.

Why don't you just create your own wallets to crack?

If you're looking for wallets that doesn't belong to you to try and crack, you will definitely be looking in the wrong places or on the dark side of the internet, meaning they are scams trying to rip you off. Even if you got legitimate wallet files you will still. It be able to crack them.

As suggested use that hashrate to try and mine bitcoins instead, you have a higher chance of earning.

First, don't buy old wallet files and try to crack them. They are all from scammers, infected files, not real wallet files. Your computers will be infected if you try to open those files and crack them. Worse if you store your Bitcoin wallets in that computer, it will be accessed by scammers and they will steal your bitcoin.

Second, if you want to test your method and computation power to crack a Bitcoin wallet, why don't you create a new and empty wallet by yourself and assume you don't know anything about it. Try to crack and find that wallet by yourself too.

If you can crack your self-created wallet, you can test more as it seems your method and computation power is good and enough to crack Bitcoin wallets.

You will be just wasting your electricity ~ money and time by doing these sorts of things. It does sound lucrative to crack a wallet with thousands of dollars in it however it will be almost unachievable in the span of 10-20 years if you keep on doing it continuously with your GPU cards. Why not buy ASIC and use it for mining and generate Bitcoin from it? That will be far much better than trying your luck (at least in my opinion).

Trying to crack a wallet that doesn't belong to you looks like a scam to me.
What you might get: Your chances of getting scammed by those who want to sell tools to you will definitely be high.
 
If you want to keep your hands busy with some cracking codes, go to the internet or any block explorer and get some random addresses with holdings. You can start from there. Since you might be too lazy to create a wallet on your own.

There is no way to distinguish a real wallet from an empty wallet if its encrypted. So if someone offers you to buy wallet.dat files, you will have to trust them.

But IMO people who want to steal coins by cracking stolen wallets deserve to get scammed by scammers who sell fake wallets. You can even call it an "ethical" scam, because you scam potential thieves.

Trying to crack wallets with a balance with a password that can be guessed, or at least knowing part of it, with the ease of predicting these words, is the only possible way, but the owner of such wallets will not sell them on the Internet for $ 100, while he can get more if he sends them to a specialized wallets restore team. all wallets that are sold on the Internet are scam or not worth the trouble of trying to find out the private key.

you can provide recovery wallet services that provide the ability to crack passwords with some complex conditions but such service are managed by people who have good experience in this field and are reliable. even if you try to create such a service, you will not find much support. You are burning your money in a losing project.