Good news from Europol - some call centres selling fake crypto were taken down.

From time to time we may hear about people who received a phone calls with a very attractive investment proposal. Many of that people accepted the risk and gave their money to scammers. It looks like for some time we will have much less phone calls like that, as many centres has been taken down.

Some details on Europol page: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/call-centres-selling-fake-crypto-taken-down-in-bulgaria-serbia-and-cyprus

(do I understand correctly they inform about the action one year after, or someone made a mistake with a date? publication date is Jan 12th 2023)

It's not really that simple. Me personally I am not a victim of this as I did not buy anything from him, but the whole market is really huge. I think everyone heard of Casascius coins (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Casascius_physical_bitcoins) which value is now much much bigger than their denomination.
Aside of that, that small items are perfect gifts.

It is just a matter of trust. For years he was running a company which became quite famous and trusted, all was fine and just one day he ruined everything. I do not know which case is worst, the one where you plan everything and just have your 'poker face' because you know one day in the future you will steal everything, or if all runs fine and one day you feel you are in need and then you feel impulse to steal all the money from your customers.
And at the end, it seems like really a 'personal issue', because like someone counter what was stolen is even less that $50k, not like millions in serious scams.

Here you are: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5434506.msg61586158#msg61586158

There is also one more post, few pages later, when someone else writes about his talk with Yogg.

For the ones who do not follow Collectibles forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5434506.0):
Cold Key owner retrieved private keys of all the sold 'cold wallets' he produced and as he was in need because of gambling he stole all the funds.

Which (apart of obvious sad event for card buyers/owners) is a very problematic for the whole "collectibles" market, any coin/card producer now will be asked twice "how may I trust you?".

I get one more GT too during the last x4 promo. Now I think I will play all-in and bet on BTC $20k-22.5k range. I think chances are 50/50, as there are still many days to the end of month and all may happen (even that we will go above 22.5...). Let's think positive

Yes, sometimes I cheat myself that Multiply could be profitable. It is, but for them
Keeping sats for interest could be the option, who knows if it is not a better option than betting on FUN price.
My year old lock expires soon and I strongly consider selling all the tokens above 12500 limit and keep the rest just for WOFs.

Exactly what I wanted to write. Do you remember maybe at which BTC price we get '50' for the first time? I have a feeling we still have lot of time until it will be decreased, for sure it the price was >$20k, but honestly speaking I do not remember what it was. It was like ages ago...

@iv4n, @slaman29 - when do you plan to execute all that WOFs? 1000? Or just at the end of week/month to have some sats for bets?

1225   


It happened today (or yesterday, I did not check). I think I was lucky to obtain that rank with Activity:826. Yey!

Not necessarily.

Using my WifSolverCuda, the WIF like in the example could be checked in a reasonable time (it is compressed and we have a middle part missing).

https://github.com/PawelGorny/WifSolverCuda

Additionally, if target address is known and public key is known, using Kangaroo makes it (almost) trivial.

PS: if you found online/bought that partial key, do not waste your time

Finally Some could not wait for that!

11 days left for January Crypto price betting, what is your opinion? Taking into consideration BTC is now >18k, I would think about >20 range, as odds now are insane (13.99).

Do not forget about really huge gain in tokens when you lock them. It makes it a quite safe investment even if price will go (slightly) down.
And even it you lose a little, you will get it back with WOF rewards.

I do not know.
If it is for learning purposes, you may use whatever you want if it only gives you fun. You may experiment with different inputs etc.
For serious usage I would stay with secure solutions understanding what they really do. You call java method, but what does it mean? Depending on system it may use Windows or Linux entropy source etc - that subject is really wide and you may read a lot about it.

If you base your program purely on user input, you will receive nothing else than brainwallet generator.

Yes. If you generate many keys, sometimes you will see 02, sometimes 03.
There is great page https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/ which could be very helpful for you. All the algorithms are explained there and you may test calculations/examples yourself.

That page is about 2 kinds of public key: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/public-key
Uncompressed public key from your OP would be:

92 - PawGo

Thanks! Amazing raffle!

We say compressed/uncompressed address to say if address was generated from compressed or uncompressed form of public key.

The address is generated exactly the same way - some input is hashed sha256, encoded with base58 etc.
The difference is what the input is. Public key is in fact a point in 2 dimensions, so you may think it is like (x, y). But, all the points are on the given curve, which is symmetrical, we may say if we have point (x, +y), we may also have point (x, -y) [they are not exactly +-,  as symmetry is not on '0 level', but you feel the difference I hope].
So, in the far far past, what was used was point uncompressed, where you hashed XY, and there was prefix 0x04, so content for hash was 04XY. Then, for simplicity, compressed addresses became more popular and now they are almost mandatory (you cannot generate (native)Segwit address from uncompressed public key).
Compressed public key looks like 02X or 03X, where 02 and 03 are 'markers' if you have public key which could be 'extended' to (X, +Y) or (X, -Y).
As for given X it is obvious what Y is, the only question is if it is + or -.

Do not forget we still have x4 RP promo. I have used it to launch Multiply BTC - Auto, fortunately results were not so bad. I gained some RPs, so I am much closer to 100k limit, but still did not reach the next GT (did I mention the progress counter would be helpful...?).
FUN token price stays +- at the same level, maybe it is time to place bets, again the same range?

If you have minimal IT skills, try to use hashcat with a given masks https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=mask_attack or btcrecover https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tokenlist_file/
If it is date only (no time) it should be quite easy task, even if you do not know the order of date segments or separators used (if there are any).

Interesting, I appreciate you work, regardless of its actual usefulness.
Do you use QR code displayed in the console or saved to file?
I think with a very little effort you may add generation of other types of addresses, even legacy uncompressed one, if the purpose is to learn/understand how things work.

And of course restore address with a given WIF, but I guess I am not the one to create TODO list, you know what to do

Nooo do not tell me they still have that bug:
https://medium.com/mycrypto/disclosure-key-generation-vulnerability-found-on-walletgenerator-net-potentially-malicious-3d8936485961

Sometimes you go too far, you suspect your colleagues, your network admin, you suspect MITM attack... and at the end you see that the most probably you were cheated by the wallet itself.

@TheQuin has not been on the forum since Dec 30th! Maybe he is on a longer (but well-deserved) holidays?

I think there are other team members who has access to their website and may update it, no? At least no-one complained recently about delayed withdrawals and we know they process some transactions manually.