Topic: Two wallets - same "defaultkey" (Read 117 times)

It's a shame... The world is full of scammers i'm afraid. This is also the case with the crypto community. Scammers love to use new technologies that are not that well-known to lure in their victims.
I truly hope your relative didn't pay to much for these wallets... The odds of actually buying a real wallet with real funds inside for any amount (but certainly for an amount lower than the wallet content) is very close to 0. You can investigate further, but the time and effort your spend are almost certainly in vain, since this is a very common scam tactic that has made hundreds of victims over the years. It's the online equivalent of somebody selling you pieces of inked paper and a special chemical with the promise the inked paper is actually smuggled in money that has been inked all over, and the chemical can be used to convert it back into real money...

You're right.

"Did somebody sell you a wallet.." - no. To one of my relatives, long ago.

Well... To be honest, i don't quite get your question.
The two addresses in your post did indeed got funded in the past, and some of the outputs were spent. This basically means that somewhere out there, there's a wallet that contains the private key for these addresses (i take the term "wallet" as a broad term, it might be just a paper wallet containing nothing more than said private key).

As to how one could forge a wallet... well, for one, it has little to do with outgoing transactions to be honest... A thief could (potentially) create a wallet, encrypt it, use it, and at one point edit it so the private key inside said wallet so it is replaced by a fake private key. This way you could open the wallet, look at the available funds, look at the transaction history, but if you'd ever be able to decrypt the wallet, you'd notice the private key is, in fact, fake... So you cannot spend those funds.

It's also possible to give somebody a wallet with watch-only addresses by not importing the private key, but merely importing the address. This way, the wallet will be able to parse the blockchain, generate a complete history of the watch-only addresses inside the wallet, but since it does not contain any private keys, you cannot spend those funds.

Not all of these methods are possible with every wallet implementation tough... I'm working under the assumption you're using bitcoin core, but for other implementations, above statements might, or might not work.

But still, i don't quite get what you're asking... Did somebody sell you a wallet and told you that you could spend the funds funding 173bU1NZtrnxfXdVQFXsRp22nuc6fEmB4k and 1NFx9FETuduha8qJ6ehPYufTqVirB1Jf1D? I ask because this is a very, very, very common scam technique that's been used by scammers for a long time... They sell encrypted wallets that are either encrypted with such a strong password you'll never be able to brute-force it, or they sell a watch-only wallet containing no private keys at all, or they sell a wallet that has been modified so the private key in the (encrypted) wallet is just fake.
The endresult is the same tough: the victim is lured into paying a lot of money in return for a wallet they think contains a lot more money... But then they find out that this "lot more money" is simply unspendable or not there. In order to protect yourself from this scam, always remember: "if something seems to good to be true, it allmost always is". Nobody is selling a wallet worth $22.000.000 for $1000. That just wouldn't be a good business model, no matter how they try to sell it. I've seen many variants, like people claiming to sell wallets including payments for illegal items, so they sell "dirty" wallet for a fraction of their value: it's a scam... Those sellers  know about anonymous coins, they know about mixers, they know about coinjoin, they know about non-KYC exchanges, they're just feeding you lies to get you to pay money for a wallet whose funds you'll never be able to spend.

Thanks for the info!

Situation indeed.. I am talking about two wallets with these addresses:

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/173bU1NZtrnxfXdVQFXsRp22nuc6fEmB4k

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1NFx9FETuduha8qJ6ehPYufTqVirB1Jf1D


Also, talking about the 173bU1NZtrnxfXdVQFXsRp22nuc6fEmB4k address, which had no outgoing transactions until recently. But how could one forge a wallet, which has no outgoing transactions? o.o

@tranthidung: that's true, but the OP is talking about the defaultkey, which is an obsolete object in the wallet.dat but it should still be there and it should be unique (IIRC) unless a wallet.dat is copyd.
To be honest, i never gave to much attention to the defaultkey, it's been obsolete for a long time... So i actually had to look it up in the wiki initially (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet)

Generally you can import a private key of an address to your wallet.

In Bitcoin Core, importprivkey (0.21.0 RPC)

Details

You can practice it with dumpprivkey then import it.

Yes and no,

If two wallets contain the same key, the can also be copy's from eachother. Copying the wallet.dat is technically possible, two different nodes can use the same wallet.dat at the same time, but each unspent output can only be spent once (so if you spend it from node 1, you can no longer spend it from node 2 that's using the same wallet.dat).

So, it's usually not a very good idear to use the same wallet.dat with different nodes, but technically nothing is stopping you, and there might be some edge cases where this is usefull.

On the other hand, if you have 2 wallets that are defenately not copys, and they contain the same key... yes, they're probably fakes.

Are you just learning about bitcoin, or do you ask this question because you're faced with some kind of situation?

Hi all!

According to this site https://renenyffenegger.ch/notes/development/Crypto-Currencies/Bitcoin/wallet, the "defaultkey" is a default address, which, as I see it, should be unique for each wallet.

So, if two different wallets have the same "defaultkey", then these wallets are fakes.

Am I right?