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trollbridge • today at 12:01 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

I did a similar stunt with an old PowerBook where I electrically disabled the WiFi/Bluetooth so it wouldn’t be online unless I plugged in Ethernet, generated keys, and played around with mining. This was back in 2010 when this was all just basically toys for fun. I also encrypted it all with FileVault.

Then I forgot my pass phrase and have never been able to recover any of it. I don’t even know how many btc were mined/lost.

Before anyone asks, no, there aren’t any usable exploits / vulns found for the encryption methods used. And from what I can tell the coins in question have still sat frozen for going in a decade and a half now. I suspect many other hackers did the same thing…


Replies

skinfaxi • today at 12:21 AM

Apparently legacy filevault can be attacked offline with tools like john the ripper.

weird-eye-issue • today at 12:06 AM

If you were attempting to mine Bitcoin with a PowerBook I can confidently say you mined zero Bitcoin

Edit: I thought he was talking about 2012 but yeah in 2010 CPU mining was still a thing

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