[HN Gopher] How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
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How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
Author : mathgenius
Score : 154 points
Date : 2020-04-03 21:20 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reperiendi.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reperiendi.wordpress.com)
| aresant wrote:
| "I'm currently looking for work in a staff or senior staff
| engineering or data scientist role. If you've got interesting
| technical analysis or optimization problems, please reach out to
| me and let's talk."
|
| That is probably the best CV I've ever read by accident.
|
| You should broaden your job hunt criteria to technical content
| marketing - seriously!
|
| Very rare to possess the skill to tell a story in an
| entertaining, approachable and detailed technical fashion.
| metaweta wrote:
| Hahaha, thanks!
| hanniabu wrote:
| > If you've got interesting technical analysis...
|
| FYI, not sure if english is your first language or not but
| this should be "If you have interesting technical
| analysis..."
| FroshKiller wrote:
| Native American English speaker. "If you've got" like this
| is perfectly idiomatic.
| dantillberg wrote:
| "If you've got" may not be formal "correct" English, but
| everyone understands it and it's used quite commonly in
| daily speech (and writing). I would wager that "if you've
| got" may actually be preferable to "if you have," in order
| to engage the reader at a more comfortable, personal level.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > That is probably the best CV I've ever read by accident.
|
| Exactly what I was thinking.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| excellent story. can you share the number of bitcoins that were
| retrieved and how the customer lost the password in the first
| place?
| saagarjha wrote:
| > Back in January of 2016, he had bought around $10K or $15K of
| Bitcoin and put the keys in an encrypted zip file.
|
| Based on the price of Bitcoin back then, it seems like this was
| about 30-40 Bitcoin?
| tomglynch wrote:
| Was the computer stolen or did he actually forget the
| password?
| lwb wrote:
| I've always wondered what the development process looks like for
| these type of algorithms. If you have to run the program for a
| year to know if it will work, how can you have any confidence
| that what you've written is going to do the trick?
| xakahnx wrote:
| It brings interesting trade-offs for program design. You can
| write the code one way which may be 10x faster but harder to
| reason about, or another way which is more straightforward but
| takes an extra 5 days go execute. How confident are you in your
| code or debugging ability? How many iterations will you need?
| I'm assuming this was written in CUDA based on the block/thread
| ID mix-up.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Perhaps you try it on smaller, "test" data to see if it works?
| metaweta wrote:
| Exactly. We created some zip files we knew the password to
| and then checked that our code found the right one. Each
| stage would generate a bunch of files with different
| candidate ranges, so when testing the next stage, we'd choose
| the one file we knew had the correct key in it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sireat wrote:
| The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very
| impressive resume (he is looking for new projects).
|
| The following CV line stands out however:
|
| Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014- March 2016.
|
| Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors
| to review Google ads for policy violations.
|
| How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go?
|
| I am not blaming the author as I would have done the same(and I
| imagine author was not told when hired that he'd be working on
| Java/Angular ad tool).
|
| Again it is not that Java or Angular are bad per se, but working
| on ad CRUD seems completely orthogonal to author's talents.
| metaweta wrote:
| Yeah, and it's why I left that job for something else.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Getting paid $300k / year to work on CRUD apps seems pretty
| nice to me.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > _How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads"
| go?_
|
| I think it goes something like the Open Source saying "that
| person doesn't owe anyone their intelligence to work on so-
| called important problems for free, just because it might be
| nice if they did".
|
| Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to
| pay more for that, than for solving junk, or find a way they
| don't need to earn money to live at the standard they want.
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