In short, within only one or two seconds of a transaction being made to a brain wallet, there are multiple competing transactions detected by different nodes attempting to sweep the coins to another address. I remember a few years ago looking more closely at coins being sent to brain wallets being stolen. I assume many people have systems monitoring all compromised private keys, and they're competing against each other to steal the funds before someone else does.This is definitely the case. But I was not aware of huge mistakes like that 0.84BTC. ![]() However, I've noticed even back then that even if some addresses were known to be leaked and unsafe, some people still were playing with them long afterwards (by funding with small amounts). So I've abandoned the idea of watching those. But for some addresses the number of transactions was too big and the Electrum servers were cutting me off (I knew less back then). Impressive! I've intended a similar test some years ago with Electrum (my set was much smaller and I don't even remember if I've done my test with keys or just addresses). I killed it, restarted it, and it took forever to load the wallet (which had grown to 2.2 GB during the rescan). Yesterday, I imported the private keys into a new Bitcoin Core wallet (this took only a few minutes), and did a rescan (which took forever, but was mesmerizing to watch: the balance went up and down by many Bitcoins, and this kept going for hours! I left it to finish overnight. The private key was posted 2 months earlier: Except for last month (January 24): this address received 0.84362383BTC, which was instantly sweeped. Back in the days, it happened to large amounts of Bitcoins, but the more recent transactions are mostly small. I assume many people have systems monitoring all compromised private keys, and they're competing against each other to steal the funds before someone else does. Scrolling through the transactions, it's obvious any incoming transaction instantly gets sweeped, usually at a high fee. It's not very nice to work with, and consumes 1 full CPU core. ![]() Every few minutes, Bitcoin Core is unresponsive for a few minutes, most likely because of the large wallet combined with a lack of processing power. Eventually, it worked! It's up to date, and the total balance is 0 (as expected). This took forever, but was mesmerizing to watch: the balance went up and down by many Bitcoins, and this kept going for hours! I left it to finish overnight. Yesterday, I imported the private keys into a new Bitcoin Core wallet (this took only a few minutes), and did a rescan. That resulted in 9375 potential keys (not all of them are valid, and no, I won't post the list). To find out, I searched all downloaded posts (which took hours) for anything that could be a Bitcoin private key. This post made me curious: how many private keys have been posted on Bitcointalk?
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