How somebody can prove that my wallet belong to him?

[buwaytress]

Signing from your wallet with an address that belongs to you. Which wallet are you using?

Huh.. But we can both signing from my wallet...

*It's not a real situation! It's just a model!

As others point out, you made a critical error in this model.

If you aren't the only person to have the private key, then the wallet is no longer yours, and yours only. You merely have equal control over the same wallet. Or to put it simple: the only way to prove sole ownership is to be the sole person controlling the private keys.

If you want to prove you owned it first, and it was stolen or given away or compromised, then you must find a way to prove that you used it first.

In your model, you could create a wallet and immediately "Stake" a Bitcoin address on this forum, signing from it. It doesn't prove you were the first owner though, just the first to use it or to attempt to provide evidence of owning it.

[The Cryptovator]

I believe I understand what you're saying. The obvious response is that if your seed or private key were compromised, you couldn't confirm that was your wallet. Whoever has the private key or seed phrase is the owner of the address, regardless of who you are. They all own the address if a thousand people have access to the private key. You are unable to establish the true owner regardless. Hence, if the private keys or seed are compromised, it is no longer yours.

[Broadanbig]

Making a proof to ownership of a wallet depends if there is any litigation on ground, if not what is the point proving ownership when only one person is in possession of the passphrase but however, if you have possession of the wallet keys and you noticed someone is on possession of it you will have to transfer your assets to a new wallet immediately before any other thing happens but if in a situation where you will need to prove your ownership in a law court, then it will need you to take extra effort inlaying claims to the wallet which will involve you providing evidence such as transactions which requires mostly experience or possible events and occurrences surrounding the tokens bought atleast thrse can be a bit challenging but convincing.

[Fivestar4everMVP]

What if i catched some mot****er, who is using one of my wallets - how can i prove that it's mine? 

I don't think it is possible for you and another person to co own and use one wallet, where as you don't know such a person, and neither is the wallet in question , a multisig wallet.

creating wallets cost absolutely nothing and would only take less than 5 minutes, it is an absolute stupidity for a hacker to keep using your wallet after hacking, he know you have access to the same wallet and that if he puts or leave funds stored on that wallet, you can and would withdraw it, for this reason, they can never use co use a wallet they already hacked with the owner of the wallet they hacked, its not possible.

[livingfree]

Let's just start out with the common quote and tip by everybody about owning keys. "Not your keys, not your coins."

And from there, if someone also owns that private keys that you have for that wallet then it only means that both of you owns it. But what's the essence of keeping with that wallet if someone already knew it and probably have swept all of the funds there?

You better just abandon that wallet and make a new one for yourself and do all necessary things that it won't happen again. Because how could that happen is when you've been hacked or phished.

[serveria.com]

What if i catched some mot****er, who is using one of my wallets - how can i prove that it's mine?  

Most probably by the time you'll realize somebody is using your wallet, your funds will be gone. So you won't have to prove anything.  

A person who knows the private key or wallet.dat + password owns the coins. There is no other way if the wallet is non-custodial.

[o_e_l_e_o]

-snip-

None of these are cryptographic proof, however. You might be able to "prove" it in a court, but as we both know from our discussions regarding CSW, courts aren't exactly great arbiters of truth. And the words in your seed phrase should never be picked because they have meaning for you and should always be generated randomly, so that's a poor suggestion.

So we can say that if I recall my seed-phrase that way - it is mine?

No, because that method will never find a used seed phrase or address, even if you used all the computing power in the world and ran it until the Earth is engulfed by the dying sun.

[JustAsk]

-snip-

None of these are cryptographic proof, however. You might be able to "prove" it in a court, but as we both know from our discussions regarding CSW, courts aren't exactly great arbiters of truth. And the words in your seed phrase should never be picked because they have meaning for you and should always be generated randomly, so that's a poor suggestion.

So we can say that if I recall my seed-phrase that way - it is mine?

No, because that method will never find a used seed phrase or address, even if you used all the computing power in the world and ran it until the Earth is engulfed by the dying sun.

Why not? It is a chance!

[o_e_l_e_o]

Why not? It is a chance!

I am thinking of an atom. One specific atom. Not just on Earth, not just in the solar system, but somewhere in the observable universe. A single atom. Start guessing and I'll give you all the bitcoin I own once you pick the right one. Why not? There is a chance you pick correctly, after all!

This is like you trying to find a previously used seed phrase by simply picking random words. It is a complete waste of time. The only thing you will gain is burnt out hardware and a high electricity cost.

Here is an explanation I gave a few years ago:

Let's say we have a trillion planet Earths. On each Earth, there are a trillion people. Each person has a trillion computers. Each computer generates a trillion keys a second. All these computers have been creating a trillion keys per second since the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. 10^12 * 10^12 * 10^12 * 10^12 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 13.7 * 10^9 = 4.3*10^65. This means that they would have so far generated approximately 0.0000000004% of all private keys.

