A small go program to check random privatekeys for a balance and record if a used ethereum address is found.

Run the get addresses script to download all the ethereum addresses (this will take a while):

./get-addresses.sh

With golang installed;

go run main.go

The docker-compose is a work in progress (it's loading addresses too slow at the moment);

docker-compose up

This is a proof of concept - the actual probability of finding a private key in use is about 90867014 / 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936. Even at millions of privatekeys a second, it will be a very long time before you will likely find anything. Though, I'll admit that there is some fun in leaving it running.

Some things have changed since when I first wrote this. Google now has an open dataset containing the whole Ethereum block chain. This is what I used to get the addresses dataset. You can find the query I used in the file bigquery included in this project. The size of the addresses file is at least double. This will take 100% of the memory on my 16GB RAM linux machine. It's probably time to work toward a distributed solution.

May number gods smile upon you.

Copyright 2017 Andrew Donley

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