Bitcoin Forum

Hi,
I've seen on Telegram during last weeks around 3 old (like 10y old with no activity) wallets selling their btc.
What are the chances that these wallets are actually broken by bruteforce? I know there were discussions some years ago about people that were trying to crack the private keys.
What do you think guys? Can such successful act would mean the end of btc era?

regards

Some people can hold their coins for years. Some people will inherit the coin from their parents. Because you see a coin that has been dormant for years transferred, that does not mean the wallet was hacked or brute forced. Bitcoin is still a secured asset if tou are not careless with your private key or seed phrase.

Definitely not something you need to worry about. There have been countless discussions about this on both Reddit (here's an example[1]) and here on the forums.

Now even assuming it's possible, why would someone try and bruteforce anything 10 years ago when bitcoin was worthless? I'm guessing that's the argument you're making? Since it's been 10 years, and now wallets are moving funds, you think someone was trying to crack the wallets during all of this period?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/16phvqe/brute_force/

My take on this matter is rather simple - instead of trying to brute-force something that you will probably never be able to break in the hopes of getting bitcoin, I would recommend you to instead direct your time into buying bitcoin (either DCA or lump sum). From my perspective a shift in that effort will be more rewarding than what you are currently envisioning doing.

Is there any difference between old wallet and new wallet? ??? if Bitcoin wallet is easily get hacked, I'm sure that few or more users in this forum will open a thread and tell if their wallet gets hacked.

And... there's a chance if this coins are owned by Mt.Gox and they're start to refund to the customers.

If you think that Bitcoin wallet can be brute forced, then you need to read this post below.

It might be that the owner of the wallet forgot his password of his wallet or misplaced it and now have access to his password. If bitcoin is transferred from a wallet after tens years does not mean that the wallet has being compromised.

It is impossible to brute force anyone seed phrase, you can read this thread by Fillippone to understand better.

There are 2^256 private keys out there: how big is that number? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5147514.msg51224295#msg51224295)

This topic has been discussed many times before, so it's no longer a major concern for most. However, it is still important and concerning part for newcomers who just enter to the market. There are always hacking attempts if our devices lack security. While concerns do arise, solutions are available, but nothing can end BTC's dominance.

If you can find proof that it is successful private key brute force, you can say it's the end of Bitcoin blockchain because even you use a non custodial wallet, has private keys in your wallet, you don't control your bitcoin. Someone else can find your private keys and use them to move your bitcoin.

So far, no proof to say about it so let's assume Bitcoin private keys are safe if you use a non custodial wallet and has good practice when create your wallet, offline or best on air gap devices.

Years ago, there is a discussion about it with a graphic, finding an atom in the universe is similar to find a Bitcoin private key.

I wouldn't worry about it, not yet at least. One day the time might come when you can generate a private key from a known public key, but I think that's far in the future. Can wallet passwords and seed phrases be bruteforced? Sure, but that's not a new thing. Weak passwords or passwords with enough known characters are bruteforceable. Seed phrases with only a few missing words as well.

It seems that every couple of months we hear news how an old whale wallet suddenly became active and moved coins to an exchange. Crypto media makes more fuss about it than there needs to be. That just proves that you can never know the status of a wallet and its keys and consider it lost just because there was no activity in it in X years. It can be an old holder who suddenly needed money and decided to sell their coins. 

Exactly people especially crypto news channels make fuss about this kind of news in my opinion just to create FUD. If a wallet is left untouched for a very long term it is most probably good to think that a long term holder is the owner. The old bitcoin wallet usually were gotten with just little amounts, the owners might have set a time target like till today’s date before they will take profit, so does moving this coins means the wallet has been brute force not all.

