Brain Wallets: three funded on video in 2014, and what the chain recorded

A new chapter on brain wallets, written as a credited recreation of James D'Angelo's 2014 Blackboard lesson "Fun with Brain Wallets" and checked against the chain:

Brain Wallets: Why a Passphrase You Made Up Is a Key Someone Can Guess

What's in it:

The three wallets he funded on camera on 8 February 2014. SHA-256("Satoshi Nakamoto"): 41,700 sats confirmed in block 284,859 and spent in the same block, 24 hours before the video was published. "World Bitcoin Network" and a 79-character phrase: untouched for 147 and 148 blocks, spent in blocks 285,006 and 285,008, the first and third after the video went up.
The earliest funded one we could find is from this forum: casascius's puzzle of 14 July 2011, "This string contains 0.25 BTC hiding in plain sight." (topic 28877), guessed within the hour and claimed in block 136,300, 3 hours 20 minutes after the coins arrived.
The site's code: brainwallet.org's key derivation was one Crypto.SHA256 call. Until May 2014 the page loaded with "correct horse battery staple" already typed in; from June 2014 it showed the empty passphrase's address (1HZwkjkeaoZfTSaJxDw6aKkxp45agDiEzN) on load. That address has received 60 BTC in 423 payments, 57.9 BTC of it between that change and the site's closing; 50 BTC arrived in block 367,464 on 29 July 2015 and was spent in the same block.
Ryan Castellucci's 2013 accident on chain: block 227,725 spends 250 BTC, 31,337 sats to a 1yoink address and 249.99918663 BTC to change; block 227,727 returns 250.001 BTC.
How it ended: pull request 27 (29 October 2013, PBKDF2) closed in seven hours with "You don't really need that"; the repository's last commit, "closed permanently", stamped 20:57:25 UTC on 7 August 2015 by its author's clock and logged by GitHub as pushed at 21:00:00 UTC, the minute the DEF CON 23 talk was scheduled.
32 phrases typed by hand, no cracker: 29 used, 1,307.7 BTC received (at least 334 BTC of it change and returned coins counted twice), all at zero on 9 November 2026. For the 39 addresses we could page: 1,150 payments, median wait before the spend about a month in 2011, 26.5 blocks in 2012, 2 blocks in 2013, 0 from 2015; 122 of 124 payments since 2024 spent in the block that confirmed them. Data from the Bitcoin Core node powering ChainQuery, matched against mempool.space. Both tables are CSV downloads.
The arithmetic: XKCD's four random words (2^44) against 130,000 guesses a second on one 2015 desktop and Castellucci's 2^48 a day for a botnet; twelve BIP-39 words are 2^84 times that space. And what a slow hash bought WarpWallet: 10 BTC behind eight alphanumerics sat unspent for 802 days.

Please do not send coins to any of the phrases named. If any number, date or quote is off, say so and I'll fix it with credit.

https://www.learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole/brain-wallets