btc-heist

Brute-forces Bitcoin wallets by generating both random BIP39 mnemonics (BIP44 HD wallets) and raw private keys (including pre-HD uncompressed keys), checking all derived addresses against a known set of funded addresses.

Setup

Prerequisites

• Go 1.21+
• curl and gunzip (standard on macOS/Linux)

Download the address list

The address list is sourced from loyce.club — a regularly updated dataset of all known funded Bitcoin addresses (~50 million entries).

make fetch

This downloads Bitcoin_addresses_LATEST.txt.gz from http://addresses.loyce.club/Bitcoin_addresses_LATEST.txt.gz, decompresses it, and saves it as Bitcoin_addresses_LATEST.txt in the project root. The file is large (~1 GB uncompressed); loading it into the Bloom filter and map at startup takes a few seconds.

Download a prebuilt binary

Grab the latest release for your platform from GitHub Releases.

Or Build

make build

The binary is written to bin/btc-heist.

Running

./bin/btc-heist

By default it uses all available CPU cores and checks 50 derived addresses per mnemonic. Progress is printed every 5 seconds:

[5s] 42301 keys/s  total: 211505  matched: 0

Options

  -c int    number of CPU cores to use (default: all cores)
  -f string file containing BTC addresses (default: Bitcoin_addresses_LATEST.txt)
  -n uint   addresses to check per mnemonic (default: 50)
  -o string output file for found keys (default: found_keys.txt)

Output

Matches are appended to found_keys.txt. BIP39 wallet matches are written as:

mnemonic=<words> address=<address>

Raw private key matches are written as:

wif=<WIF-encoded-key> address=<address>