TIL: Where the bitcoins at… Mysteries of the Blockchain

[Eisenhower34]

That is just a assumption such as mine,but my assumption was based off of human nature,as humans we only do anything for two reasons,money or sex. What you just assumed was just jibber jabber madness.

Satoshi could run now with mass cash from his 1 million+ coins. why wait? Satoshi seemed passionate about this project so i doubt it was a money grab. At 1 million coins $400. whats the difference between $400 million and a few billion? Satoshi couldnt spend either in their lifetime. hasnt happened yet and i doubt it will. what could be the motivation to wait?

He wouldn't be able to sell a million coins at the market price as the market for bitcoin is not liquid enough to handle a sale of a million coins like that.

@OP - Do you have more information about the one satoshi multisig addresses? I would be interested to know when exactly they were "funded"

EDIT: Someone almost certainly controls the private key to 1111111111111111111114oLvT2

No, they almost certainly don't.

That is the address for a RIPEMD-160 hash of all zeroes.  It is extremely unlikely that anybody managed to find a private key that computes to a bitcoin address that is all zeroes in it's RIPEMD-160 hash form.

as there is a custom tag for that address on blockchain.info and in order to create a custom tag, you must sign a message that blockchain.info asks you to sign

That is not true.  There are many tags at blockchain.info that were created without signing a message.

Do you think they sold the tag to the address? Most of the "non-signed" blockchain.info tags that I have seen are those of "interest" to the community, like the "found" coins from gox or the stolen DPR coins

[o0o0]

That is just a assumption such as mine,but my assumption was based off of human nature,as humans we only do anything for two reasons,money or sex. What you just assumed was just jibber jabber madness.

Satoshi could run now with mass cash from his 1 million+ coins. why wait? Satoshi seemed passionate about this project so i doubt it was a money grab. At 1 million coins $400. whats the difference between $400 million and a few billion? Satoshi couldnt spend either in their lifetime. hasnt happened yet and i doubt it will. what could be the motivation to wait?

Before I go any further into this conversation,are you really asking me whats the difference between 400 million and a few billion?

in usable terms arent both incredibly wealthy beyond comprehension? For me 10 million would be that point. i just cant see satoshi doing it. If he did, why not now already? what would be the reason to wait? it may sound like a fantasy but some people have life works they believe in that arent motivated by money or fame.

[snarlpill]

Excellent analysis OP, and quite an interesting read for the Bitcoin enthusiast.

I have a few questions, not just to you but anybody feel free to chime in on answers if you want.

Broken addresses:

There are 326 addresses with a balance where the address is “non standard”, a non standard address is one that cannot be decoded by the bitcoin core, and most likely can never be spent again.

Total non standard unspent outputs = 2,614.256208 BTC
example: https://blockchain.info/tx/ddddf9f04b4c1d4e1185cacf5cf302f3d11dee5d74f71721d741fbb507062e9e

How could this have happened? How could Bitcoin be transferred to an address that it can't decode when Bitcoin has a check-sum that does not allow you to send to addresses that don't exist (i.e. mistakes typing)? I guess what I'm asking- if it could "read" the address the first time to send an output to it, why couldn't it read it again?
I apologize if that sounds stupid; I love the technology in Bitcoin but am not the top expert on it.

Many 1’s:

There are 531 transactions going to a very unique address: 1111111111111111111114oLvT2 (many of them with advertisement like notes)
https://blockchain.info/address/1111111111111111111114oLvT2

While this is a valid address it is very likely that no individual has the private key for it, and the 2.98804915 BTC in it can never be spent

Still learning about the generation of public & private keys, but why is it so unlikely that people don't have the private keys for these strange addresses? Is it because it would be relatively quick & possible to process through all possibilities of addresses to find one containing those letters/numbers there in order to be able to find a matching public key to send transactions to it?   But take exponentially longer to both find a matching (to selected letters/numbers) public key and a private key that matched that address?


I hope my questions make sense the way I wrote them out; if anybody is somewhat unclear about what I mean, let me know.

