A developer has announced the creation of a CUDA-powered tool that might be able to recover approximately 8,999 Bitcoin (BTC) lost in 2010 by a user referred to as “Stone Man.” The dormant stash is now valued at around $688 million, making it one of the largest Bitcoin fortunes that could potentially be reclaimed.
The lost Bitcoin originates from an incident involving Stone Man, who purchased 9,000 BTC in 2010 while utilizing an early version of the Bitcoin client (version 0.3.2) running from a Linux boot CD. After making a transaction that sent one coin to another address, the software automatically created a “change” address for the remaining 8,999 BTC. Unfortunately, when the machine powered down, the boot CD erased the updated wallet.dat file, and Stone Man’s backup did not include the new change address. This left the massive fortune stranded at a key that was never recorded.
This misfortune is one of the earliest documented cases of catastrophic key loss, highlighted in a forum post on bitcointalk.org, predating many of the recovery services available today.
The developer, known on Reddit as CompetitiveRough8180, believes that the new tool takes advantage of weak entropy in early Bitcoin client keys, which can significantly reduce the search space for recovery. By leveraging GPU hardware through CUDA, the tool accelerates recovery attempts compared to traditional CPU-only methods that have been abandoned due to their inefficiency.
The implications of this breakthrough are significant, as an estimated 4 million BTC remains stranded in lost wallets, much of which can be traced back to the network’s early years when both entropy and backup procedures were lacking. Past recoveries have shown that losses due to bugs may sometimes be reversed, and other wallets from that era have been reactivated this year.
At the current Bitcoin price of $78,180, Stone Man’s dormant wallet would contain nearly $703 million in untouched wealth from Bitcoin’s formative years. The success of the developer’s efforts will determine whether the unique address associated with Stone Man will ever see activity again.
