BTC wallets security

[Sonia_123]

The owner of that wallet in question may have been unstable due to one reason or the other, mainly with health related issue and has not been fit to access his  Bitcoin wallet properly, instead of having issues with seed phrase or trying to get it and misplace it due to his condition ,to avoid him losing his asset ,may decide to stay away until he/she is done with whatever the challenge may be.

[Patrol69]

Wallet is one of the most important subject in investing. If the wallet is not secure then no matter how carefully you invest you will never find the investment capital. So I always try to tell new investors that there is no problem if you invest after few days but make sure you are using more security complete wallet first. You can use Electrum wallet to hold bitcoins but if you think you will need to transfer bitcoins regularly then I suggest you to use any major exchange wallet. For exchange wallets you can use Binance or Coinbase if you want.

[Zoomic]

Hi,
I've seen on Telegram during last weeks around 3 old (like 10y old with no activity) wallets selling their btc.
What are the chances that these wallets are actually broken by bruteforce? I know there were discussions some years ago about people that were trying to crack the private keys.
What do you think guys? Can such successful act would mean the end of btc era?

regards

The coins in that wallet can only be stolen if the owner of such wallet misplaced his private keys. Those wallets and the coins in them could actually belong to the original owners who might have decided to buy some bitcoins and hold for that long. This could explain why their are no activities recorded on that wallet.  Anything aside this reason I stated above could mean the private keys has been misplaced by the original owner. Cracking a private key is not easy and can be very difficult to achieve, it is only a hacker who has access to your wallet and private details that can crack your private keys easily.

The security of you bitcoins depends solely on how you manage your wallet, if you are careless with it, you will lose your coins and this will not in anyway lead to an end to the BTC era.

[Publictalk792]

The coins in that wallet can only be stolen if the owner of such wallet misplaced his private keys. Those wallets and the coins in them could actually belong to the original owners who might have decided to buy some bitcoins and hold for that long. This could explain why their are no activities recorded on that wallet.  Anything aside this reason I stated above could mean the private keys has been misplaced by the original owner. Cracking a private key is not easy and can be very difficult to achieve, it is only a hacker who has access to your wallet and private details that can crack your private keys easily.

The security of you bitcoins depends solely on how you manage your wallet, if you are careless with it, you will lose your coins and this will not in anyway lead to an end to the BTC era.

Yes you are right that bitcoin can only be stolen if  owner loses their private keys. It is possible that bitcoin in old wallets belongs to people who bought it and just left it there which is why there is no activity. If something else happens to bitcoin it's likely because owner lost their private keys. It's very hard for someone to crack your private keys unless they have access to your personal information and wallet. If you are not careful with your wallet you might lose your bitcoin but that does not mean bitcoin will disappear altogether. It is important to be careful with your wallet to keep your bitcoin safe. Because not you keys not your Bitcoin.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

Wallet is one of the most important subject in investing. If the wallet is not secure then no matter how carefully you invest you will never find the investment capital. So I always try to tell new investors that there is no problem if you invest after few days but make sure you are using more security complete wallet first.

Learn and choose a good wallet to use.

Learn to back up a wallet and practice to recover a wallet from backup.

Then, it's all good for a start of investment, with fund storage in an open source non custodial wallet. Your fund will be safe with your own custodial, with private keys and you no longer rely on any centralized party to secure your fund.

https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet
How to back up a seed phrase?

For backups, don't split wallet sees, it's bad idea.
Why is seed splitting a bad idea.

You can use Electrum wallet to hold bitcoins but if you think you will need to transfer bitcoins regularly then I suggest you to use any major exchange wallet.

Verify Electrum wallet before using it.

[Guide] Verify and download Electrum wallet

[Parvati_j]

Hi,
I've seen on Telegram during last weeks around 3 old (like 10y old with no activity) wallets selling their btc.
What are the chances that these wallets are actually broken by bruteforce? I know there were discussions some years ago about people that were trying to crack the private keys.
What do you think guys? Can such successful act would mean the end of btc era?

regards

The chances of brut forcing a wallet is very low, as the hacker have to spend enough money in acquiring much computing power up to quantum machines, which have not been produced yet. Those coin could be accessed by the owner who have held dearly to make sure the price gets to a certain amount of profit before they sell, or it could be inherited by the children, either ways the coin is still in the hands on the owner.

[Cricktor]

I've seen on Telegram during last weeks around 3 old (like 10y old with no activity) wallets selling their btc.

Telegram, scammer's paradise and wallets for sale are almost certainly 100% a scam, especially if they pretend to contain many years old coins in eye-watering quantities. Be careful with strangers on Telegram!

What are the chances that these wallets are actually broken by bruteforce? I know there were discussions some years ago about people that were trying to crack the private keys.

Probably 0% because the scammers earn money by selling such forged wallets and don't want their victims to discover that those wallets don't contain the required private keys to move the funds. So there's clearly no interest in anyone being able to actually break the wallet's encryption password.

What do you think guys? Can such successful act would mean the end of btc era?

What do you mean? Why would something basically impossible be the end of Bitcoin era?

I have a feeling you don't understand the security of Bitcoin at all. Educate yourself!

Besides a few known transactions by Satoshi Nakamoto, none of his mined coins have been moved/stolen by someone else. And Satoshi used P2PK coinbase transactions, ie. the public key is known on the blockchain. His coins are still secure, so are yours, so are mine (with respect to the basic technical security implemented in Bitcoin).

If you do stupid things with your wallet and ignore computer security, you can loose your coins, but this is not Bitcoin's fault.

