In a trial of tense decoding skills, Bitcoin and Lightning Network project developer, John Cantrell, successfully hacked a BTC address by scrutinizing around a trillion seed combinations over the course of 30 hours.
The challenge was accomplished as a part of a competition launched on Twitter by Alistair Milne — the CIO of the Atlanta Digital Currency Fund. How did he do it? Simply doing published hints to a 12-word Bitcoin wallet seed over the course of numerous days, Cantrell was successful in brute-forcing the mnemonic with only 8 out of the 12 words, eventually claiming the 1 BTC prize contained inside.
Meanwhile, Cantrell decided to rent several graphics cards through GPU marketplaces and Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service after realizing that his MacBook could only check 1,250 mnemonic combinations per second using his self-written CPU speed solver.
The developer explained: “I was worried about people doing an equivalent and is why I included a .01 BTC miner fee. I didn’t think even this is able to be enough and thought there might be a ‘race to zero’ where people continually increased the fee trying to urge the miners to incorporate their transaction within the next block.”
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