Developer says GPU tool could recover 8,999 BTC lost in 2010

A developer claims a CUDA-powered tool could recover 8,999 Bitcoin that have been dormant since 2010. The address has not moved in almost 16 years and the coins would be worth roughly $688 million at current prices.

The claim appears in a Reddit post by user CompetitiveRough8180. The developer describes a method that narrows the private-key search by targeting predictable weaknesses in keys created by early Bitcoin clients and then runs the computations on consumer GPUs using NVIDIA’s CUDA framework.

The funds were lost after a user known as Stone Man ran Bitcoin client version 0.3.2 from a Linux boot CD. After buying 9,000 BTC and sending one coin, the software generated a change address holding the remaining 8,999 BTC. When the machine shut down, the boot CD wiped the updated wallet.dat file and the user’s backup did not include the new change address, leaving the private key unrecorded. The incident is recorded in an early Bitcointalk forum thread.

The developer says the technique exploits weak entropy and predictable key-generation patterns in those early clients to reduce the number of keys that must be tested. Offloading those reduced search sets to GPUs with CUDA can process many candidate keys in parallel, which is faster than CPU-only approaches.

If the method works in practice, it could be applied to other long-dormant wallets created under similar conditions. Researchers estimate roughly 4 million BTC are inaccessible in lost wallets, and many of those holdings date from Bitcoin’s earliest years when backup practices and sources of randomness were less robust. Past recoveries have used software bugs or implementation quirks to retrieve funds from old addresses.

The claim has not been independently verified. Successful recovery would require validating the technique and identifying a private key that controls the address. No matching private key has been publicly confirmed and no funds from the Stone Man address have been moved.