John Cantrell, the Bitcoin and Lightning Network project developer, explained how he was able to successfully hack a Bitcoin wallet by checking around a trillion seed combinations over the course of 30 hours to win a contest launched on Twitter by Alistair Milne, the CIO of the Atlanta Digital Currency Fund.
It has been reported that Milne published hints to a 12-word Bitcoin wallet seed over the course of several days.
However, Cantrell succeeded in brute-forcing the mnemonic with only 8 out of the 12 words, ultimately claiming the 1 BTC prize contained inside.
Developer John Cantrell successfully hacked Alistair Milne’s Bitcoin address to win a contest https://t.co/hEPEkbYo8r — Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) June 19, 2020
The report said that Cantrell decided to rent several graphics cards through GPU marketplaces and Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service after realizing that his Macbook could only check 1,250 mnemonic combinations per second using his self-written CPU seed solver.
Thus, he explained:
“I was worried about other people doing the same and is why I included a .01 BTC miner fee. I didn’t think even this would be enough and thought there could be a ‘race to zero’ where people continually increased the fee trying to get the miners to include their transaction in the next block.”
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Coinhouse