[Fiasem20]

In my own opinion one careless person's downfall won't and cannot end Bitcoin because your security should be your sole responsibility in the crypto ecosystem.Bitcoin technology is secured and impossible for some group of online theft to crack the network and gain control over it if it was that easy the governments would have govern the Blockchain network.Bruteforce is something that  happens every day, seconds and minute,a hacker can brute force a user's wallet and that has nothing to do with entire Bitcoin Blockchain technology.And also if a hacker would think of bruteforcing all the Bitcoin wallet private keys that energy is equivalent to a wasted effort so like what every other person have said you just start accumulating Bitcoin with DCA or lump sum strategy and stop imagining actions that are impossible.

[CryptSafe]

OP, I  really do not think it would be that easy to brute force Bitcoin wallet. If you look, of lately, there have been a shift or transfer of  bitcoin from wallet as old as 10 years of age. So why did they not see that wallet to brute force and steal the Bitcoin there?  It is not not possible to do so because if it were possible, many wallets would have been hacked and Bitcoin stolen.

Any movement going on in any old wallet now possibly is the owner of that wallet transfering their assets to another wallet possible for change of position or so. That doesn't mean the wallet is hacked. If any of such wallet gets hacked the owner would come up to make announcement and who ever did that would be caught because all eyes would be on the movement of the assets and it would not be safe for whomever did that.

[Alpha Marine]

Many walkers would have been hacked if that were possible and I also do not think that would be possible in the future because different innovations would be introduced as well. The more hackers get sophisticated, so does developers. There will always be a way to stay ahead of criminals.
As long as you keep your wallet and device secure, there's no way it will be compromised, if you're using an open sourced wallet.

There can be a lot of reasons why old wallet without activity selling their bitcoins. It could be that they just decided to sell, or they've been hacked somehow, but it not by bruteforce.

[Cryptomultiplier]

Hi,
I've seen on Telegram during last weeks around 3 old (like 10y old with no activity) wallets selling their btc.
What are the chances that these wallets are actually broken] by bruteforce? I know there were discussions some years ago about people that were trying to crack the private keys.
What do you think guys? Can such successful act would mean the end of btc era?

regards

I know for certain that these days some wallets with forgotten or lost keys can be hacked into after application of a technic called 'Brute-forcing' either by the owner of whom forgot their keys and employed such services or by thieves in hacker form with just that intention.

Luckily for them, there’s a growing cottage industry of wallet recovery services, a breed of crypto dark-arts practitioners to help recover lost funds.

Currently, the most popular method is known as “brute-forcing,” where the recovery specialists use a cryptographic technique that involves bombarding the wallet with as many passwords as possible, in hope of eventually guessing the right one.

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/02/13/hacking-crypto-wallets-is-latest-strategy-in-quest-to-recover-lost-billions/

Unless such technics now used by some of these new age services continue to thrive without being regulated or monitored, then we as bitcoin investors may have come into a time when even HODLing btc is a terrible risk in itself.
 Am sure however that there would always be counter measures developed to combat and restrict these kind of services from gaining such access in the future and that BTC will fulfill its purpose of getting to 21million coins before any of such fears could even be dominant.

[Peanutswar]

Tons of words can be use for generate of keys and if those bruteforce will happen people will not trust BTC wallets anymore so whats the essence of having a wallet if they have a weak security funds are not safe at all. People have different options with their BTC can be hold for a long term and people think its already a dormant some of them can be considered as dead wallet because they are now unrecovered which is imagine to the original owner how much money they can get and just lost.

[Belarge]

Wallet is one of the most important subject in investing. If the wallet is not secure then no matter how carefully you invest you will never find the investment capital. So I always try to tell new investors that there is no problem if you invest after few days but make sure you are using more security complete wallet first. You can use Electrum wallet to hold bitcoins but if you think you will need to transfer bitcoins regularly then I suggest you to use any major exchange wallet. For exchange wallets you can use Binance or Coinbase if you want.

Crypto exchanges are vasts in numbers, its easily accessible, it provides aides for more firewall security, it's stabled to become a backup source for wallets.

Bitcoin wallets shouldn't be more complex for everyone to handle, we understand the basis of the system and how cryptocurrency operates. Wallet should be protected in all rounds and more importantly, the seed phrase should be kept in discreet place because we live in a wicked world and our close friends can be our number one enemy tomorrow.

[khaled0111]

... but if you think you will need to transfer bitcoins regularly then I suggest you to use any major exchange wallet. For exchange wallets you can use Binance or Coinbase if you want.

Crypto exchanges are vasts in numbers, its easily accessible, it provides aides for more firewall security, it's stabled to become a backup source for wallets...

Sorry, but this is a terrible idea. I would never advise anyone to store their coins on an exchange. Remember: "not your keys, not your coins".
Exchanges are meant to be used for trading. So, you need to keep only the coins you are willing to exchange there. Having to make multiple transfers on a daily basis is not a reason to store your coins on an exchange. In fact, it's just another reason why you shouldn't do that as withdrawal fees are usually way higher than what you would pay when transferring from your own non-custodial wallet.

[fredericktaylor]

The coins inside the wallet might only be seized if the owner misplaces his private keys. It's possible that the initial owners of such wallets decided to buy some bitcoins and keep them for that long. This can be the cause of the wallet's inactivity. Anything different from the explanation given above could mean that the secret keys were lost by the original owner. It is not possible for anyone to quickly crack your private keys; only a hacker with access to your wallet and personal data can do so.