[lionheart78]

I believe I understand what you're saying. The obvious response is that if your seed or private key were compromised, you couldn't confirm that was your wallet. Whoever has the private key or seed phrase is the owner of the address, regardless of who you are. They all own the address if a thousand people have access to the private key. You are unable to establish the true owner regardless. Hence, if the private keys or seed are compromised, it is no longer yours.

I think the argument here is to prove who originally own the wallet address, so I guess it should go down to the history of wallet creation.  the original owner can be verified by some technicalities like the wallet.dat or the .json file as I stated earlier, if it is available, the person who has the oldest file can be considered the owner and I think that can be presented legally as well if the case is brought to court. 

[o_e_l_e_o]

the original owner can be verified by some technicalities like the wallet.dat or the .json file as I stated earlier, if it is available, the person who has the oldest file can be considered the owner and I think that can be presented legally as well if the case is brought to court.

An attacker who knew what he was doing would be able to create an undetectable forgery of a wallet file with a timestamp of whenever they like, which renders this method useless.

And even if they did not create a forgery, the true owner could simply have lost or even deliberately deleted the original wallet file, since they were simply relying on their seed phrase back up.

[JustAsk]

Why not? It is a chance!

I am thinking of an atom. One specific atom. Not just on Earth, not just in the solar system, but somewhere in the observable universe. A single atom. Start guessing and I'll give you all the bitcoin I own once you pick the right one. Why not? There is a chance you pick correctly, after all!

This is like you trying to find a previously used seed phrase by simply picking random words. It is a complete waste of time. The only thing you will gain is burnt out hardware and a high electricity cost.

Here is an explanation I gave a few years ago:

Let's say we have a trillion planet Earths. On each Earth, there are a trillion people. Each person has a trillion computers. Each computer generates a trillion keys a second. All these computers have been creating a trillion keys per second since the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. 10^12 * 10^12 * 10^12 * 10^12 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 13.7 * 10^9 = 4.3*10^65. This means that they would have so far generated approximately 0.0000000004% of all private keys.

Not random words!
It's just 2048 english words and the dictionary is known!

[Casdinyard]

What if i catched some mot****er, who is using one of my wallets - how can i prove that it's mine?  

Signing a message is something on their wallets is something that people have been doing since bitcoin's public release. This is also the reason why we found out whose wallets are of Satoshi Nakamoto's ownership, because he signs a message on his wallets. In any case, there are also a few other techniques that other users employ like keeping timestamps of their wallet's age and other stuff. But all of these are really dependent on what wallet type you use. There are multiple ways really. And you can also employ multiple methods at the same time. I myself sign messages on my wallet and also keep track of transactions.

[o_e_l_e_o]

It's just 2048 english words and the dictionary is known!

It doesn't matter. There are 2¹²⁸ possible valid 12 word seed phrases from the standard wordlist of 2048 words. You have failed to grasp how big a number that is. Re-read the numbers I have explained above. There will never be a collision between any reused seed phrases in the entire future of the human race. Feel free to start randomly generating seed phrases and checking them for balance if you want, but I guarantee that you will find absolutely nothing.

This is also the reason why we found out whose wallets are of Satoshi Nakamoto's ownership, because he signs a message on his wallets.

No they didn't, and we don't know for sure which addresses belong(ed) to Satoshi.

[franky1]

ok lets clarify some stuff

a 12 word seed is actually 11 random words where the 12th is PART of a "checksum"
lets not go to much into the details and lets dumb it down to simply using 11 words for easy math sake

so even using 11 random words of a 2048 library and letting the software calculate the remaining to create the 12th word checksum

those 11 words have
2,658,455,991,569,830,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
possibilities

if 8billion people tried 1 unique attempt
thats still 1 in 332,306,998,946,229,000,000,000,000
if they done 1million attempts a second
thats still going to require 332,306,998,946,229,000,000seconds
which is
thats still 5,538,449,982,437,150,000 minutes to try them all
thats still 92,307,499,707,285,800 hours to try them all
thats still 3,846,145,821,136,910 days to try them all
thats still 10,537,385,811,334 years to try them all
thats still 123,969,244,839 lifetime to try them all

yep if all 8 billion people done 1million possibilities/sec for their entire lives.
they will still need to pass the project down to their offspring who pass it down to descendants
for 124 billion lifetimes of ancestry

[Stalker22]

Not random words!
It's just 2048 english words and the dictionary is known!

Just? Let me ask you something, do you know how many possible permutations there are for a 12-word seed phrase from a set of just 2048 words?
I know that o_e_l_e_o and franky1 have already answered you, but I am just wondering if you know how to calculate that number yourself?



@guys, I do not think it is worth trying to dumb it down for him any further. I am not sure if he is just trolling or he really no understand. 

[franky1]

well we know no one has actually stolen his key. his is just hypothesising..

however some people want to know how secure things are, but afraid to ask.
they dont want to sound dumb.

so by answering this. other people that want genuine answers about how many permutations there are will find out