Eight dormant Satoshi-era Bitcoin wallets reactivated after 14 yrs
106 comments
·July 4, 2025mattlondon
throw310822
> what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?
Even if that were possible, you could brute force one wallet. Not eight wallets closely related to each other.
Scoundreller
Keys created with an RNG that turned out to be a little too predictable?
Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?
volfonibros
For anyone else who's been vaguely following the story as it popped up every few years, the latest news came out a few days ago : he finally gave up.
nixass
> he finally gave up
Sounds like something someone who found few billion USD on a thumb drive would say :)
stavros
I wouldn't say anything.
nothrabannosir
That’s definitely also what I would publicize if I actually found the HDD. :)
rtkwe
He lost his court battle to force the local government running the dump to allow him to dig the last I heard. So I doubt it, he wasn't even allowed to really try.
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bravoetch
I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
handfuloflight
It's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
onlyrealcuzzo
It's close enough.
There are 200 million+ BTC wallets.
They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of wallets - in how many years?
paulpauper
this would be highly improbable. the odds of only remembering enough of the key to brute force it, is slim.
guessing a whale's key? zero
creatonez
> Satoshi-era
Not true in the slightest. Satoshi was already gone by 2010, and in 2011 there were ~8000 transactions per day from folks outside of Satoshi's circle.
coolspot
Someone just got out of jail.
Workaccount2
An old friend of mine died 11 years ago from an overdose, and I am almost certain he used darknet markets to buy other drugs.
It's very likely there is a wallet forever lost with many Bitcoin in it from his passing. No way his family would have known anything about it (Bitcoin/dark markets)or cared much anyway circa 2014. I'll admit I have pondered ways to check this, but it's too far fetched.
I can't help but wonder if the wave of fentanyl that made optiate addict deaths skyrocket, left a huge wake of forever lost Bitcoin. I know there was a lot of overlap between addicts and darknet market users.
Stevvo
Most addicts would likely not hold Bitcoin in wallet, but spend it on getting their next fix as soon as they buy it. It's not like you're thinking long-term, invest in Bitcoin so you can buy more drugs down the line. There would be leftover change but not big amounts.
Xss3
You'd be surprised how many of these addicts would be buying for multiple other less tech savvy addicts and essentially becoming small time dealers themselves to fund their own habit. If they got locked up or ODd at the right time there could've been a few thousand usd in btc in a wallet at a time when each btc was worth less than 10usd.
jedberg
Ross Ulbricht got out a few months ago. Could be his.
paulpauper
he only had $40 million . if he had $1 billion the feds would have known about it
1oooqooq
lol. Did you read the whole wired piece on how the feds couldn't find anything under their nose on that case?
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duttish
Whoever got these wallets better sell them and get a good security company on rotation quickly before anyone find out who they are. Seems like wrench attacks been been happening a lot more the last year.
Marsymars
I don't really get these; there's not a ton of difference between using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of Bitcoin vs using a wrench to threaten someone with a bunch of any other liquid asset that could be used to buy bitcoins.
BJones12
If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a transfer order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a branch, make sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches escorting me in, and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed off.
And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
Marsymars
Alright, so I can see it as a matter of scale.
Recently there was a local case of someone extorting people by leaving threats in the mailboxes to not burn people’s houses down in exchange for $1k in bitcoin.
But who would keep $8B in bitcoin without some protections in place to ensure that it can’t be easily transferred away, given the associated upside/downside? That’s... roughly as foolish as keeping $8B in actual cash/gold/gems (notwithstanding the logistical problems with the size/weight) under your mattress.
onlyrealcuzzo
Also, for the rest of your life, you'd be able to get the people arrested who stole the money.
So they'd either to kill you after, and it would be obvious why, and there'd be an easy lead on who.
