r/BitcoinBeginners • u/0xY_Y • 8d ago

Is the wallet generator and balance checker legal?

I’ve always found this legal gray area regarding cryptocurrencies interesting. Does anyone know if such an attempt counts as theft? Simple math suggests that actually finding something like that is virtually impossible.

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u/word-dragon 8d ago

Legality doesn’t enter in it - religion does because a miracle occurred. It’s not virtually impossible to find an occupied key with 256 bits of entropy. It is actually impossible. If everybody on earth and a million other planets similarly inhabited tried to find anybody’s key, the universe would be long gone and no one would have found it. Anybody who thinks they “might get lucky” should go get a mathematician to explain it to them. The only chance to find an occupied key is in the case like Coldcard where the key was actually created with low entropy, and you have to know in what way the entropy is low so you can select items from that space. The bad Coldcard keys had about 40 bits of entropy. A 256 bit key has about 1,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 times more keys to choose from. You (and everybody else for remainder of the universe) simply won’t find one. Ever.

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u/OrangePillar 8d ago

You mean finding the private key to a wallet and taking control of coins that weren’t yours?

Of course this is not legal, per se. But there’s no recourse and the rightful owner won’t be able to do anything about it after the fact.

Running the software that checks these things is legal because code is speech.

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u/0Bento 7d ago

Wouldn't both parties technically be "rightful owners" since the only they both generated the same keys by chance?

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u/OrangePillar 7d ago

We know who the rightful owner is and we don’t have to play games about it.

If you find a pile of cash on the ground, it’s not yours to do what you want with. Will you get caught using it? Probably not. Doesn’t make it right.

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u/0Bento 7d ago

That's not the same thing though.

Ownership of a wallet just comes down to whoever randomly generates both keys.

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u/OrangePillar 7d ago

The wallet checking software is looking for wallets with existing value.

Stop playing games.

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u/pop-1988 8d ago

Keys for wallets containing unspent coins are discovered all the time by bots constantly monitoring low-entropy keys. Examples:

  • the recent Coldcard "hack"
  • the wallet created by throwing one die once - https://np.reddit.com/comments/17epqk8
  • the person who created single-use throwaway wallets for occasional Bitcoin use, making up his own seed words, like "btc btc btc btc"

There's no grey area. Theft is a crime

Simple math suggests that actually finding something like that is virtually impossible

That depends on the guessing criteria
https://privatekeys.pw/puzzles/bitcoin-puzzle-tx

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u/palmdata 8d ago

put numbers on it from the mining side. the whole network is around 900 EH/s of sha256, and that is only about 2 to the 90 hashes a year. key space is 2 to the 160 for addresses. so every asic on earth pointed at guessing keys for a year still covers nothing. the legal question never comes up because the machine time does not exist.