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by sirk390 1638 days ago
Just don't lookup your private key in there. This would be like giving it to the website
3 comments

If I had some coins on my machine and the fees were low enough I'd be tempted to put a few bucks on a new key and test this theory.
How will you test the theory? It would be easy to just not sweep small amounts. Then when someone checks a wallet with a large amount, joink!
what would be the incentive for trying a second time with another wallet?
I think you are missing how this would work. The scammer wouldn't scoop up the proceeds if it was a small account you were looking up, only if it was a whale. This is to prevent someone from figuring out it was a scam with a small account and only gain a few dollars from the scam.
I think you are missing something. If you have a wallet with very little or no money attached to it. And the you check for the correspoinding private key. If you find it - you "know" it works and then _might_ be inclined to try the key for a more serious wallet. But if not, then you know this site doesn't work and would have no inclination to try another key. If you enter important passwords or keys into random websites then this isn't about incentive but mere stupidity.
No, I am not. Follow along:

I check my $100 dollar wallet.

It's there, doesn't get emptied.

Cool, I think! Next day I check my $1000000 wallet.

It gets immediately emptied.

Alternatively:

I check my $100 dollar wallet. It gets emptied.

SCAMMER I scream on HN and Twitter.

Site gets shutdown. Silly person doesn't check their $1000000 wallet.

I do something similar but to test that my pc hasn't been compromised.

I have an unencrypted btc wallet with a few hundred usd worth of btc as a canary.

It's not perfect of course.

A variant of type your password, <site> will replace it with asterisks

mydogisthebestboye44

Damn it!

Huh? Are you saying MY dog is NOT the best boye?
Perhaps not the best of the 44th boyes. I'm sure yours ranks highly elsewhere.
I can live with this. He is indeed a good boye.
As a youngling I fell for this a couple times in my video games. Then I caught on and played along, seeing it as an in joke. Later I realized doing this provides social proof for the scammer. I still play video games and I call it out when I see it.
hunter2
> ****

Did you mean to type something? Or just all stars?

To my knowledge there’s no way to look it up?
If you know the private key already, you just need to know which "page" it falls in, which should be documented somewhere as the pages are procedurally generated.
what does procedurally generated mean in this particular context ?
The data on a page are the results of running a function on the inputs of that page, not connecting to a database or anything.

view(coins = coins_with_prefix(query.page_num))

so, the site operator doesn’t need to go buy 2^256 bytes of hard drive space to store all the pages.