Despite the fact that guessing someone's Bitcoin private key is a bit like trying to count to infinity, thousands of wannabe blockchain pirates are visiting Keys.lol website that contains every Bitcoin and Ethereum private key in existence, some of them hoping of miraculously stumbling across a Satoshi Nakomoto wallet’s private key and unlocking his crypto fortune.
According to data by SimilarWeb, Keys.lol website had 133.82K total visits in last six months.
Keys.lol is a website that performs the same function as a brute-force private key generator - it generates wallet addresses from private keys and checks for previous transaction history and balance.
When seeing a post on Reddit about this site, one Redditor commented: „Nice, maybe I can restore Satoshi's wallet.“
Satoshi's wallet private key theoretically can be found on this website - it's not literally impossible for some sucker to stumble upon it, but it's practically impossible.
In an ideal scenario for a wannabe blockchain pirate, when visiting the site, Keys.lol will generate the same private key Satoshi Nakamoto used when he mined the first block, which would mean that the pirate could use this key used to unlock funds from 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa Genesis public key that currently holds 68 BTC.
As explained in a thread on Bitcointalk, in the very rare event that two identical private keys were generated, second person who generated the same private key as the first would probably be able to spend first guy's coins (and vice versa). In such a rare case, it would be a race between both coin holders to see who spends them first.
However, possibility for such a scenario is astronomically minuscule. This is because a private wallet key is a number between 1 and 2^256 and to brute force it all you need is to continue guessing until you hit the right number between 1 and 115 quattuorvigintillion.
The odds of more than one wallet randomly generating the same key are one in a billion-billion-billion-billion-billion.
This is why creator of the Keys.lol site, Netherlands-based developer Sjors Ottjes wrote; „Yes, your private key is on this website too, but don't worry, nobody will ever find it“.
His website randomly generates private keys, then uses these keys to check balance of each wallet automatically. Wallets with a balance are colored green. Wallets that have never been used are red. Bitcoin wallets that have been used in the past but are now empty will turn yellow. Likelihood of finding a private key of a green wallet with some Bitcoin in it on Keys.lol is extremely unlikely. The possibility is there, just insanely low odds.
The keys that can be found are ones with low entropy (randomness) and originate from keys generated by null inputs and brain wallets that have no passphrase of any sort.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t get anything worthwhile there.
Many wallet’s private keys have been discovered through shared computational power. In the end, a private key is just a number. Sifting through these keys manually, though, is extremely inefficient. This is why websites like Keys.lol are interesting to show how secure private keys actually are.
Even initiatives like Large Bitcoin Collider that are doing something simillar - sharing computational energy to crack Bitcoin wallets - were able to found a only a couple of wallets with little BTC after a lot of time.
See their results here: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
Fact is that hackers have been trying to crack the largest bitcoin wallets for years, addresses that holds a bunch of Bitcoin are being publicized on hacking forums in order to crack the password, with no success so far.
As Bitcoin price continues to surge, there will be even more wannabe blockchain pirates treasure hunting for Satoshi's wallet, despite the fact that using a brute force attack to crack a bitcoin private key is being as next to impossible as impossible gets.