Another reason for movement again could be that the old seed phrase or private key might have been generated by a wallet that doesn’t seems recommended, say a closed source wallet and the older decides to change the wallet and therefore needs to move it into another one. It could also be move of coins from a damaged hardware to a new one or from an hot wallet to a cold wallet for better security. So not all coins moved out means there up for sale like the news outlets puts it out to be

There are people who lost their bitcoin forever because they lost their wallets, private keys years ago. They are in HODL waves but we simply can not identify them. Estimations we make with X inactive years, like you said, are only estimations and not accurate numbers. Some of inactive wallets will wake up some day and move bitcoins.

https://www.lookintobitcoin.com/charts/hodl-waves/

Estimations on possible lost bitcoin are never accurate because of unidentifiable inactive wallets too.

Why should any act related to this be suspected for an era to the end of bitcoin, this is nothing than an empty threat the way i see it, just as from how you could also be scammed or hold your asset for long and make no transfer till when you feel like doing so, when you now do so, it is improper for everyone of us to keep giving different interpretation to what caused your own way of action which you did, apply this same to the case in consideration over what you have just spoken.

I think he is talking about fake wallet.dat files if so then brute-forcing these fake wallets are waste of time and like you said it's broken and you shouldn't waste your time and money unless you want to try it I'm sure you are wasting your time trying to brute-force a wallet that can't easily be decrypted it might take decades and you will die first before you can break one wallet.

I don't think about what you mean by the end of the BTC era if BTC has been hackable since the first launch why are people still using it? Brute-forcing a wallet is possible but it doesn't mean that you can brute-force all wallets and extract all private keys it depends on the wallet and how strong its passphrase is.
Unless you talking about online wallets they are always vulnerable to any attacks like blockchain wallet this is not a good wallet since it is always online and prawn to any attacks online.

There are lot of misconceptions here

1. Moving funds from a wallet doesn't necessarily mean they are cashing out.
2. People can do it as a safety measure to save them under new address(es).

Theoretically brute-forcing private keys is possible but the real question is how long does it takes, and with the most powerful system it will take more than a million years which means it's safe to say the funds moved by the owner or who got access to the private keys not that by means of bruteforcing.

Forget it, it's scam. 10 yr old wallet are probably from bitcoin core wallet.dat file which lots of scammers trying their best selling this files without anyone getting it because its either its fake and there's no way to bruteforce it.

0%

It is impossible not because of brute-forcing a password is impossible but it is impossible because those wallets are fake. Otherwise depending on the password (eg. if you know the length and some part of your own password) there can be some hope of recovering funds.

From what I've seen in the year I've been active in the bitcoin community, all those wallets that are being sold on the internet are a manipulated wallet file to appear as if they hold the keys to those funded addresses. The scammers create these files to make money from selling them and they sell them to a lot of newbies.

Well, everything is possible, but I rather love being optimistic with my thoughts. I want to believe that the owner of the wallet was holding for ten years and decided to sell recently.

Instead of disturbing yourself with the possibility of brute forcing to compromise someone else's wallet, why not direct your focus to accumulation of bitcoin now, maybe in coming years when you start reaping the fruits of your labour, someone else might think you the same of you.

When people start reaping the fruits of their labour, most times it looks like magic or something unusual and I think that's the case with this issue.

OP was trying to ask that if someone is able to bruteforce a random wallet (its password or private keys/seeds), would that be an end to bitcoin. It would absolutely be an end to the bitcoin as we know if if random seeds and private keys were to be guessed by quantum computers. In that case, Bitcoin would have to switch to a quantum-resistant algorithm. 

Bruteforce a wallet password and bruteforce a wallet seeds / private keys are different activities.

Bruteforce a wallet password is possible if the wallet is weak and people get their passwords compromised many times. There are many reports on risk and compromise on weak passwords and how to set up, use a strong password.

Are your passwords in the green? (https://www.hivesystems.com/blog/are-your-passwords-in-the-green)
[Guide] How to use a strong password? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5132378.0)

Use weak password for wallets and get hacked, it's not responsible of Bitcoin and Bitcoin wallet software developers, it's user responsibility to understand risk of weak password and change themselves, to use strong ones.

