A developer claims a new CUDA-powered tool can recover 8,999 Bitcoin (BTC) lost in 2010 by a user known as “Stone Man.” The dormant fortune is now worth roughly $688 million.
The address has not moved a single satoshi in almost 16 years. A successful recovery would rank among the largest reclaimed Bitcoin holdings ever recorded.
How the Stone Man Bitcoin Wallet Was Lost
Stone Man bought 9,000 BTC in 2010 and ran an early Bitcoin client (version 0.3.2) from a Linux boot CD. After sending one coin to a personal address, the software automatically generated a “change” address for the remaining 8,999 BTC.
When the machine shut down, the boot CD wiped the updated wallet.dat file. His backup did not contain the new change address, leaving the fortune stranded at a key he never recorded.
The episode, posted on bitcointalk.org under topic 782, remains one of the earliest documented cases of catastrophic key loss. It predates the services now built around wallet rescue.
A CUDA-Powered Brute Force
A Reddit user known as CompetitiveRough8180 says the tool exploits weak entropy in early Bitcoin client keys to narrow the search space.
CUDA offloads calculations to GPU hardware, accelerating attempts that older CPU-only methods abandoned.
If validated, the method could ripple far beyond Stone Man. Roughly 4 million BTC sit stranded in lost wallets. Much of it dates from the network’s earliest years, when entropy and backup practices were primitive.
Past recoveries have shown that bug-related losses are sometimes reversible.
Other long-frozen wallets from the same era have already been reactivated this year.
With BTC for $78,180, the dormant wallet alone holds nearly $703 million in untouched wealth from Bitcoin’s early history.
Whether the developer can finish the job will decide if the Stone Man’s address ever moves again.