So, this thread contains some substantial inaccuracies—some of which were corrected by a Newbie account that has not posted since 2020. (Thanks, Elliptic23; please come back. Anyway, merit sent.) Beyond that...

Wait a minute. For the past three years, nobody noticed that fillippone is a wannabe wallet thief? This is way beyond Asch.

fillippone will never find anything unless someone tells him about Brainflayer, but that is not the point: He is audaciously proclaiming wallet-thief intentions that rico666 evasively dissimulated with LBC. rico666 got tagged for that. Worse, fillippone claims that this is “legitimate” (!). And he claims that as a trusted pillar of the community, who should be responsible to the highest standards. Tagged accordingly.

This isn’t a matter of learning about Bitcoin: To dream of snatching people’s life savings or business funding, and treat it as a lottery winning or money found lying in the street, it is a matter of base character and lack of decency. At least, an honest blackhat admits a desire to take away other people’s money. By comparison, I wouldn’t criticize such candid malevolence too much—and why would I bother, when there is this:

Quote from: https://archive.ph/U1lFd#selection-629.0-667.265

Wow!
If you find a positive balance in this client side generated pages, you are actually owner of the private keys, so you are legitimate owner of such balance, and nothing prevents you from transferring to your own wallet.

I spent a few hours on that website, generating thousands of private keys, of course without finding anything, not a single used address, let alone one with a balance.

Then, I started to think I could engineer a little bit the process, and speaking with some fellow users here in the forum, I thought we could have a script generating random private keys, then ask my own bitcoin node the balance in such address and eventually transfer any balance to my own wallet. Working in local should speed up a little bit the process, I thought.

I knew from start the possibilities to find something were tiny, but I wanted to try because looking for balances and finding nothing, would reassure me that nobody could do the same with my own bitcoin so jealously held in my cold wallet.

While waiting for @babo to disclose his script, I thought to myself “Fillippone only pawn in the game of life”...how come nobody ever thought about that?

Back into the rabbit hole, I quickly discovered the Large Bitcoin Collider.

https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about

Wow this is a serious project.
Basically thousands of distributed servers generating and checking 26 Trillions (!!!) of private keys on a daily basis.
Over the first three years, they managed to find 7 private keys. That’s a lot! I imagined the odds were much lower., but probably there is some kind of bug in some wallet utilising a suboptimal random number generator to create keys. (Further research needed here!)

That’s not why—IIRC, they made sure there was money they could find—but I will not rehash all the years worth of LBC discussions, debates, and flamewars. Some of which I coincidentally engaged with against a delusional and/or dishonest LBC believer/promoter, ten days before the fillippone account was registered.

So, fillippone is full blackhat: Seeking to exploit buggy code for profit. Except that he pretends it’s “legitimate”. I intend hereby no offense to real blackhats, who are sufficiently honest to relish being evil predators, and who think that’s cool.

Quote from: Elliptic23 on April 18, 2020, 12:54:15 AM

Quote from: qwk on January 12, 2020, 12:47:40 PM

Quote from: fillippone on May 26, 2019, 02:10:00 PM

How much energy would be necessary? Well, a lot, according to this infographic:

I was never truly happy with that picture, so your thread got me thinking how to explain the energy requirements in a different way:

"If you had a computer that could do those calculations within a human's lifetime and were the size of the earth or smaller, and you actually somehow had an energy source to power it, as soon as you'd turn it on, you'd turn the earth into a supernova."

More detailed explanation in a more technical thread about it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5216788

I've never liked that image because its misleading.

We already know of ways to crack private keys that dont require 2^256 work.

That image always annoyed me, too. If the public key is known, it has a notional 2¹²⁸ security level.

Bitcoin’s Public-Key Security Level

Quote from: Elliptic23 on April 21, 2020, 03:15:52 AM

Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on April 20, 2020, 09:25:09 PM

Quote from: pooya87 on May 26, 2019, 04:12:05 PM

p.s. a bit nitpick-y but there are 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364140 private keys which is a little smaller than 2²⁵⁶ :P

I'm trying to understand it but failed. Why not 2^256? They are hashes right? Like strings. All possible combinations. Where is the mistake? ???

They are not hashes. Public keys are X,Y points on a very large curve which has just under 2^256 points.

Thank you. (I am not sure why everyone ignored this account. Because it’s a “Newbie” account?)

Quote from: fillippone on May 26, 2019, 02:10:00 PM

Yesterday while browsing down the Bitcoin rabbit hole I stumbled on the infamous keys.lol website

https://keys.lol
(Warning: time sink!)

Basically it’s a website that randomly generates 128 private keys on each page, then checks the balance of the related addresses (compressed and uncompressed) on the blockchain reporting eventual positive balances or past transactions.

Wow!
If you find a positive balance in this client side generated pages,

The generation is done server-side. I can’t see the pages, because it throws me a Javascript-requiring CAPTCHA that I refuse to comply with; and the code for the frontend website was apparently un-open-sourced. But I can see the code for the backend, which is rather embarrassing:

Quote from: https://github.com/SjorsO/keys-generator/blob/743bb28921a0a17decc9baeb9a7703f60a694e55/bitcoin-keys.go#L25

Code:

// convert the "int" to "string" because i dont know how to create a bigInt from an "int"
stringInt := fmt.Sprintf("%d", keysPerPage)

I don’t know who first came up with that concept for a website; it is clever, but trivial to implement. There used to be a better site, but it seems to have disappeared long ago. I don’t recall when I first saw it, but this seems to be when I first posted about it, about four days after I started to post on the Bitcoin Forum as a “Newbie”:

Quote from: nullius on December 05, 2017, 06:11:30 PM

Yes, “straight up brute forcing” is indeed possible. I sincerely suggest that you try this. It will keep you busy and out of trouble. To make it easier, there is a public directory of all Bitcoin private keys. Yes, that site really does list all Bitcoin private keys. Get rich! Happy hunting!

(P.S., why are highly intelligent people in a “Development & Technical Discussion” forum seriously answering questions about bruteforcing secp256k1!? Doubly-hashed, undisclosed public keys are just gravy.)

Quote from: nullius on February 08, 2018, 06:15:02 AM

I found the following amidst discussion of your very own clone of directory.io (!):

Quote from: Jude Austin on July 15, 2017, 07:51:08 PM

On a legit note, I was bored as shit sitting in this hotel room as I travel for work.

I found an address with exactly the miner fee by randomly searching http://btckey.space. I instantly ran down to the "news station" (What the UK calls a convenience store) and bought two scratch off lottery tickets, I didn't win, haha.

[...]

By the way, I see that you run LBC (and vehemently defend it). Have you seen rico666’s trust feedback? I wouldn’t trust anything executable from that guy on my machines. Just saying.