325

Researchers crack 11-year-old password, recover $3 million in bitcoin (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

all 44 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[-] Glowstick@lemmy.world 92 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

And then there's the famous case of the guy who was super early in on bitcoin and threw away the computer that had the password to the wallet, which eventually wound up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars that are now irretrievable

https://www.businessinsider.com/james-howells-threw-away-bitcoin-dump-masterplan-get-back-2022-7

[-] ShunkW@lemmy.world 43 points 5 months ago

I forgot about Bitcoin when it was still mostly worthless. I got rid of my old laptop when it had a ton of issues. I had around 8 btc left in a wallet after spending several hundred on um... An ancient trade route lol.

[-] skyspydude1@lemmy.world 46 points 5 months ago

This is also what a lot of people forget how it was at the time, thinking "if only" they had been early adopters and how they'd be millionaires. I was one, and had found it was great for traveling said "trade route", but also watched when Mt Gox collapsed and tanked the price 75% while stealing millions from people, and decided to take my winnings and leave the table.

How many people would see that shit and be like "Yes, I'm going to hold onto this for the next 10 years when it's worth something" and then sit through the number of 50+% loss events that happened?

You would have done exactly what 99% of early adopters did, and considered yourself incredibly lucky that you managed to make 1000% returns and sold.

[-] ShunkW@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago

Yeah it sat in my wallet for a long time and wasn't really gaining any value. I didn't have a need for the trade route anymore cuz I just used it once for some exotic spices that I didn't really care for. Mining wasn't an option for me because I didn't have a powerful computer as a broke college kid. So I just kinda checked out.

Still sucks to think about how I could have ended up with a great return, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

I still have bitcoins from 2011-2014 some of which I GPU mined. I'm patient. Of course I sold some, but I still have a couple full bitcoins. Not everyone sells the whole amount in one go

[-] YerbaYerba@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago

I recently got my first bankruptcy payout from the BTC I had in MtGox. I made more with them stolen as I certainly would have sold them at a lower price.

[-] Obi@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago

Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

[-] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 26 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I almost bought $20 worth of bitcoin when it was $.008 a bitcoin, which would be worth $168,000,000 today.

But realistically I would have cashed out a long time ago, so it would have been far less significant. I had some friends who bought at the same time though, one bought a car and the other got a healthy downpayment for his house.

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Silk Road was way better than Wish or Alibaba. 😌

[-] aStonedSanta@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Lmao same. I had 6. That hdd is long gone

[-] dumbass@leminal.space 19 points 5 months ago

Every so often I think about that dude, sometimes ibfeel bad for him, other times in think its hilarious.

[-] Glowstick@lemmy.world 27 points 5 months ago

I just feel bad for him. Can you imagine how much the moment of throwing it away is burned into his mind? And ever since then he's wasted huge amounts of his life trying to find it because he's very understandably obsessed. Can you imagine accidentally throwing away 181 million dollars? And living with the knowledge that it could be out there somewhere just sitting there in the garbage?

Sounds like a nightmare.

If i were him i would try to focus on the fact that most likely he would've spent or sold the bitcoin before it became worth millions anyway, so his mistake of throwing it away probably didn't really cost him very much at all

[-] lemmytellyousomething@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 months ago

Fun fact: Mining 8,000 new bitcoins takes the whole network only 9 days.

[-] tooLikeTheNope@lemmy.ml 59 points 5 months ago

Rookie numbers...

[-] PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.uk 12 points 5 months ago

I spent longer than i care to admit trying to figure out why there were unclickable posts in the comment section

[-] tooLikeTheNope@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 months ago

We've all been there brother

[-] aleonem@lemmy.today 2 points 5 months ago

Looks like I'm in the same boat.

[-] RedEyeFlightControl@lemmy.world 48 points 5 months ago

Still looking for that backup of that disk with my bitcoin wallet from the early days... sadly probably gone forever.

[-] prole@sh.itjust.works 18 points 5 months ago

That's why you gotta laminate your seed phrase, at the very least. And put it somewhere where it will stay for a very long time and that you'll remember (maybe hidden in a certain book, or put a false bottom in a drawer, I dunno get creative). Doesn't matter what you have or don't have on a disk, the Bitcoin isn't on the disk, it was the words you should be protecting.

[-] RedEyeFlightControl@lemmy.world 34 points 5 months ago

This was when BTC was like 5 cents and no one had learned this lesson yet.

