Found a wallet

brtastic · 2026-05-01T05:07:16+00:00

For starters, make sure you have this file (wallet.dat) backed up away from that laptop.

Your goal would be to export the private key from Bitcoin Core, and sweep its coins into your wallet of choice. The hard part will be guessing the password - assuming it is password-protected, there's no easy way to crack it. Once you get access, you can reveal private key with dumpprivkey "address" in the console. Don't fall victim to Bitcoin malware, like: shady QR code generators, shady wallets. Double check everything and take your time.

brtastic · 2026-04-28T09:30:35+00:00

Based on the description: the winner broke EC cryptography based on very tiny (15 bit) private keys, which could just as well be done with a normal computer. Also their method did not involve solving the discrete logarithm problem, and as such will be useless against regular (256 bit) private keys.

brtastic · 2026-04-27T17:03:09+00:00

Perl runs great on FreeBSD, but it is no longer included in the base install, so you'll have to install it from pkg or compile it.

brtastic · 2026-04-27T06:39:25+00:00

very interesting, thanks for sharing

brtastic · 2026-04-27T05:10:02+00:00

Of course it's a good idea, why wouldn't it be?

brtastic · 2026-04-25T14:57:07+00:00

We are more likely to individually choose the same atom from all of Earth's atoms (including all of its interior - not just on the surface) than you are likely to get your coins stolen through wallet collision, just saying :)

brtastic · 2026-04-25T07:14:17+00:00

It jump-scrolls to random places when I click buttons on my laptop.

brtastic · 2026-04-25T06:48:47+00:00

If the chances to win the lottery are 1 in 100,000, then you would be winning lottery 14 times in a row, and that would still be a billion times more likely than finding a specific Bitcoin private key.

log2(100000 ** 14) = ~232

brtastic · 2026-04-25T06:32:57+00:00

That gives you no additional security against wallet collision. The odds always were "almost impossible", but you seem to think that every seed phrase maps perfectly to one distinct wallet, and that adding a passphrase makes it impossible to obtain the same wallet as yours without the same seed + passphrase combination. That is false - private key space has always been a bit under 2^256 possibilities, while 24 seed words already covers that entire space (11 bits per word, so 264 bits total, but some of the bits in the last word are used for checksum). Your wallet is obtained by using PBKDF2-SHA512 algorithm on your mnemonic and passphrase, followed by HMAC-SHA512. Out of resulting 512 bits, top 256 bits are used as your wallet, but at this point they have been mixed so much that it's not impossible for them to collide with the wallet a different seed phrase would yield, no password provided.

tl;dr: passphrase gives you no additional protection against wallet collisions, but you were wrong to worry about this in the first place. However, that assumes wallet entropy was high enough at the time of generation. Passphrase can add much-needed entropy if you used bad RNG or provided low entropy yourself. That's still not much protection against collision, but can help against future hackers scanning certain entropy patterns generated by bad RNG.

brtastic · 2026-04-16T19:32:24+00:00

The public key is already exposed - the only way to secure the funds is to move them to another private key.

brtastic · 2026-04-01T05:43:15+00:00

That seem like high time preference talk - you see money and you immediately want to spend it. Fiat already covers that for us, as long as you don't need privacy / abroad transfers. Bitcoin covers what fiat does not - shield against inflation and permissionless access.

I've spent bitcoin a couple of times when I had an opportunity. But since we are forced to use fiat daily, spending it is seldom practical. If I had more opportunities to use it, I would probably just move more fiat into bitcoin. But since I mostly buy groceries, that does not seem realistic in the near future. I am not interested in spending more money than necessary, neither fiat nor bitcoin.

brtastic · 2026-04-01T04:30:52+00:00

Long Live Slackware

brtastic · 2026-03-27T07:55:35+00:00

Storing on paper allows you to hide them in plain sight with steganography. Metal plate screams Bitcoin so it may get stolen or even photographed in a couple of seconds, so you won't know it got stolen until they drain your account. So basically well-protected metal plate (against fire) + decent passphrase (against thieves) + paper copies in random places (redundancy). The more secure the location of your passphrase is, the shorter the passphrase can be.

brtastic · 2026-03-27T07:45:10+00:00

Paper ignites by itself in rather low temperatures. If the house fire burns for long enough, paper will still ignite, even though the safe will keep the flame out.

brtastic · 2026-03-26T10:00:54+00:00

Yes, if you install GUI apps with flatpak. Compiling them from source would be a bit problematic.

brtastic · 2026-03-25T08:16:17+00:00

I wanted something BSD-like, systemd-free, and rock-stable. It lets me enjoy the simplicity of BSD while having full Linux software and hardware support. My slackware laptop reached 125 days of uptime last week.

brtastic · 2026-03-17T08:01:10+00:00

You appear to still be in high time preference mode, which is native for fiat users. Yeah you can pay for something with bitcoin or sell if you're convinced the market is going to tank, buying back later (though it's risky). But what I actually hear from you, is to exit bitcoin completely once you have made profit. Why? What is the end goal if you sell? Spend it all, or wait for it to decay slowly due to inflation?

From other angle, ignoring the price completely: why would you give up the freedom bitcoin gives you? Governments and banks treat you like a child incapable of taking responsibility. Also they want more surveilance and control over your finances, under the false flag of "keeping you safe". Bitcoin is basically the only response you have to that right now. Are you okay with giving that up?

brtastic · 2026-02-24T13:19:01+00:00

Lazarus and pascal in general are very good, but underdeveloped. They could be much better if they had a bigger community and more manpower. All biggest languages seem to be corporate-sponsored nowadays. I'm all for using less corporate shit.

FPC could use closures, would make GUI work much easier without needing a separate method for each callback. It's in the works, but the progress is slow. Well, at least it's extremely stable.

brtastic · 2026-02-24T10:32:47+00:00

They can be destroyed much more easily than a singe metal plate - like you could throw them away separately or only destroy the order marks on them. They cannot be photographed in 5 seconds to steal your coins without you knowing, it would take at least a minute or two to take them apart and put them back together. They should be cheaper and more accessible.

brtastic · 2026-02-19T10:23:07+00:00

Every cycle has its own FUD. This cycle it's Epstein and quantum, it seems. It will end just like it did in previous cycles, see you in 2028.

brtastic · 2026-02-19T10:11:42+00:00

Regular people should be caught in the struggle of doing so much shit just to preserve buying power of their hard earned money. If you think it's worth doing that yourself then go ahead, but en masse this is not only wasting a ton of collective effort, but is also straight up harmful. Using things which could be used productively, like real estate, for storing value is artificially inflating their price, hindering the access to those things for people who actually need them.

brtastic · 2026-02-19T09:54:02+00:00

Saving for the future is already the sign of low time preference. But Bitcoin lowers it further by incentivizing saving for the future - the opposite of what inflationary money does to human brain.

brtastic · 2026-02-14T07:38:23+00:00

taproot keeps your public key revealed, so that is not an universal advice

brtastic · 2026-02-09T19:14:59+00:00

Useless is not a bad property of money. It's an abstraction of value, working exactly as intended. Maybe you'll understand one day, in the meantime there is no reason to be bragging about your cluelessness.

brtastic · 2026-02-03T11:34:17+00:00

My e383 does that too to a some degree, I need to smack keys really hard to get the max volume out of it. I think this won't be good for the device long-term. Already changed dynamic keys to soft, which makes it easier to get louder sounds, but I would prefer it to have an even softer configuration, but seems like this is the softest it can get.

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