I know that. I am only imagining possible "what if" scenarios. But OK, let's put wallet passwords or passwords in general aside. In those scenarios, if random private keys corresponding to bitcoin addresses started to get emptied on a massive scale without users doing anything wrong, we would have reached a point where the underlying security has become questionable, especially if we learn about breakthroughs in quantum computing, where the machines are now capable of doing such calculations that are currently impossible. Such a situation would end the Bitcoin we know today. 

The owner of that wallet in question may have been unstable due to one reason or the other, mainly with health related issue and has not been fit to access his  Bitcoin wallet properly, instead of having issues with seed phrase or trying to get it and misplace it due to his condition ,to avoid him losing his asset ,may decide to stay away until he/she is done with whatever the challenge may be.

Wallet is one of the most important subject in investing. If the wallet is not secure then no matter how carefully you invest you will never find the investment capital. So I always try to tell new investors that there is no problem if you invest after few days but make sure you are using more security complete wallet first. You can use Electrum wallet to hold bitcoins but if you think you will need to transfer bitcoins regularly then I suggest you to use any major exchange wallet. For exchange wallets you can use Binance or Coinbase if you want.

The coins in that wallet can only be stolen if the owner of such wallet misplaced his private keys. Those wallets and the coins in them could actually belong to the original owners who might have decided to buy some bitcoins and hold for that long. This could explain why their are no activities recorded on that wallet.  Anything aside this reason I stated above could mean the private keys has been misplaced by the original owner. Cracking a private key is not easy and can be very difficult to achieve, it is only a hacker who has access to your wallet and private details that can crack your private keys easily.

The security of you bitcoins depends solely on how you manage your wallet, if you are careless with it, you will lose your coins and this will not in anyway lead to an end to the BTC era.

Yes you are right that bitcoin can only be stolen if  owner loses their private keys. It is possible that bitcoin in old wallets belongs to people who bought it and just left it there which is why there is no activity. If something else happens to bitcoin it's likely because owner lost their private keys. It's very hard for someone to crack your private keys unless they have access to your personal information and wallet. If you are not careful with your wallet you might lose your bitcoin but that does not mean bitcoin will disappear altogether. It is important to be careful with your wallet to keep your bitcoin safe. Because not you keys not your Bitcoin.

Learn and choose a good wallet to use.

Learn to back up a wallet and practice to recover a wallet from backup.

Then, it's all good for a start of investment, with fund storage in an open source non custodial wallet. Your fund will be safe with your own custodial, with private keys and you no longer rely on any centralized party to secure your fund.

https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet
How to back up a seed phrase? (https://blog.lopp.net/how-to-back-up-a-seed-phrase/)

For backups, don't split wallet sees, it's bad idea.
Why is seed splitting a bad idea. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5nSibpfHYE)

Verify Electrum wallet before using it.

[Guide] Verify and download Electrum wallet (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5240594.0)

The chances of brut forcing a wallet is very low, as the hacker have to spend enough money in acquiring much computing power up to quantum machines, which have not been produced yet. Those coin could be accessed by the owner who have held dearly to make sure the price gets to a certain amount of profit before they sell, or it could be inherited by the children, either ways the coin is still in the hands on the owner.

Telegram, scammer's paradise and wallets for sale are almost certainly 100% a scam, especially if they pretend to contain many years old coins in eye-watering quantities. Be careful with strangers on Telegram!


Probably 0% because the scammers earn money by selling such forged wallets and don't want their victims to discover that those wallets don't contain the required private keys to move the funds. So there's clearly no interest in anyone being able to actually break the wallet's encryption password.


What do you mean? Why would something basically impossible be the end of Bitcoin era?

I have a feeling you don't understand the security of Bitcoin at all. Educate yourself!

Besides a few known transactions by Satoshi Nakamoto, none of his mined coins have been moved/stolen by someone else. And Satoshi used P2PK coinbase transactions, ie. the public key is known on the blockchain. His coins are still secure, so are yours, so are mine (with respect to the basic technical security implemented in Bitcoin).

If you do stupid things with your wallet and ignore computer security, you can loose your coins, but this is not Bitcoin's fault.

