Token Daily - Call me Ishmael

sos755 Platinum | QC: BTC 493, BCH 185, CC 116 | MiningSu 5 days ago

What many people don't realize is that over the last several years, there are people that have been generating billions of private keys from movies, literature, music, and quotations, etc. so that if anyone ever happens to use one of them, these people can immediately take the funds.

thearmthearm 5 days ago

This article is really sneaky. It doesn't fully explain what a brain wallet is and so it seems as if they are talking about cracking the 12 or 24 seed words plus your passphrase which you took from your favourite book.

_o__0_ Platinum | QC: CC 982 | VET 5 6 days ago

What a great experiment!
Thanks for posting.
It reminds of the guy whos key was posted accidentally in some files, and a tx happened seconds after the upload.
Imo, its evidence of some bad shit on the adoption-horizon. Gonna be a bumpy road with bots this nasty patrolling.

Tidus17 Tin 5 days ago

It's not an issue unique to crypto: there are a lot of people using very easily hackable passwords. Not to even mention social engineering...

BankBailout Tin 6 days ago

There are tons of bots continually doing this. Even if you use a brain-wallet with the hash of one recent block it WILL get swept away.

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smoothID redditor for 3 months 6 days ago

I had a few brainwallets that held ridiculous amounts at today's price level. Nothing was taken. But I also didn't create them using dumb methods. Brainwallets still work fine. Though I wouldn't recommend it for most users.

zappadoing 5 days ago

I created a bunch of brainwallet honeypots for science-fun and most of them are still not taken yet. none of the keys are taken out of books or existing text, but the keys are hidden in plain sight. one got taken after 3 years - the key was published in plain text as html-title of a webage - an other was plain text in the bitcoin-blockchain. took also 2years to be taken.

KalEll66 6 days ago

This article is deceiving. 12 random seed words are enough. A passphrase added is significantly more.

never_safe_for_life 6 days ago

a more secure way of storing coins could be to email yourself an encrypted backup of your private key

So where do you store the key to this encryption? Encypt it and email it to yourself?

I suppose at this level you could use a "brainwallet" e.g. easily memorized seed phrase. To serve as the encryption key for your totally random wallet address.

zomgitsduke 6 days ago

Write a script that checks the wallet for funds every second. Sweep keys once amount > 0.

Honestly, could be a pretty low powered device just sitting there trying to check wallet balances over and over again. Could probably run that script on a desktop fr 2010 and just leave it plugged in forever haha.

pegg7 redditor for 3 months 6 days ago

works better on a modern device, when you got a large list

chepas_moi redditor for 4 weeks 5 days ago

The size of the list doesn't matter when you're using the right data structures. Lists are are your friends for set inclusion operations ;)

fresheneesz 6 days ago

Brain wallets are well known to be a badg idea for many many many reasons including that it encourages non random pass phrases and human memories suck. Unless you're trying to get passed Kim Jong Un's blood riders, you probably don't need to even consider using a brain wallet. Get a hardware wallet and securely store your backup seed in a safe. More info

operationco redditor for 2 weeks 5 days ago

> Brain wallets are well known to be a bag idea For all the bagholders?

Bitcoin_to_da_Moon 6 days ago

The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity

this is poetry

pegg7 redditor for 3 months 6 days ago

I love it!
When is the next round of this game? Larger amounts please.
EDIT: if someone has a good list of phrases - PM me for some brainstorming. Got the bot already.

nyaaaa 6 days ago

Next? Its running.. > Around a year ago, I conducted a similar experiment, where funds were sent to addresses generated by a reasonably obvious pattern deep inside some of the world’s best selling novels. These funds are still sitting in the blockchain today and have not been stolen.

pegg7 redditor for 3 months 6 days ago

Not in my list :( That's why I need to collaborate with someone on the list.

xboox 6 days ago

Where to convert text to private key?
For testing...

operationco redditor for 2 weeks 5 days ago

https://bitaddress.org was (one of) the first and most trusted, I think. Save it and run it offline, of course.

fijiMath 6 days ago

[https://brainwalletx.github.io/](https://brainwalletx.github.io/)  [https://brainwallet.io/](https://brainwallet.io/)

Thrgd456 6 days ago

Any way to gauge how profitable a sweeping operation would be?

badasimo 6 days ago

I may be missing something, but it may be possible to pre-generate a list of common phrases and then just monitor the blockchain for their hashes. That's how the 0.67 seconds one probably worked. So not very expensive, just have to run a node and send each address to a script which will check the list.

satoshi_yoshi 5 days ago

>That's how the 0.67 seconds one probably worked. That's how they all worked. It's not like they could look at a Bitcoin address and then try to work backwards from there. It's just that there are many people out there doing this, some move faster than others to sweep the funds, and they all have different prepared lists of public addresses that they have the ability to spend.

