Quote from: robolove on May 31, 2018, 07:40:03 PM

Quote from: darkangel11 on May 31, 2018, 07:21:05 PM

Did any of you try to access wallets by guessing the seed? I think it might be easier to create a program that randomly checks various seed combinations than trying to find a private key with a positive balance. As time goes by there will be so many seed combinations that a modified password guesser linked to a dictionary might do the job. And this time if you'll able to find something it might not be a single address but a bunch of them. You might even get lucky and get into a wallet owned by a treasure hunter like yourself Wink

Electrum has a dictionary size of 1626 words and uses 12 of them randomly, producing 1626^12 possible combinations, which is close to 10^38 combinations. Good luck finding a collision. It will take quite a while. Example:

If somehow could test 1 billion combinations per second (arbitrary number I just came up with), we need 10^(38-9) = 10^29 seconds to try them all. That is approximately 3.17*10^27 years.

The universe has existed for about 13.8*10^9 years.

You see where this is going... right?

Of course, but it's the same when you're trying to bruteforce a private key. The combinations are endless, but that's not what this is all about. Nobody is trying to test all possible combinations, but find a couple that are in use and give access to active wallets. There's a quite high possibility that if you'll start picking 12 random words out of those 1626 and start messing with them in different combinations you will get a single hit. Isn't that what those "treasure hunters" are hoping for?
Why did I ask about the seeds? Because finding a single one can lead to unlocking a wallet with multiple private keys instead of a single one which the collision dudes are trying to find.

Quote from: nc50lc on June 01, 2018, 07:28:59 AM

No, what they talking about (in this thread) are those neglectfully stored wallet.dat files, private key backups, paper wallet images or other forms of backups which potentially have funds.
History can tell that some people are stupid enough to store those (not only wallets but passwords and sensitive info too) directly in the internet without "hiding" the files with a disguised file name, file type, etc.

Just recently there was a case of a guy being robbed of his coins because he was storing his passwords in a gmail account and had a backup email connected with it. The backup got hacked and through it they managed to gain the password to his main account.