About

What is this site for?

BitcoinKeys.Net was inspired by the now defunct directory.
Just like this website, directory.io contained pages of all bitcoin private keys.
It caused quite the fuss when it was shared on the internet back in 2013 with the title "All Bitcoin private keys leaked".

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital crypto-currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: transaction management and money issuance are carried out collectively by the network.

What is a private key?

A private key in the context of Bitcoin is a secret number that allows bitcoins to be spent. Because the private key is the "ticket" that allows someone to spend bitcoins, it is important that these are kept secure. Private keys can be kept on computer files, but in some cases are also short enough that they can be printed on paper.

2^256

If you want to try to wrap your head around how many bitcoin private keys there actually are, I can recommended watching this video:

What is the range of private keys?

All Bitcoin private keys are integer numbers between 1 and 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336 or in hexadecimal from 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 to 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364140.

The range of valid private keys is governed by the secp256k1 ECDSA standard used by Bitcoin.

Generating private keys

BitcoinKeys.Net contains all private keys of multiple cryptocurrencies.
These keys aren't stored on the server, that would take an impossible amount of disk space.
Instead, the keys are generated whenever a page is opened.


The seeds used to generate the private keys are derived from the page number.
For example, on page 10, the first seed is:
(10 - 1) * 128 + 0 = 1152 pages contain 128 keys each, so the last seed on page 10 is: (10 - 1) * 128 + 127 = 1279
This simple formula is repeated for each page, until the maximum seed of 2^256 is reached.

Do you store all the private keys?

No. Since there are a huge number of private keys (nearly 10⁷⁷) we just generate a range of these keys on the fly from a page number in the URL.

What is WIF?

WIF is an abbreviation of Wallet Import Format (also known as Wallet Export Format) and is a way of encoding a private key to make it shorter and easier to copy.

Every single private key can be represented as two different WIF private keys: compressed and uncompressed. A compressed WIF private key starts with "K" or "L" and corresponds to a compressed public key/address. An uncompressed WIF key starts with "5" and corresponds to an uncompressed public key/address.

On our site, we list both, compressed and uncompressed WIF keys/addresses.

What is the Mini private key format?

The mini private key format is a method of encoding a Bitcoin private key in as few as 30 characters for the purpose of being embedded in a small space. A private key encoded in this format is called a minikey. This private key format was designed for and first used in Casascius physical bitcoins, and is also favorable for use in QR codes. The mini private key format offers its own built-in check code as a small margin of protection against typos.

What is a brainwallet?

A brainwallet is the concept of storing Bitcoins in one's own mind by memorizing a recovery passphrase. An early old-style brainwallet was created by memorization of a passphrase and converting it to a private key with a hashing or key derivation algorithm (example: SHA-256 ). This method was found to be very insecure and should not be used because humans are not a good source of entropy.

How many are there Bitcoin addresses?

While Bitcoin address is just BASE-58 encoding of RIPEMD-160 hash of your public key, there are 2¹⁶⁰ (nearly 10⁴⁸) addresses.

What is the total number of Bitcoin addresses with balance?

There are about 28M addresses with non-zero balance as of November 2019. However, there are only 783K addresses with balance over 1 BTC.

What is the total number of Bitcoin addresses ever used?

There are about 577M addresses ever used as of November 2019.

What is a Bitcoin puzzle?

In 2015, in order to show the hugeness of the private key space (or maybe just for fun), someone created a "puzzle" where he chose keys in a certain smaller space and sent increasing amounts to each of those keys like this:

2⁰ ≤ random key < 2¹ — 0.001 BTC
2¹ ≤ random key < 2² — 0.002 BTC
2³ ≤ random key < 2³ — 0.003 BTC
...
2²⁵⁵ ≤ random key < 2²⁵⁶ — 0.256 BTC
(total 32.896 BTC)

As of June 2020, first 63 and #65, #70, #75, #80, #85, #90, #95, #100, #105, #110, #115 addresses have been cracked. People are still trying to crack #64 address, which requires scanning 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 keys.

Read more on BitcoinTalk: topic one , topic two, topic three.