In my own opinion one careless person's downfall won't and cannot end Bitcoin because your security should be your sole responsibility in the crypto ecosystem.Bitcoin technology is secured and impossible for some group of online theft to crack the network and gain control over it if it was that easy the governments would have govern the Blockchain network.Bruteforce is something that  happens every day, seconds and minute,a hacker can brute force a user's wallet and that has nothing to do with entire Bitcoin Blockchain technology.And also if a hacker would think of bruteforcing all the Bitcoin wallet private keys that energy is equivalent to a wasted effort so like what every other person have said you just start accumulating Bitcoin with DCA or lump sum strategy and stop imagining actions that are impossible.

OP, I  really do not think it would be that easy to brute force Bitcoin wallet. If you look, of lately, there have been a shift or transfer of  bitcoin from wallet as old as 10 years of age. So why did they not see that wallet to brute force and steal the Bitcoin there?  It is not not possible to do so because if it were possible, many wallets would have been hacked and Bitcoin stolen.

Any movement going on in any old wallet now possibly is the owner of that wallet transfering their assets to another wallet possible for change of position or so. That doesn't mean the wallet is hacked. If any of such wallet gets hacked the owner would come up to make announcement and who ever did that would be caught because all eyes would be on the movement of the assets and it would not be safe for whomever did that.

Many walkers would have been hacked if that were possible and I also do not think that would be possible in the future because different innovations would be introduced as well. The more hackers get sophisticated, so does developers. There will always be a way to stay ahead of criminals.
As long as you keep your wallet and device secure, there's no way it will be compromised, if you're using an open sourced wallet.

There can be a lot of reasons why old wallet without activity selling their bitcoins. It could be that they just decided to sell, or they've been hacked somehow, but it not by bruteforce.

I know for certain that these days some wallets with forgotten or lost keys can be hacked into after application of a technic called 'Brute-forcing' either by the owner of whom forgot their keys and employed such services or by thieves in hacker form with just that intention.

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/02/13/hacking-crypto-wallets-is-latest-strategy-in-quest-to-recover-lost-billions/

Unless such technics now used by some of these new age services continue to thrive without being regulated or monitored, then we as bitcoin investors may have come into a time when even HODLing btc is a terrible risk in itself.
 Am sure however that there would always be counter measures developed to combat and restrict these kind of services from gaining such access in the future and that BTC will fulfill its purpose of getting to 21million coins before any of such fears could even be dominant.

Tons of words can be use for generate of keys and if those bruteforce will happen people will not trust BTC wallets anymore so whats the essence of having a wallet if they have a weak security funds are not safe at all. People have different options with their BTC can be hold for a long term and people think its already a dormant some of them can be considered as dead wallet because they are now unrecovered which is imagine to the original owner how much money they can get and just lost.

Crypto exchanges are vasts in numbers, its easily accessible, it provides aides for more firewall security, it's stabled to become a backup source for wallets.

Bitcoin wallets shouldn't be more complex for everyone to handle, we understand the basis of the system and how cryptocurrency operates. Wallet should be protected in all rounds and more importantly, the seed phrase should be kept in discreet place because we live in a wicked world and our close friends can be our number one enemy tomorrow.

Sorry, but this is a terrible idea. I would never advise anyone to store their coins on an exchange. Remember: "not your keys, not your coins".
Exchanges are meant to be used for trading. So, you need to keep only the coins you are willing to exchange there. Having to make multiple transfers on a daily basis is not a reason to store your coins on an exchange. In fact, it's just another reason why you shouldn't do that as withdrawal fees are usually way higher than what you would pay when transferring from your own non-custodial wallet.

The coins inside the wallet might only be seized if the owner misplaces his private keys. It's possible that the initial owners of such wallets decided to buy some bitcoins and keep them for that long. This can be the cause of the wallet's inactivity. Anything different from the explanation given above could mean that the secret keys were lost by the original owner. It is not possible for anyone to quickly crack your private keys; only a hacker with access to your wallet and personal data can do so.