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by dustinls 3128 days ago
Looks to me like he stumbled on a bitcoin payment processing system?

That would explain how the "bot" knows a transaction is about to occur and why the bitcoins were being transferred within minutes of arriving.

The addresses he finds are temporary addresses a customer is directed to send payment, and then transferred to a more secure wallet shortly after confirmation.

1 comments

Lots of people are running bots which immediately steal payments to weak addresses.
Those bots still have to spend time finding addresses. If the transfer happens in seconds or minutes, its more likely the address was already known and expecting a deposit.
The addresses are generated ahead of time and placed into a huge database. Every new transaction that is broadcast is checked against the database, and if any vulnerable outputs are created they are swept immediately.

For example, watch either of these talks by Ryan Castellucci: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2s3_UG9IPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foil0hzl4Pg