A wild *collision story: + I generated a strong random seed…
A wild *collision story:
+ I generated a strong random seed,
+ But I ran it through the wrong function (bip39.mnemonicToSeedSync()),
+ That turned it into a different seed,
+ That "wrong" seed still made valid private keys,
+ And one of those just happened to match an address someone else was actually using. Likely, because their key wasn’t truly random.
+ Unless a cryptography expert has another explanation…
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*Note: "Collision" can mean different things in blockchain. This one wasn’t a hash collision. It was a seed/derivation mishap that led to overlapping keys.
Read more here: https://www.notion.so/bridgetdoran/Entropy-Collision-27e91fd47f8b80679734dd31067abfa7
Replies
Long story short, I accidentally have the private key for someone else's coin. (only 1 satoshi, but still).
interesting. is this on BTC or BSV? someone will undoubtledly try to run that function on a large dataset and look for more collisions.