[windpath]

@OP - Do you have more information about the one satoshi multisig addresses? I would be interested to know when exactly they were "funded"

Here is the SQL dump of: SELECT * FROM outputs WHERE address = "** multisig **" AND balance = "0.00000001"

http://pastebin.com/6xh4XhHd

[Flashman]

but why is it so unlikely that people don't have the private keys for these strange addresses?

Hmmm you'd like to think it would be easy for anyone to find the private key to a given address... yet bitcoin is irrationally popular in spite of this?

[windpath]

Excellent analysis OP, and quite an interesting read for the Bitcoin enthusiast.

Thx!

How could this have happened? How could Bitcoin be transferred to an address that it can't decode when Bitcoin has a check-sum that does not allow you to send to addresses that don't exist (i.e. mistakes typing)? I guess what I'm asking- if it could "read" the address the first time to send an output to it, why couldn't it read it again?
I apologize if that sounds stupid; I love the technology in Bitcoin but am not the top expert on it.

This thread explains some of them:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=130392.0

Still learning about the generation of public & private keys, but why is it so unlikely that people don't have the private keys for these strange addresses? Is it because it would be relatively quick & possible to process through all possibilities of addresses to find one containing those letters/numbers there in order to be able to find a matching public key to send transactions to it?   But take exponentially longer to both find a matching (to selected letters/numbers) public key and a private key that matched that address?

The odds of generating one of those addresses from a known private key are 1 in 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976.

The number is so large it is difficult for humans to comprehend.

To try and generate one of these from a known private key, each human currently living on the planet has to generate 500 million of addresses for each single nano-second (10⁻⁹s) during the entire age of the universe (15 billions of years).

Simply coming up with a valid public address that contains certain characters is much easier, on a cosmic scale...

[deepceleron]

He wouldn't be able to sell a million coins at the market price as the market for bitcoin is not liquid enough to handle a sale of a million coins like that.

Not quite true, there was a time when there were book orders on MtGox looking to buy more BTC that will ever exist; you could have sold 21M BTC and there would still have been more orders yet to be fulfilled without the price dropping below $0.20 or so. Instantly executing 1M BTC would not have even cut the price in half.

Interesting to read, I didn't know about all the binaries in the blockchain that the second post's link article describes.

but why is it so unlikely that people don't have the private keys for these strange addresses?

Perhaps see vanitygen software, where it takes days to months to search for an address like in my sig, where just the first eight characters are specified.

Trying to find the private key for an address like where the whole address is user text, would be equivalent in difficulty to cracking and stealing bitcoins from any address. It would be as hard to find the private key for that address as to find the private key for the address that has Silk Road's seized 100,000 BTC.

[Eisenhower34]

@OP - Do you have more information about the one satoshi multisig addresses? I would be interested to know when exactly they were "funded"

Here is the SQL dump of: SELECT * FROM outputs WHERE address = "** multisig **" AND balance = "0.00000001"

http://pastebin.com/6xh4XhHd

Very interesting. It looks like the block that confirmed many of the transactions was around 230020 which is from 2012 (and AFAIK was before multisig was discussed seriously).

He wouldn't be able to sell a million coins at the market price as the market for bitcoin is not liquid enough to handle a sale of a million coins like that.

Not quite true, there was a time when there were book orders on MtGox looking to buy more BTC that will ever exist; you could have sold 21M BTC and there would still have been more orders yet to be fulfilled without the price dropping below $0.20 or so. Instantly executing 1M BTC would not have even cut the price in half.

It would certainly cause the price to decrease significantly. Also your mention of "gox" also makes me somewhat question the validity of your statement (for example if someone tried to place a "market" order for 1 million btc on gox then a good portion of the order book could "disappear" or they would have some other issue)

[K1773R]

Multisig testing?

1 Satoshi Multisig:

There are 16,848 multisig addresses with a 0.00000001 balance. Why? who knows…
example: https://blockchain.info/tx/045727591618d2154239956332f307c754a52c0e7896856a05848ec7065db1c3

No. Its a script that uploads/downloads arbitrary data to the blockchain by abusing multisig.
Keep looking "inside" the blockchain to find it.