In 2014 a Bitcoin educator sent 30 cents to the brain wallet "Satoshi Nakamoto" on video, it was spent in the same block, a day before the video was published.

A brain wallet is a private key made from a phrase you memorize: hash the phrase once with SHA-256 and the result is the key. James D'Angelo taught how to make one in a 2014 Blackboard video, sent small payments to three of them on camera, and predicted viewers would take the coins. We looked up what the chain recorded.

- The 30 cents sent to the phrase "Satoshi Nakamoto" confirmed in block 284,859 and was spent in that same block, 24 hours before the video was public. Whoever took it already had the phrase.

- Two phrases nobody had seen, one of three words and one of 79 characters, sat untouched for 24 hours. They were emptied in the first and third blocks after the video went up.

- The earliest brain wallet we can find with money behind it was a forum puzzle in July 2011, 0.25 BTC behind one sentence. It was claimed 3 hours 20 minutes later.

- We typed 32 well-known phrases by hand (no cracking tool) and read their addresses: 29 have been used, 1,307.7 BTC has been paid into them (at least 334 BTC of that is change and returned coins counted twice), and every one was empty on 9 November 2026. Please do not send coins to any of them.

- In 2011 a payment to one of these phrases typically sat for about a month. By 2015 three in four were spent in the block that confirmed them. Every payment we found from 2025 and 2026 was.

- The best-known site opened with a passphrase already typed in for most of its first two years, turned down a patch to slow guessing in 2013 ("You don't really need that") and closed on 7 August 2015: the closing commit is stamped 20:57 UTC and reached GitHub at 21:00:00, the minute the DEF CON talk that released a fast cracker was due to start.

- What replaced the idea is BIP-39: the wallet draws 128 or 256 random bits and shows them to you as words. Twelve of those words are about 19 trillion trillion times harder to guess than four random ones.

The Rabbit Hole is a credited recreation of D'Angelo's lesson, with both data sets as CSV downloads and 61 sources. Free, no ads, no affiliate links, no wallet recommendations:

https://www.learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole/brain-wallets