Long-dormant Bitcon wallet comes online | Hacker News Reader

Long-dormant Bitcon wallet comes online

tomshardware.com

42 pointsrbanffy63 comments

I wrote https://github.com/jakewins/findbtc to try to recover my 26BTC wallet, which lived on a disk I installed Windows over and gave to my mother in law.

I remember looking up how much it was worth, confirmed it remained worthless and opted not to include it in the backup before formatting the drive.

At the same time, I doubt if I had had the wallet I'd have held past $1,000, so it's kind of mourning a loss that would have happened anyway.

> John Templeton once said:

>> The 10 most dangerous words in investing are “If you would have just put ten thousand dollars into…”

> Alright, alright, Templeton didn’t actually say this.

> But if he was around today, maybe he would have.

* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/10/the-10-most-dangero...

The author, Ben Carlson, then notes:

> In the past 5 years, there were drawdowns of 30%, 50%, -60% and -35%. This stock was down 60% in 2020! It’s up a cool 1000%+ since then.

> And the crazy thing is there were plenty of Tesla shareholders who did hold on for the entire ride. They were true believers in the face of relentless negativity about the company and its founder.

> Kudos to them.

I've followed AAPL, BTC, TSLA, etc, over the years (here on HN and elsewhere) but just don't have the stomach to take the risk to jump into a single asset. I'm an index kind of fellow because (a) I don't have to log into my investment account at all and see whether it's up or down (and deal with the emotional ups and downs that entails), and (b) I don't really have the time/energy to go digging into individual companies.

Also, statistically individual traders are more to lose money than be up, and so I'm generally okay with "only" average market returns, as my main saving goal is retirement, and I can meet that with the average of at least 4-5%.

Check out Ben Carlson’s podcast Animal Spirits, it’s quite interesting.

Owning individual assets doesn’t preclude you from having most of your portfolio in index funds. The trick is to buy companies you believe in and just hold it. Don’t check the price every day, just forget about it.

Ok, but its better than that if you are in the correct index... and index funds are based on company sizes. If you hold any SP500 index, you are a tesla holder by proxy.

Don't get me wrong, index funds are good but if your cost basis is 20% and your additions are weakly scheduled (ie if you are > some % at a 1 month interval you add to the cost basis to make it 20% up)... it is pretty safe.

I feel as though people who view risk on the market as not understanding that options, uncovered options and all kinds of other money-wizardry are the things people refer to as actually risky. You can lose your whole investment and there is a drop-dead date with options.

That reminds me, knowing how to set aside the past and reenter a market is a skill in itself. I first heard about it in 2012 but had no knowledge of risk/reward to act. Started dabbling in 2014, lost all gambling in 2015. Didn't make any money by trading too much in 2017. But through all these experiences I was able to make sure I didn't miss out after the 2020 halving. We are still so early, I don't know anyone else personally with a proper size position. Most humans stress about having too much or too little. But true zen is being able to say you're just right and early. We are only 1 decade into a future with true digital scarcity

I go through this very similar thought process every time I look at bitcoin. I don’t know how much I ever accumulated, it wasn’t much, but I was definitely tinkering with it very early on before it had any real value. I plugged coinbase into a checking account that I could easily dripped in 10 bucks a month since like 2012. But I didn’t do any of that, I just ignored it.

Fast forward to now and I see those as missed opportunities, but the reality is there’s no way I would’ve held until now. Or I would’ve lost it. Or something else.

I still get a _little_ annoyed at myself for not keeping at least some of the ~60BTC I mined in April-June 2011 (early enough that I have Mt. Gox support emails answered by Mark Karpeles). I basically come to the conclusion that it was going to be a flash in the pan, so offloaded them as soon as they were mined.

That said, I would definitely have sold them long before their current price, so I don't see it as a great loss.

Epic - you should mint those emails.

>I doubt I'd have held past $1000

general advice is to take a chunk of profit and let the rest ride so you don't hate yourself either way, basically regret minimization hedge.

I did exactly the same thing in 2010! Reinstalled over my wallet. I had about a dozen bitcoins that I'd mined on my PC. Calculated they were essentially worthless and hit install...

It's a wallet with 50 BTC in case anyone wonders. Not really whale level if you ask me.

50 BTC was the first block reward. It's fairly common for miners to use a unique public address for each block they mine.

This is why there's no single "Satoshi address". We can only estimate how much he has based on how many miners we believe were on the network in the early days until Satoshi disappeared, or more likely until GPUs started hitting the scene and he stopped being able to mine anything significant.

So, it's entirely possible that owner of this 50 btc actually has a TON more if they were an early miner.

Would expect a whale to hold thousands of coins.

