Ian wrote:
BTC = 0* Were having a slight problem, LOL, Yah, I lost the password to the BTC
wallet,
Ron wrote:
> See, that's what happens when you invest in Silk Road!
> Unless you actually forgot it.
The blockchain makes all of this a matter of public record, we can see
it's all still there at the same old address:
https://blockchain.info/address/1Mz6YwFap2FEpPrSq3EEpqW4Endo7gA1wr
He forgot the exact passphrase that was encrypting his private key, but
remembers quite a bit about it. There's hope. He established it on July
24 and actually used it with success on August 10.
there is about $ 200.00 "stuck" and a crack strike force of
hackers is working on cracking into it.
A very inefficient cracking program of mine will be running for the next
12-24 hours. There are 2,299,968 variations of what I know from Ian that
this is trying at this very moment.
It's inefficient because it is starting a single openssl sub-process to
decode for every try. Only using 25% cpu thanks to that start-stop
overhead. No parallelism.
Estimate of 12-24 hours comes from aprox 5-10 minute run time when I was
going for 16,000 variations.
I have an encrypted .key file as per
https://github.com/jim618/multibit/wiki/Export-and-limited-import-of-private-keys
(where I got my openssl invocation for this from)
Passphrase is going through whatever 256 bit hashing process openssl
uses as per above to attempt a aes-256-cbc key. Extra overhead from
decoding the ascii armour again and again too...
When this initial crappy attempt fails, we'll be escalating this to a
wider operation:
"Operation Wrenches and Blades" http://xkcd.com/538/
As per that comic, "wrenches" is people doing interviews with Ian to
learn whatever they can extract (without the use of drugs and blunt
objects of course).
Ignore comments Ian makes about dead brain cells from his business
travels, neuro science tells us that we don't encode each piece of
information in one specific part of the brain. The signal is in the network.
Before Ian made this public, I've invited Ron and/or Mak to conduct a
second, independent interview. Once they or someone else has had a
chance to conduct one of their own, I will make the notes from my
interview available and my copy of the key available.
This operation will go on for as long has to. At some point I imagine
this turning into a treasure hunt poster on the wall with all pertinent
information (ascii armour version of his key + timestamp encrypted is
only 131 characters) that could become legendary here at Skullspace.
Especially if the years pass by and this 1.4763397 bitcoin becomes more
and valuable.
I swear, from what Ian has told me, somebody here will find it eventually.
This is where the "blades" part comes in to my title. I will eventually
escalate this into customized John the Ripper + MPI madness . Such
things will be developed, tested and debugged with on site Skullspace
equipment (vm server + workstations), but for very big production runs I
will take up Chris Kluka on offers to use idle blades at his worksite
(with compensation for power use) and/or Amazon EC2 instances with GPUs
if it turns out the hash, AES, and iterative aspects of this make sense
to program on GPU. (my instinct says yes based on the data size).
Being relatively bullish on bitcoin's valuation, I won't be in a rush to
work on this though -- I've now got Skullspace in a position where it
may be saving some bitcoin for its own future. Muhuhuhaha!
Mark
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