Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 13 from 7 users
Re: Private keys posted on Bitcointalk
by
o_e_l_e_o
on 20/02/2023, 10:40:02 UTC
⭐ Merited by LoyceV (4) ,Foxpup (3) ,vapourminer (2) ,ETFbitcoin (1) ,Z-tight (1) ,NeuroticFish (1) ,DdmrDdmr (1)
I assume many people have systems monitoring all compromised private keys, and they're competing against each other to steal the funds before someone else does.
This is definitely the case. I remember a few years ago looking more closely at coins being sent to brain wallets being stolen - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4768828.msg46603379#msg46603379. In short, within only one or two seconds of a transaction being made to a brain wallet, there are multiple competing transactions detected by different nodes attempting to sweep the coins to another address. And bear in mind that as soon as a node has seen one such non-RBFed transaction, it will reject all others, meaning that although we may only see 3 or 4 such transactions across the entire network, there are likely many more than that which are being rejected. Given that we know there are multiple bots running with huge databases of addresses from brain wallets, it is only logical to assume their databases also include all leaked private keys and seed phrases they can find as well.

Things will get quite interesting once full RBF becomes commonplace. Any such transaction stealing coins from a brain wallet or leaked private key could be replaced by another transaction, regardless of whether or not is opted in to RBF or not. We could end up seeing different bots broadcasting more and more replacements, each paying a higher and higher fee, trying to steal the coins for themselves. Since there is no incentive for any one such bot to surrender and let another bot win, then such transactions could just escalate until the entire value (or close to it) is paid in fees.