$100K TO CRACK A BITCOIN WALLET

[BADecker]

I wonder how much info was given to Mike to do his work. He must have had a head start from some of the basic wallet addresses of the early days. We really need the devs to increase the length of our hashes.


$100K TO CRACK A BITCOIN WALLET

Since then, they owners of these coins had lost the private key, or simply thrown away the drive or computer the coins were on. It's next to impossible to recover this key in most situations, but for the right amount of money it can sometimes be done.

About 20 years ago, [Mike] was working as a cryptography expert and developed a number of interesting algorithms for breaking various forms of encryption, one of which involved .zip files with poor entropy. A Bitcoin owner stumbled across the paper that [Mike] wrote and realized that it could be a method for recovering his lost key from 2016. [Mike] said it would take a GPU farm and $100,000 USD, but when the owner paid the seemingly enormous price [Mike] was able to recover around $300,000 worth of Bitcoin.

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[20kevin20]

With quantum and much faster and more improved GPUs coming as technology advances, I have to hope the BTC devs will find a way to make wallets less prone to hacking and I doubt BTC will be left in the dust and have a sad ending with new technology taking the control over our wallets.

Worst part is, the oldest addresses are at risk. If one gets their hand on the earliest wallets, they could crash the markets and install fear in many of the new crypto enthusiasts.

But is the article even related to cracking private keys or the wallet itself? Because from the quote below it sounds like they have been able to successfully exploit a ZIP file to get a BTC wallet, it doesn't look like they spent $100k, got a mining farm and cracked a wallet file:

We never know where the solutions to our problems are going to come from, like a random .zip file exploitation from two decades ago, but we can be sure that in the future it will be much easier to crack these keys.

[odolvlobo]

The headline is a lie. No wallet was cracked. The private keys were stored in an encrypted zip file. The zip file's encryption was cracked enough to narrow the search space so that brute force became feasible.

This article explains how it was done: https://reperiendi.wordpress.com/2020/04/03/how-i-recovered-over-300k-of-bitcoin/

[joniboini]

With quantum and much faster and more improved GPUs coming as technology advances, I have to hope the BTC devs will find a way to make wallets less prone to hacking and I doubt BTC will be left in the dust and have a sad ending with new technology taking the control over our wallets.

If you brute force a private key from out of nowhere, I bet it will takes you years to even find an address that has 0.1 or even less BTC in it. Most hacking occurs because human error, naivety, and lack of security awareness. It's useless to improve any encryption mechanism when the user use something like "12345" or "qwertyui" as their password.

As far as I know, there is no brute-force of private key that result in something like having $300k in your hand.

[hugeblack]

The content is misleading with the title and perhaps its purpose is to promote the article but what happened was decryption of zip file and the private key was kept there.
I think I will risk that amount if I am sure I can find $ 30,000.
Do not forget that this money may increase in value in the future.

As for trying to brute-force the private key, I do not think that quantum technology will do a lot of work in a little time, I remember that there is a topic that contains some calculations are approximate for the required period. I will add the link when I remember.

[FanatMonet]

Enumerating keys is a very, very long and rather complicated question if you are working without any information that will help reduce the range. In general, this person can now start working with such wallets himself, with the ability, now he needs only information.

[hbbitcoin11]

Hello, what should be hardware configuration need or how much it should ne taken for unlock the zip file containing a password of 13 characters, contains only alphabet and numbers (capital and small letters and 0-9 numbers ) there is no special characters add in this zip file
I had forgotten my zip file password which contains something important
If you can crack it than i am willing to pay you 100k usd

[Harkorede]

The most appropriate title would be $100K TO CRACK A ZIP FILE, the title is somewhat misleading, leading to a belief that a bitcoin wallet is a less secure than it really is.

One of the replies from Mike Stay is quoted below

And as others have pointed out, I cracked a zip file, not a Bitcoin wallet.

[beenis]

i found a post some where , they  gave some numerical puzzle to solve and  they claim that is a pvt key of bitcoin wallet with 1000$ inside it

[seoincorporation]

So, what do we need to recover our lost coins?

a GPU farm and $100,000 USD

Mark those words guys, the history is hard to believe but you know what they say, Money Talks. 

It would be nice to know what software he used for the brute force attack, i think JTR was involved.

[liputin]

Thank you for clarifying this.I was surprised when I saw the headline.