Bitcoin Forum

There is a question that has been bothering me for a while. In August 2010, Stone Man accidentally sent 8999 BTC to an account. BTC is still at that address. If one day the BTCs in that account move, do you think it's a hack, or is it that someone lucky somehow owns that wallet?

If something like this happens, how will the community react?

Related topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=782.0

I quickly glanced over the thread you linked to... And what pops up in my mind is: why do you care?

The odds of these funds being spent are very, very, very close to 0 because the person losing the 8999 BTC wasn't scammed, or victim of a virus, or phishing... It seems to be pretty obvious it was just bad luck, 8999 BTC ended up funding a change address that was generated by his wallet, but whose private key wasn't included in his backup (and his disk was erased), so those funds are gone.

If these funds would ever move, i would probably conclude the OP was lying all along, maybe as a form of begging... Eventough the odds of this happening seem to be very close to 0.

But if they'd ever move, how would the community react: probably by shrugging our shoulders and moving on? Just some dude who either found a way to recover his wallet.dat, or was lying all along when he posted his problem.

If the coins were moved it would either be the owner found the private keys
or be a "lucky" hack. Hacking a wallet is next to impossible, which is why
those 8999 Bitcoin are still in the wallet 11 years later.

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/167ZWTT8n6s4ya8cGjqNNQjDwDGY31vmHg

If these were to move I'm sure there would be panic by some, FUD by others but
the majority of us here who are levelled headed would take the opportunity to
buy the dip which would follow the panic.

Long term it would be confined to history and remembered as the time
a "whale" moved coins.

Well if that balance disappear for sure its a hack because its been 11 years since that amount of bitcoin stucked, so it's impossible someone can manage it as it's very clear a lost wallet. Unless if the owner found the keys and decided to hold it as the price of bitcoin that year is very cheap to withdraw..  :D who knows..

@Stone Man has obviously made one big mistake, but we should not be surprised given that it was 10 years ago, and people knew much less then than they do today. I don't mean just those who used Bitcoin, but also the developers who didn't warn users that they have to back up after every transaction. We can determine with high probability that these coins were indeed lost.

@sirius wrote these a few posts below OP, too bad someone didn't think of it earlier, but every beginning is difficult, Bitcoin was no exception.

First of all congratulations, there are not many people that are going to take the time to read the early history of the forum and bitcoin, and I think this is an important step to better understand the future of bitcoin.

Now about the topic at hand, I do not think the community will react to it at all, it is an important amount of coins but nothing that should be game-changing, it is also possible as it was referenced on the thread that someone just got incredibly lucky and happened to generate the same address and its private key by address collision, however this is so unlikely that it is way more probable that the creator of that thread just found a backup of the wallet he had made which included the change address.

Like nothing happened! I highly doubt most of the community would even notice it while the remaining users who have a habit of tracking such transactions, probably aren't going to be affected by something that happens a lot more than you might imagine!

e.g. The following transactions happened in the past hour ^{[I can easily list hundreds of those]}:

• 15,075.957BTC (https://clankapp.com/tx/btc/79f08fbf8176401fb8b08126e044977d14506775bd2e77313f3e3fbc67b59e09?uuid=NzExMTQ4Njg5NTE0MDcy)
• 5,194.703 BTC (https://clankapp.com/tx/btc/fb40098f254d92a0e1f1b66aeedf2dac979d8a846aa47d9b805eced427e30813?uuid=NzExMTQ4Njg5NTE0MDgw)
• 4,237.219 BTC (https://clankapp.com/tx/btc/ef9fff723a295e4fe910ace28a206f8383bf307d93c5702ff42d1a1fd788e951?uuid=NzExMTQ4Njg5NTE0MTQ3)
• 3,196.887 BTC (https://clankapp.com/tx/btc/fdb16e2396917320e289182dc3a7cef1a0ecce435abdf4e06e155a113b61f5b2?uuid=NzExMTQ3Njg5NTEyNzk1)
• 2,972.458 BTC (https://clankapp.com/tx/btc/7de3fef667eace1c7c59bf7d5d03bdf6d21ac38fd2b416ebb944c019d0d7c51e?uuid=NzExMTQ4Njg5NTE0MDk0)

Someone did and maybe still owns that wallet, but he does not have the private key of the address those 8999 BTC were sent to nor the backup of the updated wallet file after the transaction was made. He won't be able to get that private key anymore unfortunately. 

If the coins move, it was either a joke that lasted for 10 years and we will laugh about it, or someone has found a way (or was lucky enough) to bruteforce that private key (currently impossible), in which case we should all be concerned about the security of our coins.

It's been too long. The value that those coins would have today have surpassed any donations he could have received in the meantime. And there have been many opportunities for him to simply cash out and live as a millionaire until the end of his life.

If the guy said himself that he *accidentally sent that bitcoins* then why do you think that it was *hacked?*. At the same time I do think the person to whom the wallet belongs to doesn't even know it there in the first place or might have lost the access to the wallet because they never bothered to touch those coins even during the high. So I would presume those coins to be *lost* but in general take it as a *long term holding situation*.
Even though the person sent that money and the bitcoins might not be recovered it kinda is beneficial for the community since it would ultimately be in HODL situation. But now a days there is a new thing where the person sending the bitcoins might provide the receiver with a special Key or password which would actually help the balance get deposited, chances of something like this happening might be close to nil if it's usually something that we might be using in daily practice in the future.

mocacinno's response was excellent. Why do you care!? Honestly, it's just another early Bitcoiner who lost access to their wallet file. Not the first time, nor the last. It's extremely infeasible to find the private key by only knowing the address, not even the public key. If they somehow got moved, I would suspect they sit down and did everything possible to recover it and finally accomplished it.

The only difference is that those coins are already in market's circulation. The Stone man's coins haven't moved for over a decade.

Those funds are probably lost, and the chances of it being spent in the future is very, very slim. Considering that there were no known backups from that address, and the difficulty of cracking one private key by pure luck or even by brute-forcing, it's wishful thinking to see those 8999 btc move ever again.

This is like asking whether bitcoin is possible to get brute-forced right now, and we all know the answer for that.

Doesnt matter if its hacked or lucky on finding their wallet again for a very long time. Why it does matter? We dont even know if the said owner of that wallet had been still holding after all these years and never intended to move even a single satoshi from on that wallet but as others presume out that this is probably a lost wallet for sure because it could be highly possible that you would be at least having some sell out of those ATH breaking moments that we do have even just on this year.
Why we do care so much?

Peoople do really love to get involved on things eh?

Even though its not our money but the excitement inside on having this kind of balance cant really be resisted for us to mind off and make out some presumptions. 8)

I dont even believe into myself that the owner of the said wallet do remember his wallet consdering that it was accidentally sent then its high probability that he doesnt even know that there's some coins inside on that wallet which means its just simply a waste of money.