Experts call that a 'dead cat bounce'

Sometimes ( actually most of the time ) the dead don't bounce?

I know BTC is different, yep that and a $5 bill will get you a latte to screwbucks

2013 was still the geeks, but 2017 100's of 1,000's of ppl came in using credit cards at 20% to 'get rich', ... nope hate to tell you this time its going to be more like a witch hunt, rather than 2013 deja-vu

back in 2013 it was techies who didn't have much skin in the game, but now you have 100's of 1,000's of idiots who have been burned and this will turn to anger, and then property damage, and loss of health of some individuals, study this stuff its not new, its been going on for 1,000's of years of human history, 'madness of the crowds'

I hear U but even at $1k I would NOT BUY any crypto I'm a miner, and have a ton of all, but for the life of me I will never understand how or why people spent real money to buy this invisible non-existent shit, I mean as a miner, I just see the cost of electricity as a cost of playing and the HW was there anyway, but I never even going back to 2011 ever considered even for a moment of spending even one CENT for any of this crypto shit.

BTC if it went to $1 even then what would be the point? Sort of like owning an invisible cabbage-patch-doll?

Lot's of stuff like this comes & goes, most likely in a few years only super geeks will even remember, most ppl who get hurt from this shit lock it out of their minds and put the blame on gov for not protecting them, or maybe the exchange for ripping them off,

The market in the future for these non-tangible assets will be so small that it will hardly worth owning a 'private-key',

That said, I have over ONE MILLION BTC private-key's in my possession, I guess that someday I can sell them to collectors?? I think not

The problem is that most ppl here think they own something, but all they have is a number, and most likely if I have one million private key's so does 100 other guys

'CULT' a dogmatic group of religious idiots, who think only they see the light? Right pretty much sum's up BTC cultism, of course its not about TECH is it? It's about easy money and we all know that fools and their easy money quickly depart.

The problem with BTC is the emperor has no clothes, just like ETHEREUM BUTERIN is BUTT NAKED control freak, but at least you can put a face on ETH, on BTC the best you have is core, who are already almost 10 years into the game, and rich and ready to move on and find a life,

It's time for BTC 3.0 ppl, lets seriously make the jump to light-speed, and ditch these bitches

Nakamota SAtoshi is NSA, so what did you expect? A warm hug at the end of the party?

COINBASE (CIA) doesn't want its users to use TOR, imagine that? The entire scam that is crypto is now nothing more than a lab so that GOV can control idiots who think they're getting 'rich'

First step with BTC 3.0, is to be as far away from GOV as possible, that means no SHA, no ECDSA, and nothing that even smells like NSA.

Just curious, there are survivors, but most people are idiots

Take a sinking ship, smart ppl know its sinking very early they get on a lifeboat and get faraway

The idiots first go into denial as the ship is un-sinkable, then they of course perpetuate the myth of the captain that the boat can't sink, and of course the majority being morons, well morons flock together until the end,

Thus the question begs to be asked, do you see your self as one of the idiots holding the bag?

Funny HODL meant a clever at one time, but in the future HODL will mean those that held the shit until it was worth zero ( or very close )

BTC sucks, its doesn't work, and ethereum is worse, 2.0 BTC is not on horizon, and 3.0 isn't even discussed, ppl are too busy talking shit about making money today, and of course nobody wants to 'rock the boat'

Well it was bound to happen, when you world is made up of lies, its bound to fail.

So pray tell us folks, which are you? U going down with the ship, or are you cashing out for another crypto day?

Most of the old timers on this board are not programmers, thus they don't have a clue how btc works, but what they know is how to jump&jive, and talk shit and make fools buy into a sinking ship.

That sw is like what 4+ years old, and it will just bog down around 400k blocks, and certainly there would be a core crash, they even caveat to tell you to have 32gb of RAM on your system, as all their work is done in malloc()

The problem here is this sw is 4+ years old, and if the github is even a month since the last update, chances are 99% it aint' going to work, its the nature of BTC sw, ... because core is always changing the block-chain format, and nobody is going to maintain the shit for long, cuz you would go nutz

...

Said it before and will say again, if you want to parse bTC you must write you  own parser, its not hard, only ten lines of python to parse, what most ppl here are after, the problem, is that its clear that most here aren't programmers, and that is where the rubber meets the road,

Just like this post about a seg-fault, a programmer, would have just just used GDB and resolved the problem, but not here no way, there are no programmers.

https://github.com/mikispag/rusty-blockparser.git

Ok, lets take this case, he hasn't touched his code in 3 months, and the CAVEAT says that the code is only tested to block 393k, and that was January 2016, so that be two years old data at best,

So what would be the point of any of this?

I know I played with 'rusty' a few hours and quickly figure out it was more than worthless,

It would be so useful if ppl actually invested time in these code submissions and understood that they didn't work,

I think the OP wants ALL addresses with value since the BIRTH of BTC to NOW, today, and there is no block-parser out there that I know of turn key, for free that does this, and almost all of them are 4+ years old and have never been maintained,

I'm just commenting here to save ppl some time, who actually venture off to 'rusty' now at best the author may have had good intentions, but more than likely this is a game of bitcoin donations setup on GITHUB, where ppl do minimal development and hope some idiot tips them well, but sadly, this sw doesn't exist

Probably the best sw ever for parsing is SNORT, but it requires a machine with 32+ GB or RAM, and I don't know if it work past block 400k, as I don't have any machines with that much ram to go past that point, sadly the guy who wrote snort did it all in memory, and now that BTC is 200 GB well it it doesn't work,

....

In summary the database problem of collecting addresses is the EASIEST problem in the game of hacking-bitcoin, and can be written in 10 lines of python, leave it at that and just DO-IT.

A block is just a list of 'transactions', and the transactions can be strange, as all tx's can have opcode script, and variable length, which means U must really parse, and can't make any short cuts in this business

So you have your code, where you process all transactions, but you always have a 'catch' a fall through for any tx you don't understand, then print that  txid ( hexadecimal ) then go to chain.so ( raw mode ) better than blockchain.info, and inspect that tx, its better this way than using python debugger, usually a one second glance tells you what code mod you need to make in your python tx parser ( again block parsing is tx parsing, as parsing block is not parsing its just a list )

Well if you can't code, and if your not a programmer, you simply can't do this shit, cuz none of the software out there works for the entire block chain, NONE NADA; if you pay somebody money to write a parser and it breaks ( and it will ), then you will need an infinite amount of money to feed your programmer, and then I repeat NONE of the stuff on the internet works, it all is garbage, but sometimes a good place to start can be found

If U just want to gather addresses, then you don't need to parse, just run through the block-tx-list, in JSON mode and poll the 'addresses', but if you want to public keys or ecdsa values, then you must parse. Mult-Sig, SigWit, .. and all the other protocols all have various args and numbers of IN/OUT, and its all a convoluted mess,

Very good question, I think the first step for all bitcoin 'hackers' is having the database's

Snort is a good start, its bundled with brainflayer, but as you already known starting from genesis block 1 to N is easy, around 400k most parsers break

Lots of ppl wrote code in 2013, so my first 'advice' is work backwards, anybody can start at zero and bomb at +400,000 all the SHIT on github can do that, so ...

