Bitcoin Forum

Sign a message from the address that had 139 Bitcoin in it. It's easier to take you seriously that way.

I have some doubts about your claims.  As LoyceV mentioned, providing more proof like a signed address could help you be taken more seriously. 

But lets theorize for a sec.  This person who gave you the seed phrase or whatever - how can you be sure they aint the hacker who stole the money themselves?

First of all, you have to stop spamming your own thread, use the "insert quote" to reply to as many comments as possible all in one comment, posting comments after the other without allowing comments from other users in-between is spam, and could get your account banned.

Secondly, to learn how to sign a message, check this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=990345.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=990345.0), for the signature you posted above can't be verified, I tried but it failed, which means you are doing it wrongly.

Try verifying this

Maybe I don't understand something, I'll try to figure it out tomorrow. thanks (never dealt with signatures)

Are you using a link to this topic as the content of your signed message? If so, Electrum shows that your signature is not correct, but this signature verification service (https://www.verifybitcoinmessage.com) shows that your signature is correct. It's hard to know who to believe.

Its very simple to do bud, from the screenshots you shared, I see that you are using electrum wallet, I've never used electrum wallet before, so I can't possibly guide you with that, but if you will be willing to download mycelium wallet and imports the bitcoin wallet in question into mycelium, then the screenshot posted below should be easy to understand and follow..

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/30/NIco5.png

Once you select your bitcoin wallet, you will see the "sign message" function at the top right corner, click it, if there are multiple wallet addresses under the same key, you will be asked to select the address you want to sign the massage from, select the bitcoin address in question, and the next page, type in what ever you want and click the "sign message" button beneath.


Hope there is no mix up somewhere?

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/30/NI4P2.png

https://i.ibb.co/yq5LSfB/image.png
Signature verified on
https://www.verifybitcoinmessage.com


Did you input the whole thing?


Might depend on if you're using an older Electrum version. Someone should try Bitcoin Core.

Also, what's interesting here is that the wallet in OP has a transaction paying a fee valued over 3m USD:
https://mempool.space/tx/b5a2af5845a8d3796308ff9840e567b14cf6bb158ff26c999e6f9a1f5448f9aa

Which likely links it to this story:
https://cryptonews.com/news/bitcoin-user-claims-hack-triggered-record-3m-bitcoin-fee-139-btc-lost.htm

I don't want to speculate on what's going on but...

I've tried over and over again, initially, I thought I didn't input everything actually, but on several other trials, I was careful enough to copy and paste everything till the end, but still got invalid signature.
Could this be device related, I would suggest you try doing it over again on another device and see what result you get.
I am also going to try this again on my personal computer, I've tried multiple times on my mobile phone, but it always returned back as invalid signature, mycelium also recorded it as an invalid signature.

EDIT So, I tried on my pc and got a valid signature, paid more attention and discovered that the error was from the message, I failed to copy the message correctly.
So, by correctly coping and pasting the message, I've been able to get a valid signature on both my mobile phone and pc.

Kinda stupid of the hacker to just give his keep that easy, it seems more like this user's not really saying anything remotely true, and perhaps is only doing this for the sake of duping yet another clueless mofo on the crypto industry. LoyceV's suggestions's a far more plausible suggestion than actually asking him or theorizing how he happened upon this amount of bitcoin. Although this could be related to that news from back then where someone lost their bitcoins and this triggered a 3m transaction fee charge or whatever. I could be wrong tho.

In any case it's best to just sign the message and wait until further updates come, for sure if someone lost that amount of bitcoin specifically, they'd be able to reach out to you and prove at some level that it was theirs in the first place.

Honestly not sure if op is offering a good deal given that the whole process of recovery is honestly complex and uncertain. I'm also not sure how such address would play when who knows how many times it has passed hands.

10% is no small amount... perhaps after the money has been recovered would be an appropriate time to discuss a reward.

A message was signed, and was confirmed to be valid as stated by some of the users above. However, Electrum cannot verify the message given by the OP above which is kind of weird. I tried verifying it on my end through Electrum but it just says that it couldn't verify the address. I don't know how that happened as I also tried signing a message through Electrum and verifying it through this site (https://www.verifybitcoinmessage.com/) and it worked perfectly fine.

I saw FiveStar4Ever's comment and tried the same approach and it worked in Electrum. How the OP obtained a signed message is something I'm not certain. Also, even if the owner of the address managed to contact OP, there's no guarantee that they will get the money back. I'm more interested on the back story of how OP got access to the seed phrase, really.

Just came to see that Antpool said that the fee wasn’t spent and it was frozen due to a unusual fee. And all you need to do now is just prove that the address is yours and they will send it back to you, make sure it’s sent to a new address and get a hardware wallet this time.

It’s funny how by using such a huge fee by mistake you were able to recover some of your money, imagine if the hacker used the usual fee. Hope it all works out for you.

Some of the evidence you provide here will not make people to believe that this is a real story that happened to some crypto users without the person exposed his or her seeds phrase to scammers, because there are some users will shared their personal details to their friends or relative years ago but forget that they did such a thing in the past. Hope you know that court use the evidence you present before them to verify your case if you are guilty or not by investigating your wallet address to know how the coins was moved from your wallet to other wallets address before they will give their final judgement. Many people has experienced some issues like this from scammers hoping that they want to help them to recover their funds than to gain access to their remaining funds.

usually these things are where a scammer/hacker had obtained XXXbtc via other means of scamming/hacking

and is advertising that he so called "bought"/obtained a wallet..  (the convincer of another scam)
and will later see idiots PM him asking if he can get more wallets for them where they will pay him a commission for being a middle man. and the scammer will ask them to pay him X amount upfront and he will give them new wallets.. (empty)
and the scam is then complete

the OP is obviously the guy that stole the wallet that then spent the 139btc. now he is doubling down pretending to be a innocent bystander that pretends to have access to someone that hands him wallets

if he is genuine
if he has proof of real life identity of whom he got the wallet from. he should dox the hacker to the authorities

You should read his reply next, he signed the message with that address.