+1 came here to say this.

This is such a small amount of BTC that it's laughable to call it a "whale."

Yeah, not a whale, but an early miner.

And if he mined a block, chances are he mined others (this was doable on a laptop back then), but impossible to know because coinbase coins (minted with the block) aren't linked to anything.

They're as clean as a BTC can be.

Honest question, and no I do not own any crypto these days:

How would you liquidate a wallet with, say, 100 BTC or more? 1000? 10,000?

Can any of the exchange houses move that much money in a day? Would you instantly be visible and known to everyone?

100 BTC is roughly 6M, 1000 is 60M. FTX.US has 35M depth moving the price 2% downward. Binance has 23M, Bitfinex 35M, Coinbase 15M.

So basically you could liquidate 1000 BTC in a market sell if you split it across some exchanges and cause a 2% move downward. More if you were a bit smarter about selling and not just straight dumping it.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin#markets

The 24h volume for BTC is ~33b usd. You can liquidate a lot very quickly. Tesla recently sold ~270m usd worth to test liquidity [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1386821144037236737?lang...

Tesla is a high profile customer. They have separate policies for them.

Normal accounts can offload 25k/day last time i checked.

Which exchange are you referring to? The big US exchanges have limits, but those limits can be very easily raised by doing some extra identity verification.

My Coinbase daily limit is actually $250k and I haven't done any extra verification, and my total amount ever traded is lower than that figure. Just a long time account holder.

Try selling 250 m$, which would take multiple years with 250k/day.

I think it was kraken or Binance that i checked.

Coinbase pro states 50 k /day https://help.coinbase.com/en/pro/trading-and-funding/trading....

The page you linked references $50k as the starting limit:

> When you first create your Coinbase Pro account, the withdrawal limit is $50,000/day. See your Limits page for your current withdrawal limit and to request an increase to your limit.

Like I said, there are limits but they can be raised by going through extra verifications..

You said you didn't do any extra verifications for 250k/day. That's not possible according to the faq.

What makes you say that? All I see is:

> When you first create your Coinbase Pro account, the withdrawal limit is $50,000/day. See your Limits page for your current withdrawal limit and to request an increase to your limit.

That implies that the limit for new accounts (mine is not) is $50k and that the limit may be raised by making a request. It does not imply that making a request is the only way of raising the limit..

Generally you aren't limited in how much you can sell. If Tesla deposits $270m worth, the exchange won't stop them from selling. I think you mean withdraw (there are pretty strict limits on how much you can withdraw)

That's what I mean with offload.

100 BTC really isn't that much you could easily vwap out of the position. Alternatively you could just do OTC, but it's a little small for that.

Dumping 100 BTC on Coinbase into current sell orders, would only bring the price down by $400. (Assuming no more orders don't immediately fill in the void.) Any large exchange could handle that sort of volume.

Couldn’t you just launder it through other crypto first? Then take it off the exchanges in Ether and Doge etc.

Why are you talking about laundering?

So that you don't have people doxxing you then showing up at your door looking for a handout, like with lottery winners? That's how I read the last part of the original question: "Would you instantly be visible and known to everyone?"

Why would that happen? It's not like your name is visible when you make a trade? Not even your wallet address is visible on most exchanges since the trades don't happen on the blockchain.

The way I interpreted it, the writer of the original question doesn't understand all of the mechanics of a Bitcoin transaction, and that's why they were asking.

No, I understand it completely. But I also know moving that much crypto at once gets you noticed by a lot of people, not just the government.

Fair enough.

It can be fun to look at high value addresses and see the quantities and transaction dates. Hard to say how many old ones are lost or if they are dormant long term holders.

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

I remember times when people were gifting entire blocks just for lulz.

I sold mine when bt first hit $100, and in fact had lost a usb stick with a few btc on it

This guy accidentally threw a hard drive away with 7,500 BTC on it. He's offering $70M to allow him to excavate the landfill. BTC price has even doubled since this happened.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/uk/bitcoin-trash-landfill-gbr...

txid or it didn't happen.

[EDIT]: never mind, found it:

TX hash is 26ddd5cab88562188a6407c69642d72024eb99342830ebe2981bdb344622da60

Fees were 84 satoshis - quite cheap.

Original 50BTC Coinbase was deposited on 19h7oPeqkQeQAqKcNTGKkKr1Xd2AZ85xL2

Block was mined on May 25, 2010, 1:00 AM UTC - something a half-decent laptop could pull off fairly easily back then. The miner likely mined other blocks.

Miner didn't even bother cleaning the corresponding shitcoin addies:

https://blockchair.com/search?q=19h7oPeqkQeQAqKcNTGKkKr1Xd2A...