1.) get your full node running with TXINDEX set to 1, this gets you all the transactions decoded into script

2.) run your parser backwards from 530,000 ( where ever now ) and decrement, ... do the hard first, it only get easier

3.) addresses are the easy part, but you really don't want them, because the good stuff is the hashed public keys and r-values that can actually tell you stuff

4.) python is probably best cuz its easy to hack, and if your going to parse the entire btc blockchain from 5xxxxxx to 1, your going to be doing a lot of hacking

5.) don't bother with these databases, they all bomb out on the 200GB of required data, have many databases, I mainly just have .txt and csv, and then use bloom-filters as my datbase front-end that way all my querys have zero latency, filling the bloom with data is one time, and acquiring the data is what takes time, but once you have the data, its zero time making a decision

6.) sadly its probably going to be RPC with python all the way down hill and then work in JSON, the script is a pain in the ass as its not documented except in the C++ bitcoin core, and they break it on every version, thus if your running RPC at least you have a chance of reading all the data down to one

7. ) u say u want addresses, but once you have them you'll find them more than useless, most addresses hold no bitcoins, have never been used,

8.) U may want to look at snort and brainflayer they include the 'pristine' and all account with balance address list up to about 2015, that's a good place to start so you have something to look at now, pristine means blocks mined from day one, but never spent

9.) again addresses in themselves are rather worthless, what I find useful is to keep a running system that keeps a BLOOM-FILTER fed with all addresses that have a balance, once the balance goes to zero then that bloom-filter for that address is set to zero, thus I have an instant way to know for any address 1 to N ( base 10 ), I can tell u if that address has a balance today, this is useful, because in actuality your running on the memory pool looking at addresses and want to know how to update your bloom-filter for addresses

10.) most useful is deriving private-key/pairs & public-key, say in order of 10 million, and then watch your address bloom-filter to see if an address is used, then you know whether to run more software and go down that rabbit hole

I think I attempt to say more than is needed, just parsing is just in PYTHON

import pycoin/bitcoin ( your favorite shit coin lib on github that none work very well, and all were written 5+ years ago )

rpc=openrpc on port ( 127.0.0.1:8545 )

blkn=rpc.getblocknum('latest')

for blk blkn to 1: # yes  we start with the most recent blocks and work back to dinosaur age
  tx = rpc.gettransaction list from block
  for all txid in tx ...
    for all script in tx
       if tx['value'] > 100M Satoshi THEN # U said high value right?
            print address in script ( or write to file txt/csv )

Easy peezy, whats to say? nothing to it, ... the problem is it takes  a long time, I mean 'getting your list is easy'

Sure you can read the raw blk000n.dat files N to 1 and read the raw script and get the data, but you will find a mess of spaghetti code that makes you insane, its not 'python like' to fuss with hexadecimal, and its no fun in C/C++ given the fact that the entire bitcoin legacy code from day one is a KLUDGE, hack, mess and sucks real bad

Well I make it sound sort of easy, addresses and value come in JSON, but when you want R/S & Public Keys, and hashed keys then you must decode the asm/hex script, which means you must read the C++ source cuz its the only place that documents the script 03/02/01/N/R,...

Besides Adresses in themselves are useless, most addresses you gather have no meaning, here I will give you some numbers

I parse the block chain from N to 1  ( 500k) blocks, about 4,000 transactions per block, and about 2-3 addresses per tx, so that 20 million addresses, of those maybe 5-10% are interesting and less than 0.1% have a balance ( remember ppl are told not to use same addresss twice )

**

I have said it before and I will say it again NONE of the CODE on github works, its all shit, and its all not maintained, as the kids like BUTERIN seem to get bored 1-2 years after they write their library and get 'famous', and then move on and never look back, and some of these libs are just out&out read-only non-maintainble, I have spents MONTHS trying to get ABE ( and many other of these so called bitcoin pasers databases ) to work just to realize that its hard-coded to a specific bTc fork, which means that is worthless if you want to parse 1-N

I wish to say there was a fast way to parse, and even ABE sure it works great 1 to 410,000, and then it stops and never works again, cuz the script is so convoluted, and the code is so tightly wound on early BTC data-structures that its all hopeless, SEGWIT and all these new TX scripts seem to have broken all the shit libs

I find that most of the time i have to parse my own script, that's why I have one parser for each task, and don't bother with one fits all, cuz its too much hacking, ( but its easy as shown above the writer you own parser to gather all high-value address on btc is only 10 lines of python )

