It changes that if you attempt to liquidate that much BTC, BTC crashes and you've got 90% less money than you hoped for.

Do you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?

They could also do a private party transaction to sell the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.

This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0]

> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/050614/introdu...

Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that after the transaction, both sides would know the key to the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up a transaction first.

After the transaction, you can still send the bitcoin to the purchaser's wallet.

But since the purchase itself happens off exchange, there's no record of how much the coins were sold for, so no impact on market price.

A large wallet that’s been dormant for years suddenly becoming active will tend to pressure the price lower from the implied increase in liquid supply and fear that the wallet will continue to distribute coins.

It’s not just the printing of transaction price that can affect the market.

The vast majority of BTC transactions are done this way. Anything of any size is traded via OTC desks or other more private avenues.

Just the fear of future liquidation would eventually severely crash BTC.

Like it's crashing now on this news?

There's ~$188B in Satoshi era wallets.

While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.

Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another.

That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.

It depends how it's sold. Market orders would have more impact than OTC .

yeah, people think it's the selling that makes the price fall. it is the anticipation . markets are forward looking

Because maybe this isn't satoshi waking up, but finally those kidnappers hit that poor guy in the latest "we found satoshi" documentary

if someone could brute force a key, they would target small inactive wallets , rather than big wallets and drawing attention to it

Not true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the crypto algorithms and implementations which agencies use to achieve any objective they may have. On top of that there are also holes across the software and hardware stacks of various implementations. Just because they run all the researchers and fund a lot of it does not mean there are no holes.

Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky.

Just because they are not published, does not mean they are not using them, someone else found them and are using them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day.

Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts making leaps above Moores Law.

There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my folks!

You dont understand bitcoin or the math or the cryptography ehind it.

Can you look me in the eye and state that you understand Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it?

Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.

I understand the math and crypto behind it to a degree. I don't profess expert knowledge however. But I know enough to know the GP is wrong and I'm happy to point that out. If I thought there was any value in correcting GP claim by claim I would do so. But in reality it will just end up in me wasting my time trying to educate someone who doesn't want to be educated, and if they did they could go and research the math and cryptography for themselves.

As someone once said, I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.

It would take approximately 6B H100 GPU days to crack every active BTC wallet.

So if you had 10,000 H100s running, it'd only take ~1500 years.

You'd have a high probability to find key in under ~1000 years, though.

Even if I'm off by 3 orders of magnitude, it would take a decade and cost billions, and not make financial sense.

*at most ... years.

People always forget those numbers are worst case scenarios. I mean, you can get luck on the very first guess too.

If that’s the plan you can guess a number for free, no outlay needed.

If your guess is generated by a QRNG and many worlds is true, than one version of you is very happy although the expected value is 1.03×10−66 USD.

Active addresses have less entropy too

Why? Are you hypothesizing that they used bad RNGs?

How do you get that?

BTC private key space is 256 bit. Let's say a billion wallets, that's 30 bits, so you need to check 226 bits to hit one wallet.

A H100 does about 1000 TFLOPS at the very most, that's 10^15 or 50 bits per second (generously assuming we can check on key per FLOP).

6B days of that will give you an additional 50 bits (6 = 8 = 3 bits, B = 1000^3 = 30 bits, day = 10^5 seconds = 17 bits).

Now we're talking 100 bits. But as discussed above, you need to check 220 bits to hit a key. There's still quite a gap.

For comparison, the entire Bitcoin network (using 1% of world electricity) does about 1000 EH/s at the moment, that's 10^21 or 70 bits per second (so, roughly equivalent to a million of H100, using the rough overestimating sketch above).

Per year, that's 70+25 = 95 bits. Still far.