[deleted] 6 days ago

[deleted]

pegg7 redditor for 3 months 6 days ago

Right, coding the bot (got this done) + amassing the list (tbd).

ProbablyFullOfShit 6 days ago

I think the most expensive part would be that your node needs to be faster than everyone else that's doing the same thing.

igadjeed 6 days ago

The literature quotes are all first words from novels. The Satoshi quote is from the conclusion chapter of the white paper, near the end, which is why it took longer to snipe

100xer 6 days ago

That's the wrong method. Pick any phrase for a password, add a salt (another unrelated word), and hash it one trillion times.

MarkPapermaster 6 days ago

Just use normal trusted Bitcoin software to generate (on a offline computer) a 12 word seed. Copy paste some of the addresses to a thumb drive and then memorize the 12 words. (Now wipe the offline PC) Not using enough entropy for a bitcoin privkey (by coming up with something yourself) means the funds will eventually get lost no matter how clever you think you are. This method is the only safe way of getting a brainwallet.

tituspus redditor for 1 week 6 days ago

Better than using "trusted" bitcoin software to generate the seed is to rely solely on general random number generator, you can write your own seed generator on top of general RNG (which everything including https, ssl, ssh depends on) in an hour and don't need to trust some rando software. That is, using an existing general RNG, but it's better to write the glue code to make a valid seed is yourself - it's less time consuming than auditing existing implementations. And yeah do all this on an offline computer, you want probably an older one without wife and run linux/*bsd to be safe.

satoshi_yoshi 5 days ago

Why would anybody do all this versus just rolling some dice a bunch of times to generate a 12 word seed phrase? There are so many hassles and so many different things that can go wrong.

tituspus redditor for 1 week 5 days ago

It's not as much hassle as it sounds, take an old laptop boot live linux and run one script (to generate valid seed phrase on top of RNG is few lines of code).

MarkPapermaster 5 days ago

Diceware wordlist and HD wallet wordlist are not the same. If you create 12 diceward words your HD wallet won't accept it when you import it.

operationco redditor for 2 weeks 5 days ago

> you want probably an older one without wife Without wife I'd probably want a younger one.

spe59436-bcaoo 6 days ago

> Pick any phrase for a password, add a salt Use the seed phrase, remember it using memory palace, and let the wallet deal with salt

fresheneesz 6 days ago

Security by obscurity dude. Just don't use a brain wallet. Non random seeds are incredibly insecure.

exab 5 days ago

That's not security by obscurity. Hashing a password a lot of times is effectively a Password Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF) and should be secure if the hash function is secure. Admittedly, a well vetted dedicated PBKDF would be more secure, but that solution should work, too.

fresheneesz 5 days ago

> Hashing a password a lot of times is effectively a Password Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF) Yes indeed. But a KDF doesn't make a non-random password secure. What is security by obscurity about it is that the KDF would be non-standard. If it is standard, then it can only make a secure password more secure. If the funds were stolen in 0.67 seconds, they might last a few minutes instead.

100xer 6 days ago

A brain wallet is not for everyday bitcoin storage.

fresheneesz 6 days ago

I agree. It can be useful if you need to access bitcoin after going through draconian searches by authoritarian governments. Trying to keep it in memory for any length of time tho is so risky its probably not worth it for anyone.

IKnowWhoYouAreGuy 6 days ago

Anagram a phrase and swap out letters for numbers or special characters, then reverse it and add capitalization to indicate your favorite prime in binary * IknowWhoYouAreGuy * IKWYAG * 1kwY46 * 64Ykw1 ... * ^4ykW1! but, you know, with more words in the phrase

Youwinredditand redditor for 2 weeks 5 days ago

The thing to remember about these approaches is the method becomes a part of your password. And while using tricks like this may seem clever, they're less secure and more difficult to remember than other methods. Generally speaking a hardware wallet is going to be the most secure approach. But if you insist on using a brain wallet keep the following in mind: 1. Hashes are your friend and you don't necessarily need to keep the hashing count a secret. With a high enough rehash count you'll slow down attempts to brute force your password. 2. Some aspect of your password should be information you've never shared and not inspired by anything you've seen in the world. It doesn't have to be substantial but you can't ever share this information or enter it into a compromised system. 3. Combined with the concepts above you can add in phrases or information that someone might guess. This information should be substantial but also easy to remember. Again, using a seed you come up with is generally a bad idea but you're less likely to forget it or get it stolen if you keep the above rules in mind.

dealbuddy 6 days ago

I was going to use “this is a test of the emergency broadcast system” until I read this a few years ago

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