One parser to get ALL the addresses, another to get all public-key and their hashes, and another to to get all the R&S values for EcDSA hacking, ... and other databases for other good stuff like dates and time for unusual transactions and all these different databases go into different bloom-filters and then in productions all my main code just uses the bloom filters,

I might add the bloom filters should be updated every 10 minutes, but actually earlier, cuz the early bird is always two steps ahead of consensus

Exactly anybody who talks this shit, just ask if he has a car,

+90% of all btc is mined in china, with free hydro,

fools driving their cars like hamsters in a cage are the cause of most pollution in the western world, already in china, most citys have banned gas motorcycles, and everything is now electric, Kunming for instance, its all silent now, ... very dangerous as a pedestrian as you can't hear them coming

I heard current price for mining electricity one btc in western world is $2500 USD, but 1 btc is worth 50 barrels of oil, and it take 20 in energy to get that one btc, ... thus btc is one of the most energy efficients means of making profit in the western capitalistic world

Most large scale mining operations are near hydro, or thermal,

Most industry generates far more waste in search of profits far less than are found in BTC,

Just  think of cost doubling your money in any other industry?? It makes bitcoin look like super environmental friendly, even auto industry is barely 10% ROI, if fact without selling credit-cards, GM would be negative ROI

Good advice, ...

1.) If your NOT the only one holding the private-key, then you don't own the money.
2.) If you didn't generate the private-key yourself offline, using your own high-entropy algo,  then the odd's are your NOT the only person who has the key , I would speculate that all if not most 3rd party gen-tools have back-doors or later day harvest schemes.

Since New Year a funny thing has happened well for that matter since Goldman-Sachs came out with their derivative futures for BITCOIN, it has gone no where but trading in a very tight window,

On the other hand the alt's, especially equihash like HUSH, .. are up 5X

Hell even the SHIT-COIN either etherum with +70% pre-mined ( almost 4million of  the 4.8 million in circ were pre-mined ), even that dog is up 2X for NY

It's obvious that all cash is now flowing to alt's the NEW MONEY ain't buying BITCOIN.

Z-Classic is up like 20X in a few weeks, what is up with that? There are dozens of same-same shit as this z-coin

Lot's of plays here, our own BITCOIN-Z which is much better than bitcoin-gold and is just waiting to rocket to the moon, when discovered.

Amazing, if any of it were true, Upon reviewing this article, I took to myself to spend 1/2 hour and run some of these things, I have a database of 5 million BTC addresses, and every public-key ever used, both hashed and open, and I ran the addresses though the system, I found less than 1,000 addresses have been used as 'seeds', and I found of that only 'one' had ever had a transaction, ... Not VERY INTERESTING ( So somebody ( most likely the OP, created 1,000 private-keys on BTC using 'address' as the SEED, but never used them, ... so what? ); Sounds like somebody was bored that day, and ran a batch file that terminated at 1024

Then there is the BS about using tx's and merkels for your private-key, or hashing them, these are just random numbers after they're hashed, there was NO 'order' to begin, with hashing high-entropy, is high-entropy, if you want to cultivate private-keys for REAL that have been used ( that's the GOAL right?) Then you need to leverage off the human weakness issue and that is seeds need to have a deterministic nature that came from humans, not random shit.

The OP lists 5 ways to 'hack-btc' I found all to be non-workable, certainly if it be true that a few of these were places as back-doors by a wallet 'engineer' ok, I can dig that, but looking at this stuff from 'hacker' point of view its all a waste of time,

Of the 5,  only the one about seed('cat') times N ( running sha256() n times on the result )  was interesting, the OP makes it sounds like he found many where N > 1, ... but the reality is such that if you take all known seeds, and start N'ing them by N++, you will vanish to zero at 2, ... sure you might be lucky and one time at seed*1975 get one hit, ... but that is just an anomaly

The fact is this kind of stuff in real world would be from 'hand rolled' private addresses and its just not that common, unless the guy is an engineer and hand-rolls from SSL, or that is high-entropy, that works.

