Hi,

As been discussed many times before using a (weak) Brainwallet is a bad idea. I ran some tests myself and got some input from users over here. This far I have a collection of 18.767 BTC-addresses based on a brainwallet which have been used in the blockchain before.

I tried to compare my results with the results of other researchers but could not find any lists online at all. I found some examples but not a comprehensive list. So I published my own results over here: https://eli5.eu/brainwallet

Please note: all published addresses have a balance of 0 so this is not a list for robbers . There are also a lot of extra datasets I haven't used this far so I expect the numbers to go up once I use them as well (I'm in the middle of perfecting my own tooling and blockchain parser so this will take some more time first).

I love to get some feedback and if you have results to share which I missed in this round I'm more than happy to hear from you and include them.

TA

Note: Based on my original posting from two days ago on the Technical Discussion subforum but this might be a better place (?)

No I didn't. It seemed to be a lucrative business once so I can imagine lots of time and computing power has been consumed to find private keys for addresses with non zero balances in the past.

Furthermore: I'm just interested in finding as much brainwallets as possible which have been used in the past. I'm not interested in stealing funds which aren't mine.

Forum member amaclin1 did a check and came up with 200 addresses/brainwallets he had which were missing from my list. I just added them to m database and updated the site. My own software indicated two of the entries as a duplicate so the total list now contains 18.767 entries. Thanks for helping/sharing!

To comment on the other request by adding the latest transaction date: This is something I currently do not have present in my database. I will mark is as a future request since I first have to complete/update my own blockchain parser for this. But as mentioned by HeRetiK all of the addresses were emptied a long time ago so way before any fork afaik.

Grab them from this text-file then: https://eli5.eu/brainwallet/btc_brainwallet_v18569.txt

Would be nice if you could share the ones I miss!

There isn't one yet but I could build it easily. So you are looking for a text file containing 1 BTC address on each line?

I get you stand on this and maybe the introduction was a bit too short on the subject. As always there are exceptions to the rule and if you manage to remember a brainwallet with high entropy and also using some personal knowledge (like a salt) it becomes a lot more secure. Let's just hope you want suffer from a dying brain instead of a dying hard drive!

Fixed some nasty bugs which caused some addresses to stay blank on the overview-pages and fixed some wrong amounts_in and amounts_out which were not properly converted in some cases.

I also added another 60 new entries to the list based on a small sweep I just completed so the list currently contains 18.569 entries.

Finally: I'm always interested in new datasets to try and/or results from other people who conducted this kind of Research. I aim to let this list grow to the best source for compromised brainwallets.

Thanks for pointing out those posts. I was aware of the first one (from Pastebin) but haven't yet made my own dataset with the kind of data decscribed in there like BTC-addresses, transaction-id's, merkleroots, etc.

I will read up on your post about Ethereum brainwallets. I'm focussing on BTC for now but it's always nice to read about other experiences!

Thanks for pointing out the 2 Billion mistake! I will look into it tomorrow.

Biggest is over 500 BTC. As stated on the site (https://eli5.eu/brainwallet/detail/14NWDXkQwcGN1Pd9fboL8npVynD5SfyJAE.html):

General Information
The passhrase below was used as a Brainwallet to generate the given address.

BTC Address: 14NWDXkQwcGN1Pd9fboL8npVynD5SfyJAE
Used passphrase: bitcoin is awesome
Total transactions: 19
Amount received: 501.06500863 BTC
Amount spent: 501.06500863 BTC

Proof
You can check the private key is indeed known by verifying the following signed message when running your own node:

I personally believe most of the ones with a 0.00005460 deposit and withdrawal are in there because of some experiment in the past where simple dictionary words were used to see how long it would take for an attacker to grab the funds. I do agree with you the ones with the most transactions are the ones most interesting that's why I sorted the list by number of transactions. I still think the other ones are interesting as well when trying to compose a list of brainwallets which have been used in the past.

I did look into Brainflayer and also used it in the process. But you got to keep in mind Brainflayer is not a standalone solution. It depends on creating a Bloom filter based upon all addresses used in the BTC-Blokchain. So you first need to come up with such a list: this is where I used my own parser to create the list. In 2015 when Brainflayer was released there were about 80 Million unique addresses on the blockchain which lead to a lot less false positives than when used on the 400 Million plus unique addresses currently in use. And finally Brainflayer just reports if a match was found it doesn't do any looking into transactions or balances used.

So what I did was make use of Brainflayer to do a very fast scan using a Bloomfilter and I processed the results from there within my own tooling to filter out false positives, duplicates and add extra information on transactions and balances.

No, I used my own parser but since it wasn;t/isn't finished yet I got the transactions and balance from using the Blockchain API.

The steps involved for creating such a list:

• Perform a SHA-256 on the input (word/phrase)
• Check the generated private key (compressed/uncompressed) against my own databases with successes
• If Private key is not in database create BTC-address from the key(s)
• Check if BTC address exists on blockchain based on my own database with all BTC-addresses
• If address is found store the private key and passphrase in the database and get info on number of transactions and balance from Blockchain API

That's about it.

I mainly used single words from dictionaries and used passwords from published password dumps.

Hi,

As been discussed many times before using a Brainwallet is a bad idea. I ran some test myself and found 18.509 BTC-addresses based on a brainwallet which also has been used in the blockchain before.

I tried to compare my results with the results of other researchers but could not find any lists online at all. I found some examples but not a comprehensive list. So I published my own results over here: https://eli5.eu/brainwallet

Please note: all published addresses have a balance of 0 so this is not a list for robbers . There are also a lot of extra datasets I haven't used this far so I expect the numbers to go up once I use them as well (I'm in the middle of perfecting my own tooling and blockchain parser so this will take some more time first).

I love to get some feedback and if you have results to share which I missed in this round I'm more than happy to hear from you and include them.

TA