Developer Claims He Can Crack $700 Million Lost Bitcoin Wallet
A developer claims a new CUDA-powered tool can recover 8,999 Bitcoin (BTC) lost in 2010 by a user known as “Stone Man.” The dormant fortune is now worth roughly $688 million. The address has not moved a single satoshi in almost 16 years. A successful recovery would rank among the largest reclaimed Bitcoin holdings ever recorded. How the Stone Man Bitcoin Wallet Was Lost Stone Man bought 9,000 BTC in 2010 and ran an early Bitcoin client (version 0.3.2) from a Linux boot CD. After sending one coin to a personal address, the software automatically generated a “change” address for the remaining 8,999 BTC. Stone Man Bitcoin Wallet. Source: Blockchain.com When the machine shut down, the boot CD wiped the updated wallet.dat file. His backup did not contain the new change address, leaving the fortune stranded at a key he never recorded. The episode, posted on bitcointalk.org under topic 782, remains one of the earliest documented cases of catastrophic key loss. It predates the services now built around wallet rescue. Stone Man Case on Bitcointalk.org. Source: Bitcointalk.orgA CUDA-Powered Brute Force A Reddit user known as CompetitiveRough8180 says the tool exploits weak entropy in early Bitcoin client keys to narrow the search space. CUDA offloads calculations to GPU hardware, accelerating