Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/29/hacker-defies-the-odds-unlocks-3-million-bitcoin-wallet-locked-since-2013.html
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If I remember correctly, @frauenfelder , when you lost your password, whatever mechanism you were trying to access featured a lock-out time that doubled after every incorrect guess. I suppose that wasn’t an issue here? (No, I didn’t watch the video)
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Can we put a nail in cryptocurrency and blockchain now? Clearly not living up to the promise.
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Cryptocurrency’s value is entirely from people assuming it is useful, so everyone who has some has a vested interest in convincing others it’s not dead. It apparently makes it hard to finish off. 
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What is the hacker guy’s cut, that’s what we all really want to know!
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Fair, but the more stories like this of security around it being broken by the weakest link, the better.
Hard to convince people to admit they’ve been conned, but when they see their fake money for criminals is less secure from criminals than they expected, they get to feel like they’ve got the upper hand when they leave it.
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Put a wooden stake in them and bury them at a crossroads at midnight.
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Should change his name to Joe Millions, or at least add the middle name “Thousand”
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I’d argue min 30%.
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So this was basically a case of a non-random random number generator. Amazing that problem is still biting people in the arse after all these years.
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The old Windows Solitaire had days when every round would be easy and days when every round would be more difficult. I imagine that the cards were shuffled using a pseudorandom number generator seeded by the date.
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It was worth $80M when they first started working on unlocking it. 
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I didn’t watch it either, but there’s a big difference between “attacking” online and offline systems. For an offline attack (as I think unlocking a bitcoin wallet would be) there’s practically no way to enforce such limitations, since the attacker can make their automation tools run a fresh copy of the software with each password guess, making the software think it’s always the first guess.
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