286
Sleeping beauty bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2 billion
(www.morningstar.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Technology
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This sounds fishy.
What if somebody found out the private key for those accounts? Like, brute forced them?
Is it even technologically possible?
Bitcoin private keys are 256 bit long. That means, there are 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 (1.15*10^77) possible private keys.
Say you are using a bitcoin miner that's roughly 4x as fast as the curretly fastest one at 1PH/s (1*10^15), they you'll need roughly 1*10^62 seconds or 3*10^54 years.
Lets say you got a million of these miners, then you are down to 3*10^48 years, or 2*10^38 times as long as the universe has existed.
I was going to calculate how much electricity this would consume and how expensive it would be, but the answer to that is plainly "too much to imagine".