Michael Stay, a former software engineer with Google and the current CTO of smart contract and decentralized application (Dapp) business firm, Pyrofex, claims to have successfully hacked a null file containing the private keys to over $300,000 in Bitcoin (BTC).

In a web log post, Stay says that his journey began when he received a message from "a Russian guy" on LinkedIn about six months agone.

Software engineer contacted on LinkedIn regarding paper from 2000

The Russian had read a newspaper authored past Stay in 2000 describing a technique that he had used to successfully attack cipher files.

"He had read that paper I'd written 19 years ago and wanted to know if the assault could work on a file with only two files, Stay writes, adding: "A quick analysis said not without an enormous amount of processing power and a lot of money."

"Because I just had two files to work with, a lot more than false positives would advance at each phase. At that place would end upward existence 273 possible keys to test, almost 10 sextillion. I estimated it would take a large GPU subcontract a twelvemonth to pause, with a cost on the order of $100K. He astounded me past saying he could spend that much to recover the primal."

Zippo file contained keys to $300,000 in BTC

The files contained the private keys to what had been roughly $12,500 in BTC when the Russian purchased the coins during 2022. "Now they were worth upward of $300K and he couldn't recollect the password," says Stay.

"Luckily, he still had the original laptop and knew exactly when the encryption took place. Considering InfoZip seeds its entropy using the timestamp, that promised to reduce the piece of work enormously—"merely" 10 quintillion—and made it quite feasible, a matter of a couple of months on a medium GPU farm."

We made a contract and I got to piece of work," he adds.

After several months of testing, including the discovery of a problems in his GPU farm, Stay claims to have cracked the file and returned the individual key to the Russian.