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IPFS News Link • Hacking, Cyber Security

$100K TO CRACK A BITCOIN WALLET

• https://hackaday.com by Bryan Cockfield

Since then, they owners of these coins had lost the private key, or simply thrown away the drive or computer the coins were on. It's next to impossible to recover this key in most situations, but for the right amount of money it can sometimes be done.

About 20 years ago, [Mike] was working as a cryptography expert and developed a number of interesting algorithms for breaking various forms of encryption, one of which involved .zip files with poor entropy. A Bitcoin owner stumbled across the paper that [Mike] wrote and realized that it could be a method for recovering his lost key from 2016. [Mike] said it would take a GPU farm and $100,000 USD, but when the owner paid the seemingly enormous price [Mike] was able to recover around $300,000 worth of Bitcoin.


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