Bitcoin has a 'dark forest' of its own, and it has to do with brainwallets

The concept of a blockchain "Dark forest" has been popularized recently by Ethereum and the existence of front-running bots that will copy any profitable transaction pending for submission.

Dan Robinson from Paradigm Capital demonstrated one such case with money mistakenly sent to a contract address.

Bitcoin does not have smart contracts to front-run, but a post by BitMEX Research highlights how a similar event occurs when one uses brainwallets.

A brainwallet is the term for a private key that is only stored as a memory in a person's brain, meaning that no physical backups exist.

The analysts concluded that addresses generated from these types of complex, but public-domain seed words are fully compromised and are constantly being monitored.

As Cointelegraph reported earlier, blockchain makes it hard to use any type of password-based generation mechanism.

Blockchain private keys can instead be pre-generated from massive dictionary databases, making attackers the effective owners of those addresses.

The fundamental issue of brainwallets is that any address that is sufficiently resistant to brute forcing will likely be difficult to remember reliably.

There are many stories of people losing their BTC by forgetting a private key they stored in their brain, with one notable loss of $13 million reported in 2019 - though some believe it was fake.

Ethereum is likely subjected to the same type of private key brute forcing, with millions of dollars in Ether being reportedly stolen in the past.