Do owners of large addresses protect themselves with bots ?

[khaled0111]

OP’s idea is not bad at all, actually. For those who are concerned about the risks of exposing the address’s private key, there is a workaround for it but it will only work for hodlers who keep their coins in long-term cold storage (no utxo should be spent).
The idea is to create multiple transactions that spend the wallet’s entire balance and send it to another safe address. Each transaction pays a different fee. Then the bot can decide which transaction to broadcast depending on the fee that the attacker used.
This can rule out the risk of exposing the private keys but it can’t prevent the attacker from creating another transaction paying even higher fees.

[coupable]

Thanks for the replies.

Yes I mean as a protection against theft. I agree that this involves that the bot has access to the private key and so it must be done extremely securely. Isn't there not even one bitcoin user having said that they set up such an anti-theft bot?

If I get you right, first question that comes accross my mind is what should be the need for this solution if the owner is safe protecting his keys? To think about such a method, it means he either knows that his keys are somehow exposed, or he is ignorant about the ways to protect his keys.
Furthermore, if we follow this approach, it is the dumbest way to protect the transaction with a third part app, unless the owner is a developper himself to build the bot (if he can build such a complicated app, he should be aware about how to protect his keys).
Your approach is just an imaginary assumption. But I won't be surprised if one day I find some scammers promoting selling a bot claiming that it's an additional layer of security.

[ABCbits]

Either the owner or hacker will receive small amount of satoshi, that is close to dust limit. So IMO both of them lose, with miner as the only winner.

It’s better not to end up in a situation where your funds is being stolen but it’s still better to have the third party (the miner ) get most of the money than just letting the hacker walk away with it.

Not sure if something like this could work:
What if the owner can just secure the funds by using it  as a fee.. the only problem now would be recovering them , how possible can that be from a pool or miner.. giving the stance of the situation ( it will also be very hard) but I’m also asking if it’s possible?

It's possible. If you haven't know. There is a Bitcoin owner who mistakenly used a very high transaction fee which the mining company refunded the overpaid fee to the sender. It's not just once but more than one time that it happened although it's not the same company and both are high amount of fee like 700k worth of bitcoin. For small amount of Bitcoin?, That's what I don't know if they do the same and they also require confirmation of ownership or proof that you own it.

Even if miner or mining pool willing spend their time to help, proving ownership is tricky since both owner and hacker have private key to sign message. The owner need to give different proof that may compromise their privacy, while the hacker wouldn't hesitate to create fake proof.

[AVE5]

So to me it would make sense that the owners of addresses that have large amounts of bitcoins have set up bots that constantly monitor transactions that arrive for confirmation by nodes, and if they spot someone trying to spend their coins they quickly create another transaction with much larger fee to try to be in the blockchain first.

If I get you well, yes it'd makes some sense if there's such a bot that notifies users of when their wallet address sign in wallet recovery message to gain accessibility in the case that your wallet address mean to be accessed with strange device or by other party.
Like I said it might make some sense but doesn't seem to straighten security because non custodial wallets doesn't require external permission before gaining access but once you've the right seed phrase, you're just one step to go.
So it'll be needless of this your thought about using external notification feature to securing of wallets.
To safe and secured with your funds and privacies, just store your seed phrase secured and maintain your device privacy same time.

[Pmalek]

Bitcoin is secure on a protocol level. It doesn't need an overseer or a bot to monitor transactions. Keep your keys safe and make sure no one else can find them and you will be fine. If you think there is a risk of exposing your keys, you are not removing or decreasing that risk by allowing an online bot to access them. It creates the opposite effect. The risk of your keys leaking are higher because another party knows them. Software malfunctions. It can break, it can have bugs, it can be intentionally created to be faulty. And it can be hacked.

[satscraper]

Does this make sense? If so, is that known to be the case for at least some top 100 addresses?

In my view there’s no real point in doing it, because anyone hunting for funds this way is likely using bots as well. You’d just end up in competition between bots and the one with the lowest latency ^{which always exists, whether your bot relies on public node API or your own node} will win. So this approach can’t guarantee the safety of the funds.

[NotATether]

It does not exactly work that way, because first of all, who can spend their addresses unless they somehow got access to the private keys or seed phrases?

And if that access is available then that must mean that since the owners did not voluntarily give it to someone, it was stolen from their devices by malware.

That's an operational security failure, as then the only way to completely guarantee that coins don't go to the hacker is by bumping the fee so much that it eventually all goes entirely to the miner, and then beg the miner for your coins back and hope that they listen.

[Catenaccio]

That's an operational security failure, as then the only way to completely guarantee that coins don't go to the hacker is by bumping the fee so much that it eventually all goes entirely to the miner, and then beg the miner for your coins back and hope that they listen.

It is only when the transaction fees are too expensive, too big like in millions of dollars. Small transaction fees won't be noticeable and noisy enough on media and Bitcoin mining pools, Bitcoin miners will not care about that.

One of transactions with super big transaction fees got refund from Bitcoin mining pools.
Bitcoin Miner AntPool to Refund Record-Breaking $3 Million Transaction Fee

[dansus021]

Correct me if I am wrong
this as far as I know called front running, which usually happens on the Ethereum Virtual Machine with MEV Bot. While the idea of a fee-bumping bot is technically possible, Top 100 addresses prefer prevention over reaction. fee bumping is actually expensive especially in network like bitcoin and they need private key

[Satofan44]

That's an operational security failure, as then the only way to completely guarantee that coins don't go to the hacker is by bumping the fee so much that it eventually all goes entirely to the miner, and then beg the miner for your coins back and hope that they listen.

It is only when the transaction fees are too expensive, too big like in millions of dollars. Small transaction fees won't be noticeable and noisy enough on media and Bitcoin mining pools, Bitcoin miners will not care about that.

One of transactions with super big transaction fees got refund from Bitcoin mining pools.
Bitcoin Miner AntPool to Refund Record-Breaking $3 Million Transaction Fee

He did say explicitly that you have to beg, and just because it happened sometimes that does not mean that it will happen in your case. A miner is not legally required to make this refund, although for reputational reasons there may be benefits. However, if the miner that gets this is anonymous or they do not have any need for public facing reputations then they can simply keep it. Nobody can do anything about it if they decide to keep it.

Correct me if I am wrong
this as far as I know called front running, which usually happens on the Ethereum Virtual Machine with MEV Bot. While the idea of a fee-bumping bot is technically possible, Top 100 addresses prefer prevention over reaction. fee bumping is actually expensive especially in network like bitcoin and they need private key

It is, but a MEV Bot is not running with the access to the cold storage of the owner. It is running with its own balance, which can be considered a hot-wallet high risky trading balance. It has nothing to do with what is being proposed here. MEV bots are great, they can be extremely profitable if done well -- some are. However, what is being proposed here is completely dumb in all conceivable ways. Do not make any kind of security suggestions or ideas until you have become a security expert, average users should just listen to established solutions and ideas from others.