Developer Claims He Can Crack $700 Million Lost Bitcoin Wallet
A developer claims a brand new CUDA-powered instrument can get better 8,999 Bitcoin (BTC) misplaced in 2010 by a consumer often known as “Stone Man.” The dormant fortune is now price roughly $688 million.
The deal with has not moved a single satoshi in nearly 16 years. A profitable restoration would rank among the many largest reclaimed Bitcoin holdings ever recorded.
How the Stone Man Bitcoin Wallet Was Lost
Stone Man bought 9,000 BTC in 2010 and ran an early Bitcoin shopper (model 0.3.2) from a Linux boot CD. After sending one coin to a private deal with, the software program mechanically generated a “change” deal with for the remaining 8,999 BTC.
When the machine shut down, the boot CD wiped the up to date pockets.dat file. His backup didn’t comprise the brand new change deal with, leaving the fortune stranded at a key he by no means recorded.
The episode, posted on bitcointalk.org beneath subject 782, stays one of many earliest documented instances of catastrophic key loss. It predates the services now built around wallet rescue.
A CUDA-Powered Brute Force
A Reddit consumer often known as CompetitiveRough8180 says the instrument exploits weak entropy in early Bitcoin shopper keys to slender the search house.
CUDA offloads calculations to GPU {hardware}, accelerating makes an attempt that older CPU-only strategies deserted.
If validated, the strategy might ripple far past Stone Man. Roughly 4 million BTC sit stranded in lost wallets. Much of it dates from the community’s earliest years, when entropy and backup practices had been primitive.
Past recoveries have proven that bug-related losses are sometimes reversible.
Other long-frozen wallets from the same era have already been reactivated this yr.
With BTC for $78,180, the dormant pockets alone holds practically $703 million in untouched wealth from Bitcoin’s early historical past.
Whether the developer can end the job will determine if the Stone Man’s deal with ever strikes once more.
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