[-] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 15 points 5 months ago

When I first acquired it, I wasn't aware of a place to even check it's value. There was this old game called Dragon Tales, where you could gamble whole BTC on things like kicking a coconut tree to see if 0-4 BTC worth of coconuts would fall...

[-] evatronic@lemm.ee 9 points 5 months ago

There's an IDE drive in a landfill somewhere with 10BTC on it because I'm fuckwit.

[-] GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 2 points 5 months ago

There is a guy fighting Newport council to let him dig through a landfill at the moment: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67297013

[-] Petter1@lemm.ee 5 points 5 months ago

I just store it in my keepass file, lol

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago

Honestly even lamination isn’t great. Won’t survive a fire.

Best options I’ve seen are engraving your seed into metal, and/or putting multiple copies in trusted locations like family houses or safety deposit boxes.

[-] umbraroze@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago

How come everyone is forgetting the best practices in Bitcoin backup?

You put the stuff in a container, put it in a hole in your yard, and put a birdbath on top of it.

The birdbath is a crucial security step! Standard practice! Been that way for years! I frankly can't believe a lot more people don't know about it.

[-] NOPper@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago

Last time I tried to engrave my seed on metal I got kicked out of the park.

[-] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 4 points 5 months ago

In retrospect, the monkey bars were a poor choice for metal.

[-] Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago

I chuck a backup of stuff in my storage for that reason. Even if my house burns down I'll still be OK with those backups.

[-] havokdj@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

So you're telling me they stole 3 million dollars?

[-] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 months ago

Well, if crypto bros are to be believed then this isn't fiat currency. If it's not fiat, then it shouldn't be enforced by state violence, meaning the courts, right? Possession is ownership when there is no remedy, so the concept of theft is meaningless. Any attempt to fix this would violate the supremacy of the blockchain.

I mean they actually noticed this was a problem and reinvented the concept of banks to entrust them with their crypto. You know, the kind of trust that crypto was supposed to make obsolete, but then the crypto bros realised how much it sucks to suck and decided they needed a bit of nannying after all.

[-] sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 11 points 5 months ago

Good for them.

Also I'm jealous.

[-] match@pawb.social 10 points 5 months ago

"researchers" I'm pretty sure this is a heist team

[-] FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Or Archaeologists.

You can't steal what nobody owns.

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago

Isn’t this explicitly someone’s?

[-] FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 3 points 5 months ago

"Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down.

Michael, who is based in Europe and asked to remain anonymous, stored the cryptocurrency in a password-protected digital wallet. He generated a password using the RoboForm password manager and stored that password in a file encrypted with a tool called TrueCrypt. At some point, that file got corrupted, and Michael lost access to the 20-character password he had generated to secure his 43.6 BTC (worth a total of about 4,000 euros, or $5,300, in 2013). Michael used the RoboForm password manager to generate the password but did not store it in his manager. He worried that someone would hack his computer and obtain the password."

The password was forgotten and he asked 2 famous hackers for help, who took a fee and gave the wallet back to Michael. So, ownership is sort of loosely defined at this point. Sure, Michael probably had legal rights to it, but it held no actual value until taken by somebody else.

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 5 months ago

If I lose to key to my vault, and require a locksmith to enter… does my vault hold no value until I can enter it? Of course not, the contents is still there.

I get where you’re going, but really it makes no sense. The value (or as close to value as we are willing to put on crypto) was always there. Whether or not someone was able to get into it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there.

[-] FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 1 points 5 months ago

If a vault buried somewhere you don't remember is unearthed by experts decades later, I would argue it isn't yours.

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 months ago

Forgetting the password is more akin to losing the key. You dont forget where the blockchain is.

[-] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It is luck(?) for him the password generator isn't secure back then.

[-] IrregularChore@lemm.ee 19 points 5 months ago

The password auto generated by his software wallet used the date/time as the "random" seed for the password, so knowing the rough date he created it they were able to get it to spit out the same password again. So not very secure at all.

[-] NutWrench@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

A little too "pseudo" and not enough "random." :)

[-] Glowstick@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

It all depends on the value of what you're trying to secure, and if an attacker knows the value of what's in the account, and if the attacker has access to hints about the password you used to narrow down the possibilities. The researchers knew all of that info and they still didn't want to bother trying to crack the password until they found an additional way to narrow down the possibilities even further.

There's no such thing as perfect security. A lock only needs to be strong enough to make it not worth breaking into for what's in there

this post was submitted on 29 May 2024

325 points (99.1% liked)

Technology

59366 readers

1272 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS