Remember this story? Latest from him is he has gone through a couple lawyers that offer recovery services and is now working with some outfit out of New York and the FBI. He's dropped another $10k on this in hopes of recovering those 9 BTC.
Discussion
Could you elaborate on the technicalities of how this occurred?
Back in the day it wasn't as easy to generate Bitcoin wallet addresses so people used websites that would help. If you Google "bitcoin paper wallet generator" you can find a ton of them. Simpler times when Bitcoin was still in its infancy and not worth a whole lot.
Anywho, this guy had used a particular site way back when. At some point, the original owner sold the site to a bad actor. Wallets generated on the site likely were captured by the owner and any BTC sent to those generated wallets were swept.
How is it that it was swept only once he sent it away? He sent it to a new paper wallet using the same site?
Correct. He sent BTC to a new paper wallet generated via one of those sites.
I know of paper wallets but don’t understand how they are generated. What you’re describing just sounds like a hot wallet. How is it not just a hot wallet if it’s generated from a website?
it's a script that you download and then open from your disk... but it is a bit sketch, you'd have to open the dev controls to see it does no network connections
these things are just 121 and 192 or so bits that make a seed for a HD wallet, usually it gives you the first address it would generate as well. they are trivial to make as a local running program also, in almost any language
Crazy to think of such an OG person making that mistake. I’m a total noob by comparison and I wouldn’t trust any internet connected device to generate my keys.
yeah, though i have a special privilege in that i can write a little tool to generate them for myself and i can just check on the dependencies and functions to be certain nothing is calling the network... i have written dozens of key generators in the last 8 years
only the system random number generator can be suspect but every time a bad CSPRNG is found it is removed, this is the main non-network vulnerability, and affects TLS in a bad way that's why they fix them so fast