I think this is a hoax. Tried around 100k compressed/uncompressed legacy addresses over night, zero history or balance on any of them. There are around 7000 files in each ISO. Didn't bother to undupe the hashes, some files didn't change.
Only tried english ISOs though. XP Pro/Home original OEM, all SPs, retail / VL.
At this point it's not worth my time anymore, so good luck to everyone else.
I did the math as well, and came to a similar conclusion.
When you factor in the number of ISO variations - language, edition, SP level, OEM vs retail - the total unique file set explodes. Even assuming 5–10k hashable targets per ISO, you’re looking at millions of permutations.
Sure, hashing and WIF conversion is trivial. But building a pipeline to cover all the XP variants, deduplicate inputs, and handle edge-case encoding quirks... that’s easily several hours of effort. And all of that assumes the premise isn’t a hoax - which we can’t verify unless the OP drops the address.
End of the day, I respect the puzzle hustle, but the expected value just doesn’t justify the dev time.
Nice try though, OP. Would love to see the address at least.
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0xMuted