Back around 2012 I created a paper wallet using an offline website (it was HTML and JS downloaded locally that worked without internet. I put it on a USB stick and then use it in a laptop without internet), printed it out and put it in a safe
Back around 2012 I created a paper wallet using an offline website (it was HTML and JS downloaded locally that worked without internet. I put it on a USB stick and then use it in a laptop without internet), printed it out and put it in a safe
I did a similar stunt with an old PowerBook where I electrically disabled the WiFi/Bluetooth so it wouldn’t be online unless I plugged in Ethernet, generated keys, and played around with mining. This was back in 2010 when this was all just basically toys for fun. I also encrypted it all with FileVault.
Then I forgot my pass phrase and have never been able to recover any of it. I don’t even know how many btc were mined/lost.
Before anyone asks, no, there aren’t any usable exploits / vulns found for the encryption methods used. And from what I can tell the coins in question have still sat frozen for going in a decade and a half now. I suspect many other hackers did the same thing…
Apparently legacy filevault can be attacked offline with tools like john the ripper.
If you were attempting to mine Bitcoin with a PowerBook I can confidently say you mined zero Bitcoin
Edit: I thought he was talking about 2012 but yeah in 2010 CPU mining was still a thing
Wasn't the difficulty like 6 orders of magnitude easier back then?
Okay maybe in 2010 you could use a CPU but even by 2012 it was entirely dominated by GPUs and I think even dedicated hardware was coming out around that time or soon after
ehhh you could CPU mine in the early months IIRC. The issue was that 50BTC wasn't even worth a penny back then lol
Wasn't there an offline wallet that used a poor algorithm to develop seed phrases, and thus someone stole all of those coins a couple of months ago?
Aren't you thinking of a hardware wallet?
Yes
That's why I went with a paper wallet it seemed way simpler which is what you want for something like this
Definitely Ledger Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts (796 points, 18 days ago, 515 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054092
Possibly Trezor (35 points, 16 days ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078423
He's thinking of Coldcard, which accidentally switched their RNG from the hardware RNG to a predictable PRNG https://www.cryptotimes.io/learn/what-is-coldcard-hack/
> Coldcard’s software is built on MicroPython, and Coinkite supplies its own hardware-RNG wrapper for the device’s STM32 chip. To avoid conflicts, Coinkite deliberately disabled MicroPython’s built-in RNG path by setting a configuration flag, MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG, to zero. The problem: the underlying library checked only whether that flag was defined, not whether it was enabled (set to a non-zero value). Because a flag set to zero is still “defined,” the build silently compiled against the wrong code, and seed generation fell back to a deterministic software pseudo-random number generator called Yasmarang
Yep, Thank you
bitaddresses .org? If the JS code was defective, the coins can still be stolen later if the hacker can recreate the keys by going through the small key space, despite the coins being created being offline.
Ah yes that's the one, although the domain name isn't plural