Wait a minute. I'm not talking about randomly generating private keys like


and luck out a la (Powerball)^128. We all know the odds for finding a positive balance address that way is practically close to infinity, even if you had the computational power to check a billion addresses per second.

I'm talking about way to significantly reduce the entropy. Or completely remove it, such as finding images of paper wallets that people frequently - those were the days - used to share on Instagram, Imgur, Flickr and so forth.

Take this one, for example. It had more than 2 BTC in October 2015:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=http://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/files/2014/11/IMG_20141027_185706.jpg&w=1484

Another way is (was) brainwallets, maybe the stupidest contribution to the bitcoin ecosystem. A famous example is sha256sum("mike") that gives (I'm by no means taking credit for this one):


https://blockchain.info/address/144BBhjaTofkGJzCG7opHyG5t5HP2boUXc

After the 2016 release of brainflayer and this instructional video (recommended viewing!), I assume every possbile and impossible wordlist has been used to sweep the blockchain clean of brainwallets, in a global script kiddie joint venture.

However, I might take credit for


which leads us to this Ethereum address


https://etherscan.io/address/0xe0fc04fa2d34a66b779fd5cee748268032a146c0

which was active only 57 days ago.

Ethereum is perhaps even more interesting than bitcoin, because of tokens and smart contracts, some of which you can easily dump on exchanges. I simply assume lots of people are sweeping low entropy ETH addresses for such tokens.

My main point is that there are other and much less explored methods, that I work on for time to time when I have some spare time. I'm done with brainwallets and Google Image, but still have one or two aces up my sleeve.

It would be cool to hook up with others who are into the same thing. I'm fairly certain you are out there. Step forth!