Given that using random data from the block-chain for your private-key; hashed or not is a jerks game, and thus by definition a JERK has no BTC, thus its a complete waste of time for a 'professional hacker' to follow any information in this post.

IMHO this article is a sci-fi fairy-tale that can be told to bitcoin wannabe's and their boyfriends.

Seriously though, its pathetically easy to 'clone' a coin, ... that's why there is +2,000 shit-coins on the internet, and probably more, that don't get marketed, and hyped

Try to make it new and interesting, try to solve some of the problems of BTC ( there are 100's of reasons btc sucks ), if you can make it better, then it's not a shit-coin, ...

For  the past six years, I look at my first clone, and the only useful thing is that doing it is a great way to learn the bitcoin source, but honestly, and i think that HACKING-BITCOIN is a way better way to learn BTC, as in hacking you must really understand stuff, while 'cloning' is really just an exercise in cut&paste.

Also there are some real nice coins like BITCoIN-Z that lay dormant on this FORUM, that are actually pretty nice, well in that case other than the cap being 21 BILLION,rather than 21 million, but for its 'tech' its much better than bitcoin-gold.

Make a list of all the things that suck about BITCOIN, and try to find ways for your shit-coin to resolve the issues, the world will be on your doorstep.

...

Sometimes its NOT good to be TOO early, sometimes its better to be just right, we're at bitcoin 1.0, 2.0 is an unknown, and 3.0 will probably when it hits critical mass, we're still very early, I suspect that  by 2.0+ much of our 'open-source' will have gone away, because this stuff is too valuable to give away for free, thus IMHO if I had '3.0' today, I would wait until the right time, so that you don't have to give it away, just for  another guy to steal and market it, ...

It sucks and I'm not advocating, but this is the TREND, there was no such thing as 'free software' prior to 1999, and we're almost at 19 years, and NOTHING lasts forever.

Some random thoughts about this business of 'hacking bitcoin', when I say that remember that the same is also done with Ethereum, and all the other cryptos, BITCOIN is most interesting to researchers, because it has the MOST data, for instance the first 3.5 MILLION block of ethereum were pre-mined to the same 'group' ( person ), I mean what's the point of studying ETH? Later post 5M it gets interesting, but below 4M nada, ... but BITCOIN is fascinating the entire block-chain, ...

***

IMHO, having done this stuff for a solid six months after a double hiatus from bitcoin in 2011, and 2013, I have seen very little to nothing come of these types of 'looking for private keys', just hashes in generals that they them selves came from hashes is just shit from shit, you still get shit, a lucky monkey on a type writer can also generate 'war and peace', given enough time.

There are 10k ways to HACK bitcoin, there are a zillion paths to be taken, one must test them all to find that path that works for them, certainly you don't want to follow the 'pack' in this shit, as it will lead you to NO WHERE.

Probably best advice for people serious about this game is ...

1.) Study the C++ code for bitcoin, as none of the docs are real, its all bullshit, only the code is real

2.) roll you own, write your own parsers ( block chain to text, its probably best to do CSV), most of the database programs can-not handle 200GB very well; probably best c/c++ & python; I prefer csv-text, but all the real work is done with bloom-filters so that no text is actually ran during  during production

3.) have many databases that are selective for each mission, one for addresses, one for balances ( short life ), one for public-keys, ... but all the databases have bloom-filters, so you don't need to query a slow server during production, for instance a bloom filter indexed by 'address' but the bit signals value is far faster way to determine whether its useful to analyze and address

4.) Have many bloom-filters for all of the above, searching for the monkey means O(1) search time, you can NOT have just a bloom for address, you need blooms for your rain-bow tables, for your private-key warehouses, for your public-keys, for your ecdsa integer farming, X-Y pairs, R's&S's, k's,  ...

