Bitcoin & Lightning Network project developer, John Cantrell, recently revealed how he was successfully able to hack a Bitcoin [BTC] address by checking & verifying over a trillion seed combinations within a time period of 30 hours. This was however accomplished as a part of a contest launched on Twitter by Alistair Milne – the CIO of the Atlanta Digital Currency Fund.
Milne revealed hints to a 12-word Bitcoin wallet seed over the time frame of several days. Cantrell succeeded in brute forcing the mnemonic with only 8 out of the 12 words, ultimately claiming the 1 Bitcoin in prize contained inside.
Is It Really So Simple To Hack BTC Wallet?
Cantrell proceeded with renting several graphics cards through GPU marketplaces and Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service after realizing that his Macbook could only check 1,250 mnemonic key combinations per second using his self-written CPU seed solver.
While adding further, the developer added:
“I was worried about other people proceeding with some similar ways and is why I included a .01 BTC miner fee. I didn’t think even this would be enough and thought there might be a ‘race to zero’ where people continually increased the fee trying to urge the miners to incorporate their transaction within the next block.”
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