if he used a seed-approach which contains methods like sha2, then there is truely no pattern, as the creator stated.
But in my opinion, if he used a seed approach then the seed is anywhere public or accessable.
I dont think its truely random, because of the fact, that the creator remembered the private keys after 2 years
Here is example:
import random
import hashlib
import base58
for puzzle in range(1, 160):
lower = 2 ** (puzzle - 1)
upper = (2 ** puzzle) - 1
seed = "SatoshiNakamotoPuzzle" + str(puzzle)
random.seed(seed)
dec = random.randint(lower, upper)
private_key_hex = "%064x" % dec
private_key_bytes = bytes.fromhex(private_key_hex)
extended_key = b'\x80' + private_key_bytes
extended_key += b'\x01'
checksum = hashlib.sha256(hashlib.sha256(extended_key).digest()).digest()[:4]
wif_bytes = extended_key + checksum
wif_compressed = base58.b58encode(wif_bytes).decode()
print(f"Puzzle = {puzzle} seed = {seed} wif = {wif_compressed}")
You don’t need anything else, not even a deterministic wallet.
Just a Google Doc to save the code, and you’ll have all the WIFs.
yes thats a kind of determinsitic wallet. you dont even need that line: dec = random.randint(lower, upper)
you can also take the sha256 output of the seed.
so there are many types of custom deterministic wallets and maaaany possible seed.
also the seed itsself dont have to be ascii compatible (human readable). we can input any kind of data om the sha256 methods in hex format