5.) getting back 2, none of the code on github works, I mean NONE, its not maintained, and it will all lead you to dead ends, if a guy actually wrote a 'bot' that harvested valuable addresses and swept those accounts he would NOT give that software away for free, 99% of the shit you find on GITHUB is somebody's dead-end,

6.) study all the papers on the subject, there are 1,000's of well written technical papers on ECDSA SECP256, read them all, write your own sig ecdsa software write your own hash library, vector everything, always place vector check points every few 100 steps so you know everything is working.

7.) there are 1,000's of variables, and it only takes one to generate false-positives, know at all times that all  your inputs are correct,

8.) have a bell or timer set to generate music ( make a sound, don't sit and watch the monitor ), I have a A-G guitar chord set, so depending up what my bots find, they play the different chord sets so that I know the nature of the problem, and the chord set doesn't nauseate people  around the house

9.) I find that hacking BTC is harder than mining ( writing your own mining sw ), but far more interesting, 'mining' is a toy problem, while the 'discrete log' problem may win you a fields medal, big difference between 'hacking' and mining.

10.) Don't be a fool, if you don't have years of experience in programming, cryptography, database, networking, math, physics, then your chance of making any kind of interesting discovery is nil ( or for finding high-val address for that matter, when I say 'find', I mean getting the private-master-key ); Lots of smart people working on this "Discrete Log Problem" for a long time, if it were an easy problem, then it would have been solved, I think some 50 years since computers have been generally available people have been trying to solve this problem by brute-force

11.) like I said there are 10k ways to hack btc, there is the address angle ( have bloom filter for a addresses with value ), the public-key angle, the random priv-key angle, ... the ecdsa pool angle, ... you need to really play around with all until you find a method that works for you, then dive deep and really understand why your succeeding, don't try to do them all, there is too much, just doing the ECDSA can be a full time job for a mathematician

...

Most of this stuff is done for intellectual curiosity IMHO its to much work for the 'get rich quick moron' which are the majority of this board ( over at 'bitcoin talk', I know here at dev is the real geniasses ), its far easier to clone your own coin, start your own mining pool, or exchange, or write 'wallets with backdoors' and rip people off if your goal is to 'steal', most of us when we do find coin, are more than happy to make note of the find to the owner.

It's a vast multi-disciplinary field 'hacking btc', I can see it become a major career path, there are already dozens of masters thesis written on this subject, bound to be many phd's born of this stuff

For the young kid, I can offer no better path than BUTERIN did, first study the BTC source (C++), and master that, then write your own btc client/server in python, and completely understand all, then modify your source so it can output 'data' as you want, ... Most of the 'action' is happening now, most of the easy stuff that is talked about in papers or this forum is what happened in 2014 or earlier, ... unless you write your own client/server that is tuned to study the now, your not going to make 'great' discovery's.

Passive Analysis is still wide open, very little work has been done on the block-chain using machine learning or digital signal processing techniques, but then again like the stock-market, what bitcon did in the past in terms of private-key generation means nothing tomorrow, as the core-devs are constantly hacking the code, and fixing the 'holes', thus to find the new holes, you must stay one step ahead of the core-devs,

No its more like talking about 'cold fusion' in 1988,

A real scientist will walk away from you, a layman will be deeply interested

Talking about Quantum-Computing in any fashion, other than a bunch of REAL physicists at a bar, is non-real

Most of my physics friends all say "I didn't really understand QM until I was drunk and had it explained",

Feynman said "Nobody understand's QM",

When somebody understands QM, then they just might be able to make a QC, until then butter-fly wings will flap in the air,

I will not bother with this 'article' ( two years old), but let me guess its a layman's article? Written in a laymans blog or magazine?

