Find Lost Bitcoin (BTC) in the Greatest Treasure Hunt of All Time

7 min readSep 21, 2023

Bitcoin Seekers upgraded version is live as of September 21, 2023. Hold 100,000 AFB and/or FUND to be able to access the product. You can view the Dapp at staking.canisventures.com. Search 10,000 wallets per second!

What is Bitcoin Seekers?

Bitcoin Seekers is a product put out by A Fund Baby to promote the narrative of Teh Fund. It uses advanced technology to find lost Bitcoin wallets via generations of random mnemonic phrases and public/private keys to access it and also the balance of BTC. The process is automatic, which means you click start and it searches. All you need to do is wait and don’t exit the website. Only those who hold a minimum balance of 100,000 A Fund Baby (AFB) or/and Teh Fund (FUND) combined can use the Bitcoin Seekers product. 31% of the Bitcoin supply is considered “lost”, which has a value of over 100s of billions of dollars. Therefore, it may be worth it to some to search for this hidden treasure.

How does the program only search for “lost Bitcoin”?

While its impossible to truly know if the Bitcoin is lost, we can speculate on three factors which are;

Age of wallet
Any recent transactions
If the BTC is located in the null derivative pathway

Without fully disclosing the full backend code of Bitcoin Seekers, we can at least disclose we are mostly searching in the m/44/0/0/0/0 pathway. Over 40% of all Bitcoin is located here.

44 = Purpose = is a constant set to 44' (or 0x8000002C) following the BIP43 recommendation. It indicates that the subtree of this node is used according to this specification.

Hardened derivation is used at this level.

First 0 = Coin type = One master node (seed) can be used for unlimited number of independent crypto coins such as Bitcoin, Litecoin or Namecoin.

Hardened derivation is used at this level.

Second 0 = Account = This level splits the key space into independent user identities, so the wallet never mixes the coins across different accounts.

Users can use these accounts to organize the funds in the same fashion as bank accounts; for donation purposes (where all addresses are considered public), for saving purposes, for common expenses etc.

Accounts are numbered from index 0 in sequentially increasing manner. This number is used as child index in BIP32 derivation.

Hardened derivation is used at this level.

Third 0 = internal/external = Constant 0 is used for external chain and constant 1 for internal chain (also known as change addresses). External chain is used for addresses that are meant to be visible outside of the wallet (e.g. for receiving payments). Internal chain is used for addresses which are not meant to be visible outside of the wallet and is used for return transaction change.

Public derivation is used at this level.

Fourth 0 = Address Index = Addresses are numbered from index 0 in sequentially increasing manner. This number is used as child index in BIP32 derivation.

Public derivation is used at this level.

In summary, Bitcoin Seekers is only checking the original wallet created on the the pathway, because they are considered more likely untouched or lost.

How many wallets can I search?

We are using our own Bitcoin node to pull request. The current rate is 10,000 wallets per second that are shared among all users. If the product becomes popular, we will strive to increase this rate by adding more nodes.

For example, if there are 10 users actively using the program, then each user will search 10,000/10 = 1,000 wallets per second for each user.

A total of 864,000,000 wallets are searched per day.

What are the chances to find a wallet with a Bitcoin balance?

It is not impossible but it is still considered a lottery at best. You are more likely to win multiple lotteries before you found a wallet with a Bitcoin balance. While the true odds cannot be calculated because the backend code is not public and we don’t know all parameters that are searched, we can look at common math of a basic program.

A 12-word seed phrase has a possible combination of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.

With the current BTC node output, Bitcoin Seekers can only search 864,000,000 combinations per day.

There are 200,000,000 BTC wallets as of 2023.

How do I know if I found something?

If a wallet is found with a Bitcoin balance, it will be shown permanently in the result section of your Dapp. Balances of 0 Bitcoin will not be shown because the program is searching multiple wallets per second and the result section will be unappealing and unnecessary.Also, there is no web socket that can handle this amount of display per second. The input data of seed phrase, private and public keys will be calculated in the result section and you can use that data to import the wallet to a Bitcoin wallet that accepts that pathway.

It is normal for the result section to be empty. Don’t worry if you disconnect or logout of the website, a wallet with a balance will be stored permanently on your account.

Run multiple wallets

You are able to run multiple wallets if you hold a minimum of 100,000 AFB/FUND tokens combined. To run multiple wallets, you will need to use different browsers. Some may be able to use the same browser but different profiles. You will need to experiment to what works for you.

How come my search speed and seed phrase shown in the search box are coming at different speeds?

The actual search speed via request to the BTC node versus the amount of seeds you see in the front-end will differ because the program is searching multiple wallets per second and the web socket display cannot keep up with the amount of request.

If, for example, there is 1 user on the platform, then the back-end will be able to process 10,000 requests per second for him. Then platform has to show 10,000 mnemonics in one second. First, the front-end web socket cannot process and display 10,000 mnemonics in one second. Secondly, if for example, this would be possible, then the user would not even see anything, it would be so fast that the user could not see it. Seed phrases that are displayed on the front-end are randomly renewed every 1–3 minutes depending on your connection speed.

How do we know the program is working?

The developers of Bitcoin Seekers at Rock N Block used one of their old wallets with Bitcoin in it for testing. They knew the 12 word seed phrase. In the initial test they only used the 12 words to search in the parameters, not the full 2000+ words from the bip39 word bank. So after some time, they matched their wallet when searching and it showed the correct data and appeared automatically in the results section without refreshing the page. This test can be replicated again at any time. It was replicated again after the upgrade to the BTC node 10,000 search speed via testnet where they found another wallet.

How many users are online?

To see how many users are online, right click the webpage and click inspect (Q). Then click the network tab. Then click one of the https://btc-seed.canisventures.com/api/v1/wallet/rps links. Then go to the response tab and there you will see wallets searched per second and the amount of active users on the platform. Or simply you could just copy and paste the URL into your web browser and it will show you there. This RPS shows the rate at which your connection is pinging the server, not the rate of wallets searched.

How come the wallets searched show no history?

All of the seed phrases generated are legitimate address on the blockchain. Almost all of the addresses under these seed phrases have not been generated yet by any user. You can copy and paste all the address to verify that the seed phrases do exist on the blockchain at this website: https://bitcoin.oni.su/bip39/ . The seed phrases that have been used before are the only ones that would show up in the result section if they have a current Bitcoin balance on it.

How come the search stops randomly?

If you are on Mobile device, the search will stop if you exit the tab and go to another app on the phone. However, if you are using PC, you are able to go to different tabs in the browser and the search will continuously run. It is best to use Bitcoin Seekers on PC. Also, if you lose internet connection, the search will stop.

Bitcoin Alert Pop-up

A Bitcoin alert system was added to the product. If you are searching and somebody finds a wallet with a balance, a system wide alert will go out to all users that somebody found a wallet.

Future plans

There are plans to add a dashboard that will update real time statistics so that users can verify the information on the front-end. Also, depending on the success of the product, more BTC nodes will be added to increase search speed.

Donations

If you would like to donate to help keep the Bitcoin Seekers program running, you can donate to the treasury wallet that is used to pay for cost. Wallet address is 0x5fb396B8BB265f1f15fF91F9Bb08d034E9db52eE