The 50BTC has moved quite a fair bit since the initial spend, but to mostly old-style addies, such as this one: https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/1Kr6QSydW9bFQG1mXi... which seems to be a bitfinex wallet.

Counting a 50 BTC wallet as a "whale" seems a tad exaggerated to me. I was expecting to see a wallet approaching 10,000+ BTC before clicking this headline.

To be clear: as someone with negative net worth, 50 BTC would still be great to have..:).

What’s the chance of someone brute forcing the private key for these “wallets”? Given the size of today’s mining operations, could someone be targeting these Whales?

Brute forcing a BTC wallet private key is like counting to infinity: the earlier you start, and the faster you work, the sooner you’ll never get there. :)

There are 2^256 possibilities.

This thread is interesting: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4453897.0

Recent key rates are 182 million keys/sec, so about 2^27 keys/sec. By my math (always suspect!), I think that means you have a 50% chance of finding a specific key, in 2^101 seconds => 8.0e22 years, or approximately 1.0e21 lifetimes.

If you get together with 8 billion friends, you will have a 50% chance at cracking the wallet in only 125 billion lifetimes, but then if you split the wallet value evenly, you'll each only get $1.00 USD (at today's BTC-USD exchange rate -- might not be the same in 10 trillion years, but who knows??).

If you have a meaningful fraction of a zillionth of this kind of computing resources available, you should put it to use mining instead!

All bets are off if quantum computing ever happens.

The article says "50 BTC worth $5 million", and mentions that a couple of other on-the-order-of-10 BTC wallets have come online in the recent past.

How much influence would dumping 50 BTC on the market have? Is it like Bill Gates MSFT stock, where if he sold a large amount, the price would drop? Or if Satoshi sold his/her/their BTC would the market just absorb it?

50 BTC on its own is nothing. Market trades $1e8+ Volumes these days.

If wallets that could be reliably traced to Satoshi came online and started moving, there would be a lot of turbulence in the market.

It would have no impact. It’s such a tiny amount it’s not even material to the markets.

tl;dr someone is using a dormant wallet after 11 years of not touching it. Worth ~3m or so at the moment. The article provides absolutely zero new information beyond that.

Not even an address or link to a blockexplorer so that we can see what “awakens” even means, and then the ads overload my iphone and freeze my browser before getting to the bottom

The source independent article is paywalled

This is the depth of crypto discussion in non-crypto news sources right now. (And of course crypto-news sources would be seen as non-objective so therefore ignored) Frustrating.

Anyway 50 bitcoin is non-news. But the headline gets people talking about a dozen barely tangentially related things. Its a decade later and, apparently, many people have no idea how to sell bitcoin for cash, not even sure if its possible, or when the information about them is any different from when they sell stocks, or think it would move the market. Kind of comforting to know that’s the ‘competition’, at least, since it just means “still early”.

I have two guesses:

1. someone forgot they had it and (re)discovered it.

2. someone spent a few recent years figuring out how to use the current value without being subjected to significant taxation.

Gotta love that for something that’s supposedly about privacy, it’s news when someone opens their wallet

Is the typo in the submission title intentional or a Freudian slip?

When one wallet has $5B in it, the ROI on attempting to crack it is rather exceptional.

And there's another zombied one with $2Bn in it. You could try to bruteforce them both at once I guess if you had a lot of spare CPU cycles on your hands ;)

When will the wallet of Satoshi awaken is the zillion dollar question...

Whenever we have the tech to cure ALS probably.

For context, this is referring to Hal Finney, who was active in the early Bitcoin community but later died of ALS and had his brain cryopreserved. Whether or not he was Satoshi, this is certainly a clever solution to the "what incentive will people in the future have to resurrect cryopatients" problem!

> this is certainly a clever solution to the "what incentive will people in the future have to resurrect cryopatients" problem!

You don’t need to resurrect them. All you need is to read their memories until you find what you want. Much simpler.

Another approach is to simulate their minds into a torture space until they give you the passphrase. When done, delete the data and use the storage for Chia ;-)

That’s fascinating to think about. I’m now picturing a future when we’re on the brink of resurrection technology, and VC firms invest and trade warehouses full of billion dollar cryopreserved brainwallets.

Seems like that was the plan all along :)

Satoshi's anonymity is bitcoin's biggest problem. If bitcoin were to become a real world reserve currency, people would be making trillion dollar bets on a "probably".

Actually it's Bitcoin's biggest strength. A truly decenetralized system should have no figurehead. Satoshi's anonymity is his greatest gift to Bitcoin.

Satoshi needs no wallet. All the wallets will be his when he activates his backdoor :)

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