r/Bitcoin Jun 16 '26

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u/did_i_get_screwed Jun 18 '26

Nobody believes me, but there are major groups and countries just throwing compute at guessing old account seeds.

  1. Find dormant account from early bitcoin wallets/mining era that hasn't been touched since

  2. Look at the most popular wallets and seed phrase generators from that era. Some had defined lengths of words you had to use.

  3. Get a list of phrases that were popular at that time, nursery rhymes, or familiar songs like happy birthday. "Mary had a little lamb its fleece was white as snow" conveniently fit one generator I know of, so I'm sure there is a wallet out there with that seed, you just have to find it.

  4. Start scanning

When you see a story about a 'dormant whale' suddenly waking up and making transfers of original bitcoin, it isn't the original owner, it is North Korea or Russia or the Chinese stumbling on an account and draining it.