Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: zomgwtfbbq on February 08, 2012, 03:20 pm
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Ok, so let me start off by saying that...
a: I know that I am most likely fucked.
b: I have nobody to blame for this but myself.
c: I don't want anyone to give me anything for my misfortune other than information - this isn't a "woe is me, please send me a coin" post. If I can't recover the coins, then I can't recover them.
But... does anyone know any way to reverse engineer part or all of an instawallet address from a bitcoin address? The instawallet faq pretty much says that if you lose that URL, you're screwed - the guy that runs it either can't or won't help you - and I don't blame him, but I'm out a non-trivial amount of BTC unless I can figure out a solution here. Basically, I think I clicked away from the wrong tab thinking that I had saved the URL somewhere - I'm not entirely sure - but whatever. I have a dump of half of my laptop's memory (it crashed during the memory dump process) in the hopes that maybe some or part of the URL is in there somewhere, but so far all I've been able to get out of it are all of my instawallet URLs except the one I really need. The more I look at it, the more I think too much time had passed between the time that I realized what had happened and the time that I was able to start dumping RAM, so all my grepping is probably for naught.
Feel free to mock my misfortune. But any suggestions for solutions are welcome, too. I briefly considered the idea of trying to brute-force it until I did the math on the number of possible wallet URLs. =/
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If the instawallet admin wasn't an idiot, he'd be using some sort of (inherently considered secure) hash function to generate the URLs. I think you're outta luck.
And bruteforcing it... yeah, that's 5.4x10^39 URLs by my count... :-(
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Here, have at 'em! Klick away... ;)
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://www.instawallet.org/&hl=en&prmd=imvns&filter=0&biw=1280&bih=861
But on a serious note, I fear you're shit out of luck. :[
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Sorry mate- not to get your hopes up by posting 2 weeks later :-\ but for future reference for all- the same thing happened to me :(
I saved the address and not the URL. I realized then before get-bitcoin deposited my money in my account so i VERY promptly emailed them explaining i needed to change my deposit account address. They said they'd proccess my request before it was deposited. This was a good 8 hours before they actually made the deposit. Then never did. Only offered the 5% refund and still haven't gotten that. For all i know they could have put it in their own account. Otherwise it's just sitting out there eating up someones server space.
At most try and get the fee back somehow mate. I know how you feel- sucks. but as im sure you've realized by now life moves on :)
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I wonder how many bitcoins are floating in the limbo because the owner lost the instawallet address or the HDD storing a local wallet crashed... Since mining is going to stop when a fixed total amount of coins is reached, it's not good at all to have stuff like this happen.
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I lost over 200$ on my 1st go-round with instawallet... such a bummer!! I now double and triple check that shit every time!!