How to get Bitcoins for free (almost)
A new gold rush called Bitcoin has swept the world. No wonder, since at the beginning of 2021, the value of one Bitcoin was around 55k USD. Yet, when Bitcoin started in 2009, its value was $0.01. Back in 2010, the price was somewhere around $1/Bitcoin. But then it started to grow, reaching the astronomical amounts it is today.
If in 2010 you just waved your hand over Bitcoin (like I did), thinking it was just some crap that had no potential, then today you probably regret what an opportunity to get rich you missed. But don’t hang your head, there are still ways to get Bitcoins. There are even ways to get Bitcoins for almost free, it’s just not that easy and the probability of success is almost zero.
In today’s article, I’ll show you one way to get Bitcoins for almost free using your computer. Currently, approximately 18.5 million Bitcoins have already been issued out of a total of 21 million by the year 2140. It is estimated that approximately 3-4 million bitcoins are irretrievably lost (forgotten keys, lost wallets, etc). These 4 million bitcoins are worth approximately $140B USD today. Yes, 140 BILLIONS! We just need to guess the private key to some lost bitcoin wallet…yes it’s that simple.
Right at the beginning I will draw your attention to the fact that the probability of success is …well, let’s say borderline close to zero. The probability of success is 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000656 : 1. Or to put it another way…one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the Sunway TaihuLight, would take 5194882658574989737995779322992527357514014 years to complete. So this tutorial is more of a curiosity to try your luck with. If you succeed, you will probably be the luckiest person who has ever lived or will live in this or any other universe or dimension.
How to get Bitcoins for free (almost)
A couple of enthusiasts have taken the effort to create small programs that automatically generate random private keys and test them against the bitcoin wallet database to see if they match an existing key. After installing this little program, all you have to do is run it and wait….wait…wait…wait a long, long time until all the trees and rivers and mountains turn to dust and the earth shrinks to the size of an orange and before the big shrink and then the big bang happens again and this repeats 376440772360506502753317342245835 times.
Once the program finds a key that has more than 0 bitcoins in the account, it will send you an email. And then all you have to do is log in to your bitcoin wallet and transfer the bitcoins to your account, or exchange them for cash. Of course, we have no idea what the exchange rate will be at this time, but with the current growth, it’s likely that when you find some bitcoin, you’ll be using it to buy at least the entire solar system…maybe even part of the Milky Way.
We’ve tried such a program written in Python, and here’s how to get it working.
How to do it:
- The first thing you need to do is install Python on your computer. Download it from https://python.org and install it in a folder such as C:/Python (you can install it elsewhere). During installation, be sure to check Add Python to PATH.
- Download the Bitcoin Private key generator and extract it to the C:/btcgen folder
- Open the Windows command prompt – right-click
and select Run (or WIN+R on your keyboard). Type “cmd” and confirm with OK.
- enter “cd\” and confirm with Enter
- type “cd btcgen” and confirm with Enter
- type “pip install -r requirements.txt” and confirm Enter. This will install the libraries you need.
- Now open the config.ini in notepad located in the C:/btcgen folder (Right click on the file, choose open in program –> notepad) and edit your outgoing mail server and your email login credentials. (For the mails on the list, the server and port are pre-populated). We had this notification mail sent to a different mail address than the sender (from youraddress@gmail.com the mail was sent to youraddress_2@gmail.com). Then save and close the file. Without this step, the program will not work.
- Run btcgen.bat
- The program started scanning and when it finds something, it sends you an email. You can also find all the scanned keys in the log – log.txt file. If the program finds a key that contains bitcoins, it also creates a success.txt file in the C:/btcgen directory where it stores the information about the find.
- You can run btcgen.bat repeatedly to open more windows and multiply your chances. We had 20 such windows running and it put about 20% load on the processor, so windows can run in the background and you can still use your computer almost without limitations.
- Good luck to you 🙂
If you happen to find something, you can send us a small tip here 🙂
Sources: the source code of the program is available on Github , thanks to the author farhad2161