Most of this stuff is not unlike BITCOIN, I venture to say only one in 10k understand the 'real' about bitcoin, and certainly the same could be said of quantum-computers. Much of the talk of BTC on this forum is just the urban myths of BTC, and QC-BTC is the same, not based on fact, but based on religious fervor.

So a kid found the backdoor on the INTEL chip, and its ten years old, we all knew that the NSA had a back-door in the chip, most governments on earth don't allow these chips for this reason in sensitive areas,

All the routers and stuff its same, Microsoft has been working with NSA since 1990's, all mobile phones are NSA, hell even PUTIN says "Google is NSA"

So a kid in his 20's busted them we all knew this was a matter of time the Snowden leaks showed this,

BITCOIN is NSA, the white paper is NSA "How to mine a mint"(1996), SHA-256 is NSA,

PPL ask here how does the INTEL leak affect our BITCOIN, well it means that all is fair now, everybody of earth can now spy like the "NSA"

Intel has special instructions for CRYPTOGRAPHY, so they know when your doing crypto, and we knew these backdoors were in the chip;

No worry average person on this forum has 0.05 BTc, not likely a target by the NSA

More interesting is how the chinese/russian hackers will use this new information, its just another vector or path, into the bowels of Bitcoin.

You all have your wallet on your smart-phone (google-nsa), its not like they didn't have you all along, besides they created bitcoin to track&control your spending, your phones  job is your location, and what your saying, and doing

private address in HEX 9e027d0086bdb83372f6040765442bbedd35b96e1c861acce5e22e1c4987cd60
private address in WIF 5K1sjALvVxbsTRMf3aGKnB6E39uZfqQ6XQTGh5z3DrBDq3pG9A6

[ but there are two wifs L2Wru6Ew8pQuhcWAvMpdtPY4YWK1CQcwPCWxFvzkoi47crJBAVaP ]

Then address is 18JT3KeFV36Hkgo3Xi9bfgNYAXCVXBGyFg

But there is only the compressed address ... 15ZwrzrRj9x4XpnocEGbLuPakzsY2S4Mit

There is no balance on this private-address

IMHO, having done this stuff for a solid six months after a double hiatus from bitcoin in 2011, and 2013, I have seen very little to nothing come of these types of 'looking for private keys', just hashes in generals that they them selves came from hashes is just shit from shit, you still get shit, a lucky monkey on a type write can also generate 'war and peace', given enough time.

There are 10k ways to HACK bitcoin, there are a zillion paths to be taken, one must test them all to find that path that works for them, certainly you don't want to follow the 'pack' in this shit, as it will lead you to NO WHERE.

Probably best advice for people serious about this game is ...

1.) Study the C++ code for bitcoin, as none of the docs are real, its all bullshit, only the code is real
2.) roll you own, write your own parsers ( block chain to text, its probably best to do CSV), most of the database programs can handle 200GB very well; probably best c/c++ & python
3.) have many databases that are selective for each mission, one for addresses, one for balances ( short life ), one for public-keys, ..
4.) Have many bloom-filters for all of the above, searching for the monkey means O(1) search time, you can have just a bloom for address, you need blooms for your rain-bow table, for your private-key warehouse, for your public-keys, for your ecdsa integer farm, ...
5.) getting back 2, none of the code on github works, I mean NONE, its not maintained, and it will all lead you to dead ends, if a guy actually wrote a 'bot' that harvested valuable addresses and swept those accounts he would NOT give that software away for free, 99% of the shit you find on GITHUB is somebody's dead-end,
6.) study all the papers on the subject, there are 1,000's of well written technical papers on ECDSA SECP256, read them all, write your own sig ecdsa software write your own hash library, vector everything, always place vector check points every few 100 steps so you know everything is working.
7.) there are 1,000's of variables, and it only takes one to generate false-positives, know at all times that all  your inputs are correct,

8.) have a bell or timer set to generate music, I have a A-G guitar chord set,so depending up what my bots find, they play the different chord sets so that I know the nature of the problem, and the chord set doesn't nauseate people  around the house