Your odds of getting away with stealing that kind of money conventionally are essentially zero.
paulpauper
But the criminal's stolen BTC are tainted. Exchanges will not accept them. procession of them is a crime
yieldcrv
> And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen
or you get a better bank to begin with
most banks that call their slow processes "security purposes" are actually just putting up barriers to maintain liquidity. the banks that go bust are the ones that got clientele based on making it convenient to transfer
jedberg
This is the other edge of that double edged sword of "no regulations". It's a lot easier to steal bitcoin with no consequence because there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged.
diggan
> there isn't an entire financial system backed by people with guns to help you if you are wronged
It's not the "financial system" that comes and hunts criminals with guns, but police, acting based on what laws they seen has been broken. And stealing $3 billion is as illegal if it was Bitcoins, as if it was Euro or USD.
dist-epoch
You are confused. The people with guns will come for you if you steal bitcoin and they know who you are.
> Bitcoin thief sentenced to 5 years in prison for stealing $1 billion in crypto and laundering it with his social-media rapper wife ‘Razzlekhan’
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/15/bitcoin-thief-sentence...
andylynch
Bitcoin doesn’t ask questions when you unexpectedly want to make a very large transfer to a new payee. Your banker will.
paulpauper
But exchanges will if you deposit that much, and will freeze your $ if they don't like your response.
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sampl3username
You just need to swap them for monero and then monero for litecoin or bitcoin again. Now you have anonymous, untraceable coins.
onlyrealcuzzo
I doubt there's enough liquidity to swap that kind of money...
drexlspivey
Monero daily volume is like $50m lol
yieldcrv
looking at the address types this just looks more like a security rotation to a stronger hashing method
MarcoZavala
[dead]
jedberg
If you have $8B in BTC, is there any reasonable way to turn that into any fiat currency? USD, EUR, anything? Can you even buy that much USDC?
pawelduda
Sure you can. If you do it over a few months, it will get absorbed by market because there are buyers (as of today). Though this is kind of unprecedented, so markets could find this kind of event bearish and front run your sells which tanks the price. But I can't imagine I'd care if I held for 14 years. There is also USDT which is much bigger than USDC.
diggan
Also if you approach Coinbase/Kraken/$exchange and tell them you have X million to offload, they'll probably let you do it off-market, so no one (except for the ledger, obviously) would really notice.
nandomrumber
Loans using the BTC as collateral.
Buy good / commodities with BTC and resell them.
Sell the BTC.
Probably not all $8 gigadollars at once, but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
jedberg
> but is there any reason you would immediately need that much?
Because you worry that BTC will crash and want it in something more stable?
PoshBreeze
BTC is volatile but it isn't going to crash tomorrow or any time soon at least not by the amount that would make sense to sell with a wallet this old.
nandomrumber
Well, one way to lower the price would be to put eight billion on the market all at once.
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bgwalter
If the Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund scam that was announced after Trump's election is launched, there will be a price bottom that is financed by public funds.
I'm not sure what has come of it. Trump is doing well with his own coins:
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uae-fund-buys-100-m...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-07-02/donald-tr...
dist-epoch
If you don't want to bother, you can auction it and some hedge fund which wants to buy will take it from your hand.
yieldcrv
yes, that’s why the exchanges are nearly $100bn companies
between multiple corporations buying $1bn per week, retail, and nation states, there is a large appetite for this amount with a few phone calls
paulpauper
nah, they are worth that much because of inflated valuations
alecsm
I wish I had access to my old wallet. I mined around 1.5BTC with my laptop and I deleted the wallet after a while because it was worthless.
paulpauper
you probably would have sold it at $100 or something anyway
twright
This is definitely something I remind myself of for any investment I sell and later on explodes. For bitcoin there were way too many highs that I definitely would have sold at.
freedomben
Yep. I used to pay my Dish Network bill with BTC. Youth is wasted on the young and hindsight is 20/20
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EGreg
I have been saying for a decade
Satoshi isnt gonna move wallets 1 through 10
But he probably had wallet 55, 182 and 281-290 and has been spending this whole time. Any founder of a crypto project can do that.
barkingcat
Probably North Korea.
p0w3n3d
F word is what caught my eye first
ETH_start
April 2011 is not Satoshi era. Satoshi had dropped out of public Bitcoin forums by late 2010.
Maybe that guy who was digging up a landfill to find his old HDD finally found it!
Seriously though, what are the odds that someone has been quietly spending 10s/100s of millions in cloud compute to brute force the keys for old wallets?