I think you're right, I see that the wallet was actually emptied and costing more than half of the balance as tx fees. OP seems to be using mixer service to blur the traces.

I'm not so sure we should trust the original poster here.  It seems a bit sketchy that he's asking for money in exchange for info that could help the victim get their funds back.  Makes me wonder if he's the actual scammer trying to double dip.  Some folks here said the signatures checked out, but that dont mean much.  Saw a tweet saying this guy ain't the only one with the keys. 

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/12/01/NslLz.jpeg
https://twitter.com/83_5BTC/status/1728873072349069352

You left out the last character. With this added, the signature is correct.

That's going to be interesting if several people claim to be the real owner. In that case following the coins up the chain and signing a message from one of the earlier addresses will be more convincing.

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My take on what happened:
Address bc1qn3d7vyks0k3fx38xkxazpep8830ttmydwekrnl (https://mempool.space/address/bc1qn3d7vyks0k3fx38xkxazpep8830ttmydwekrnl) received funds, which were immediately transferred again. That happens to every compromised private key (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5440536.0), and many bots must be competing to be the first to steal funds. Usually, they use a high fee. In this case, my guess is that since more and more nodes accept full RBF, this lead to a very high transaction fee. Eventually, miners will get all stolen funds and the "private key hunters" will only be left with crummies. I hope the real owner can convince Antpool he's the real owner, so they don't send it to any of the private key hunters who also have the same private key.

That's because you are brute-forcing "easy" private keys.

How about you read the "this software is provided as is"-licence that any wallet comes with?

Quoted for reference.

Well I didn't wannt mention this initially just for the remote possibility that OP didn't know there was an open call to sign a message and get these coins... But now that the cat is out of the bag I just want to say...

OP saying he wants compensation from an open source wallet developer is just nuts... His signature was valid yet he doesn't seem able to understand bitcoin well after supposedly having hacked into a seed phrase.

Hanlon's razor is a thing. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

We can't exclude the possibility OP is just a dumb idiot. He could have went for the claim directly.
Now he'll probably get nothing and it will also mean that the poor guy who had his funds stolen also gets nothing as he can't get his address verified in a trustless manner given the proven compromise (at least by cryptographic means).

you understood everything correctly. I am not a hacker or the owner, I am the 3rd person who has access to this seed phrase. It is necessary that the owner at least announce which crypto wallet he used to create the seed phrase. Just imagine, you create a seed and it gives you 11 times abandon and 1 time about. a beginner will send funds there and lose in a second. I believe that the crypto wallet, no matter what conditions are prescribed in the license agreement, should be held accountable. Moreover, if the laws of the country contradict the license agreement, then such a license agreement loses force, which means that the remaining 85 bitcoins can be reclaimed from the creator of the crypto wallet. and of these I would not refuse the reward, because... I can prove that the seed phrase was not created by chance.

The screenshot verifies that the transaction was made on the 23rd of 11th 2023 and you did make those transactions or what? If you have found the seed phrase by doing some research then those transactions should not be yours, right? Actually, I am a bit confused here but what I understood is you found a seed phrase by doing some research and found this wallet which had 139 BTC in it and now you are finding the owner of this seed phrase on BTT.

Did you get the seed phrase of this wallet from BTT that you are searching for owner here? And what exactly was the platform where you searched for this seed phrase, it looks fictional like fictional stories but I am not judging you as story makers which is common here.

10% is a lot of money you are asking but it is nothing in front of the handsome amount of 139 BTC but if you want to find the real owner then go live on social media or a news channel, and make yourself more famous that your videos would reach to the owner of the wallet.

the victim(s) were 2 wallets/addresses
one with bc1q8qz322m5gu4faemeumzkxeqhd4r4439y42ps3r   99.24875663 BTC ( 3,847,366.97 USD )
one with bc1qd6nn3734nkxlktseawn27xp2cw4ruy2ecz9hk9   40.17625999 BTC ( 1,557,428.23 USD )

a hacker moved the funds to:
bc1qn3d7vyks0k3fx38xkxazpep8830ttmydwekrnl
and then hacker did child-pays-for-parent in the same block. to spend 83btc fee of the 139btc to get 56btc in the hackers next wallet

the hacker then sold/gave the now empty wallet seed of 'bc1qn3d7vy..' to someone else(op) or the OP is the hacker

the address
bc1qn3d7vyks0k3fx38xkxazpep8830ttmydwekrnl
is not an address of the victim.. its the hackers wallet

That's not necessary. It's impossible to prove any seed phrase was created by any wallet.

That's not a wallet, that's a human creating a seed.

Good luck with that. What's next, banning people from creating their own private keys?

How about you share how you created the same seed?

I’ll tell you soon, and you will understand either how stupid the creator is with 139 btc, or that no one else will ever use the wallet that he used... wait a little, believe me, it’s just a hand-over-hand.
answering your question
*Just imagine, you create a seed and it gives you 11 times abandon and 1 time about.*
=That's not a wallet, that's a human creating a seed.=
How can I explain to you, even if it’s not true, a crypto wallet can create a phrase from the keccak512 hash, for example *satoshi nakamoto* is this normal? in appearance, it will seem like a random set of numbers converted into 24 words, but in reality, hackers with running scripts will be grazing there for several years to steal everything that comes in... Crypto wallets should be held responsible for this, because they receive income from it...