That's a wrap, case closed.

Seriously though, Roger Ver strongly pushed BCH while trying to down talk BTC (even going as far as selling people BCH as Bitcoin), yet it amounted for very little. Seeing how little control he has over the Bitcoin Cash price his influence on the Bitcoin price is probably pretty much zero. So I believe that any correlation one may see between Roger Ver's comments and Bitcoin's price fluctuations is based on retroactive attribution, rather than causality.

I think most of the debt belongs to countries and cooperations though, not to private individuals. Accordingly I believe that any attempt of debt reduction via private individuals is just a drop in the bucket, globally speaking. I don't have numbers on the global debts of private individuals and cooperations, but I do believe it's hard to top the debt levels of countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt

Looking at the debt per capita I get a feel that most of us are more in debt by proxy of being a citizen, rather than as private individuals. And that's just external debt.



Here I wholeheartedly agree with you and I feel that this aspect of crypto has been criminally neglected by most people in the last few years. Kids these days seem to care more about lambos than about freedom.

Which statement are you referring too? The earliest comment I found from Roger Ver about BCH / BSV was mid- to late November, ie. when Bitcoin already hit the 3000s.

In general I don't think Roger Ver's comments have much influence on Bitcoin's price.

What are you trying to do? Unless you are after a very specific use case I'm fairly certain there are easier ways to achieve your goal rather than trying to parse Bitcoin's chainstate LevelDB.

Very interesting point of view, but I'm afraid in the end the bank still wins. People withdrawing their money from banks will likely lead to one of the following scenarios:

a) Central banks will allow banks to run on smaller fractional reserves and / or print more money lend more money to banks.
b) Banks will charge higher interest rates on what little money they can lend to people due to supply and demand.

Neither of which would be a pretty sight. Let's keep in mind that debt is inherent to the way our current economy runs, so it's unlikely to go away easily.

Can you check in your account settings which permissions the used API key had?

There are 4 permissions settings that you can turn on for Bittrex API keys: 1) Read Info, 2) Trade Limit, 3) Trade Market, 4) Withdraw.

If you gave the API key the permission to withdraw then you got the culprit, because from what I can see in the Bittrex API documentation their withdraw call doesn't check for 2FA.

@OP: Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but what is this crypto index you are referring to? I'm using crypto just fine without even being aware of it, so it seems pretty non-essential. Crypto is free, so people could create the S&P500 equivalent of crypto for all I care.

I think a bit more context is needed here to make helping easier. What tool / API did you use to get this dataset?

That looks fun, I wonder how far it will come. I hope the chain ends up at some sort of charity before the temptation becomes too grand, would be a shame if it would end with someone simply yoinking the coins.

Because simply closing your eyes to a problem won't make it go away.

Anyone willing and able to steal brainwallets won't need a thread like this to run their operation. Anyone lacking the skills and tools to steal brainwallets won't gain either from simply following a thread like this.

How long did it take you to generate a rainbow table of this size? I'm just curious about the timescale (so hardware specs for reference would also be nice).

Sorry in case you already mentioned it upthread and I overlooked it.



Stealing brainwallets is probably still profitable though, as I assume that the running costs are close to nil once you've set up the infrastructure.

If you look closely you'll find that hashMerkleRoot is not the only member being set though


Here you see the components of the block header as mentioned further upthread:


...with hashMerkleRoot being only one of various members set during the mining / block building process.


For example you can see the hash of the previous block, timestamp, difficulty target and an initial nonce being set here:



And the version being set here:



And for good reason: The nonce nNonce is required to give miners a wide range of values that can be tried during the mining process. The target nBits allows the block to be verifiable in itself and seals the current network target within the blockchain. The timestamp nTime is required to calculate the upcoming difficulty change and makes time warp attacks more difficult. The hash of the previous block hashPrevBlock is necessary for ordering and puts the chain in blockchain. And needless to say hashMerkleRoot ensures transaction integrity. Accordingly you want to ensure the integrity of all of these parameters, hence they are hashed as part of the block header.

Security liabilities need to be discussed publicly, otherwise you have no basis for public discourse, awareness and improvement.

Note that this thread is about monitoring and documenting cases of brainwallet thefts, rather than stealing them.

While these thefts are happening regardless of whether threads like this exist, it may prevent some people from generating weak brainwallets and becoming victims themselves.

bits is not random, it's the current difficulty target:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Target

This will stay the same on the next block unless the difficulty changes, which happens every 2016 blocks (ie. roughly every 2 weeks):
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

The nonce is the value that miners are searching for when mining a new block (ie. miners are looking for a nonce that leads to a block hash that is below the difficulty target as denoted by the bit field).



What do you mean? The block hash is definitely more than just the merkle root.

Yep, that's pretty much the same as moving coins onto an exchange, doing your trade and then immediately withdrawing your balance (ie. the way you should use any exchange, unless you plan on daytrading).

Granted though, there's no temptation of keeping your coins on an exchange that doesn't allow you to keep funds on it, so the timeframe where you keep funds in a 3rd party's custody is limited (but still existent, unlike decentralized exchanges or atomic swaps).

If your lesson from yet another exchange going under is to keep your coins at a different kind of exchange you learned the wrong lesson

Don't keep coins on an exchange unless you are actively trading with them. Period. No ifs, no buts, no exceptions. With the exception of decentralized exchanges where you are in control of your own private keys, every exchange is a custodial exchange.



You can use hardware wallets such as the Ledger Nano or Trezor as both a hot and cold wallet. They are secure enough to serve as cold storage and convenient enough to move coins in and out at your leisure. If you hold significant funds in your hardware wallet and plan on spending coins on the go it will make sense to keep a separate mobile wallet however.



Don't worry, those coins are not lost. They simply belong to someone else now.

Yes, but this balance is not stored as such on the blockchain but are rather the way wallets choose to display the sum of inputs / outputs available to you as a user (as opposed to Ethereum, for example, where accounts and their respective balances are stored and maintained as a global state).

It's:
SHA256( SHA256( Version + hashPrevBlock + hashMerkleRoot + Time + Target + Nonce ) )

With the Merkle Root being the set of all transactions reduced to a single a hash:
https://www.mycryptopedia.com/merkle-tree-merkle-root-explained/

The Bitcoin wiki has a good description of what is contained in the block header:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm

I'm pretty sure I qualify as a nerd based on my hobbies and interests with Bitcoin being on of them, so I guess that counts as anecdotal evidence? I guess hanging out at a forum that is mostly focused on digital currencies is kind of a nerd activity as well so if it looks like a duck...

That being said, being a "nerd" lost most of its negative connotations over the last few decades (remember that nerd chic phase?), so I'm fine with Bitcoin being called nerd money. Let's not forget that having a personal computer and hanging out on the internet used to be "nerd stuff" as well. Heck, computer games and comics used to be "nerd stuff" before they turned into the integral part of the entertainment industry that they are today.

Samourai wallet allows to mark specific UTXOs as "Do not spend", similar to Electrum's address freeze function:
https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018/10/bitcoin-dusting-attack-threats-anonymity-of-several-wallets/

I think that's the feature you are looking for.

If I'm not mistaken Wasabi wallet offers a similar level of control on which inputs to use. Unfortunately those two are the only wallets that I'm aware of have such a feature implemented, but maybe others will follow.



No need to "block" certain addresses (which by Bitcoin's design shouldn't be possible anyway), preventing the unwanted inputs from being re-spent is completely sufficient.