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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".
Purely hypothetically speaking, but, what if someone had their own private Dyson Sphere generating electricity? (Asking for a friend.)
The power consumption would be 5*10^62 Wh.
The sun outputs 3.9*10^26 W. If you captured all that energy with 100% efficiency, you would need 1.3*10^36 hours or roughly 1*10^22 times the age of the universe to collect enough energy.
That's incidentally roughly the estimated number of stars in the universe.
So if you put a dyson sphere around every star in the universe, right after the big bang (ignoring that stars didn't form instantly after the big bang) and you ran them until today, then you'd have just about enough energy to crack one wallet with current tech.
Yeah that's if you were to try to bruteforce the entire keyspace one key at a time. Nah. You'd look for sidechannel attacks which could reduce the keyspace by many orders of magnitude before starting.
Yeah, my password was Hunter2 Username: Username
It’s possible but not plausible. It’s incredibly unlikely that’s what happened.
This is correct for a given transaction, but there's no consensus needed to open a Bitcoin wallet. That is usually just a private key in an encrypted envelope.
At that point though the whole concept of bitcoins will be moot. If quantum computers can crack lost wallets they can also crack active wallets, and at that point there's no reason to buy bitcoin at all, which will tank the value of bitcoin making it mostly not worthwhile to crack wallets.
So if we get to that point, there will be one proof-of-concept wallet crack, and instantly after that bitcoin will cease to exist in any relevant fashion.
There's a window between the proof of concept success and Bitcoin being worthless where the attacker could attack any wallet and collect/sell while people figure out what is happening. The only question at that point is do you attack and sell aggressively to beat the clock, or do you slowly and carefully attack to try and stay under the radar? If one person has the ability to break crypto, then it follows that other people working towards it only have to align the same pieces before the window shuts.
Crypto is and always has been a scam.
Considering that you'd need a paradigm-breaking revolutionary and incredibly expensive device to do so, I'd find it hard to believe that you could stay under the radar with it.
What I'd expect to happen is that some big corporation and/or university manages to build a quantum computer capable of breaking 256bit encryption, and quite instantly after the announcement bitcoin will tank into nothingness or will change the algorithm to something quantum-computer safe. Well before some shady actor will get their hands on a quantum computer to crack wallets.
Yes, it's possible, but more like "brute forcing the password of a wallet software and get the keys that way".