9.) I find that hacking BTC is harder than mining, but far more interesting,

10.) Don't be a fool, if you don't have years of experience in programming, cryptograhy, database, networking, math, physics, then your chance of making any kind of interesting discovery is nil; Lots of smart people working on this "Discrete Log Problem" for a long time, if it were an easy problem, then it would have been solved, I think some 50 years since computers have been generally available people have been trying to solve this problem by brute-force

11.) like I said there are 10k ways to hack btc, there is the address angle, the public-key angle, the random priv-key angle, ... the ecdsa pool angle, ... you need to really play around with all until you find a method that works for you, then dive deep and really understand why your succeeding, don't try to do them all, there is too much, just doing the ECDSA can be a full time job for a mathematician

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Most of this stuff is done for intellectual curiosity IMHO its to much work for the 'get rich quick moron' which are the majority of this board, its far easier to clone your own coin, start your own mining pool, or exchange and rip people off if you goal is to 'steal', most of us when we do find coin, are more than happy to make note of the find to the owner.

It's a vast multi-disciplinary field 'hacking btc', I can see it become a major career path, there are already dozens of masters thesis written on this subject, bound to be many phd's born of this stuff

For the young kid, I can offer no better path than BUTERIN did, first study the BTC source, and master that, then write your own btc client/server in python, and completely understand all, then modify your source so it can output 'data' as you want, ... Most of the 'action' is happening now, most of the easy stuff that is talked about in papers or this forum is what happened in 2014 or earlier, ... unless you write your own client/server that is tuned to study the now, your not going to make 'great' discovery's.

Passive Analysis is still wide open, very little work has been done on the block-chain using machine learning or digital signal processing techniques, but then again like the stock-market, what bitcon did in the past in terms of private-key generation means nothing tomorrow, as the core-devs are constantly hacking the code, and fixing the 'holes', thus to find the new holes, you must stay one step ahead of the core-devs,

Criminals? Gambling? Bitcoin?? Say it ain't so

Well lets's say you taught yourself calculus when your were 8 years of age, and wrote a compiler at 16, and then went to U, and studied advanced math for 4+ years, U may become a 'programmer'

Look at BUTERIN of Ethereum, wrote ETH at 19 years, of age, won programming game contests at 14 years of age,

If your not a child prodigy by the time you were 14 years old, and certainly not an expert at math, or you didn't try to learn calculus on your own at 12, you have a snow ball in hell's chance of ever become a 'programmer'

There is simply too much to learn, especially the block-chain biz here cryptography at master-level math, bitcoin written in C++, obscure at that all the most arcane data structures to be found, this is an old programmers game, or a genius like Buterin

IMHO the majority of so called 'programmers' here at best might be running miners, or compiling software downloaded on github, but they're not programmers.

BITCOIN is combo of TOR, and TORRENT, and Discrete-MATH, and ETHERNET, and WEB, and database,  it pretty much brings in all of computer science, I couldn't imagine someone without 10+ years on COMP-SCI being able to seriously grasp this shit.

Again, none of this is a problem if your 16 years old, and you already wrote your own C++ compiler in GO, without anybody's help, including all the code generation, I think it only took Stallman about 20 years to write GCC/C++, and he too is/was a genius

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Yes, to answer your question if you were a programmer, you could 'clone' your own BTC and hype it and get rich, if you buy this shit, you will most likely end up a pauper.

Most ppl have a skill, its best they focus on their own skill, and intelligently invest their money, the number of ppl who get rich in BTC is a joke, most of the rich are ppl who were here in 2011 and got their coin for free, the ppl day-trading the majority here you see on this forum, are never going to make more money than a guy with a paper route.

The problem with BITCOIN is that its way beyond the shoeshine boy stage, now every moron on earth thinks he get rich on the bitcoin wave, and this always ends badly for all.